Hulu yesterday (March 14) released a photo of Gilmore Girls‘ Alexis Bledel in season two of The Handmaid’s Tale, confirming her character Emily survived the first season.
But how? The last we saw of her, Emily (or “Ofglen,” as Gilead’s rules dictate she should be known) was being taken into custody having killed a guard with a car. Given the violent punishments meted out to other characters for much lesser crimes, viewers assumed she had been sentenced to death.
Add to that the fact that Ofglen hangs herself in the original novel by Margaret Atwood, and we had every reason to think she must be dead.
Not so, according to this latest photo. Reports last year confirmed that Alexis would not only return to the role that earned her an Emmy, but be promoted to a series regular for season two.
Emily was notably absent from the second season’s trailer released in January, but we got a glimpse of her on what looks like a college campus in a short tease released last week on International Women’s Day (March 8).
Now, it seems, she is alive and well, albeit in even more reduced circumstances:
The landscape suggests Emily is in “the Colonies,” swaths of America that have been rendered virtually uninhabitable through pollution and radioactive material. According to Atwood’s book, being sent there is a death sentence in all but name, given that people rarely come back.
The new season will go beyond the ending of the book, however, meaning we are literally in new territory.
Season two of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on Hulu on April 25.
Are you glad to see Emily has survived?