Spoilers ahead.
June Osborne spent years trying to get out of Gilead, and she finally did it. And after years spent under the control and abuse of Fred Waterford, she finally got her revenge. So what happens next?
In the Season 4 finale of The Handmaid's Tale, June tastes sweet vengeance when she and a number of women corner Fred in the woods and beat him to death. The next morning, her husband, Luke, finds June bloodied and distraught in her daughter Nichole's room. He doesn't seem to know exactly what she did, but knows that it can't be good. Luke doesn't say anything, but June can already start to guess what he's thinking.
"I know. I'm sorry," she whispers to him. "Just give me five minutes, okay? Just give me five minutes with her, then I'll go."
But where, exactly, will June go? And why does she have to leave?
One possibility is that she may have to answer for killing Fred in the woods of No Man's Land, but showrunner Bruce Miller wants to emphasize that June's exit, if she goes through with it, would be her own decision.
"I very much want it to be her choice, not consequences," Miller told Variety. "Because once it's consequences, it's just her dealing with those consequences. And of course, there will be that [down the line], but right now, there's no crime. Nobody has any idea what happened. Fred's gone; he was traded."
It's also possible that she doesn't go at all. When the episode ends, June is still fresh from her long-awaited reckoning. "Well, I don't know if she's gonna leave. She feels like she has to," Miller told Entertainment Weekly.
June's choice to pursue vengeance "makes sense character-wise," Elisabeth Moss, who plays the anti-heroine, told The Hollywood Reporter. She added jokingly, "What is the show if she doesn't choose revenge; she lives happily ever after in the Three's Company house with Nichole?"
Even after escaping Gilead, June is still very much living with trauma, Moss explained. As June tells Emily in the finale, she couldn't just let that go so easily. "She has been changed too much," Moss told THR. "Her life is this war on Gilead and that's her purpose in life. There's nothing else that can be done."
That closing scene captures "her changing from June as a handmaid in Gilead to June as an avenger with more choices but more responsibility," Miller told Deadline.
Luke seems to have sensed a deep change in June too. "The image of Luke when he sees June with Fred's blood on her face as he falls against the wall is haunting," executive producer Warren Littlefield told Forbes. "He's essentially saying, 'Holy f**k, look what she's turned into!' He knows at that moment who she is now."
Miller told Entertainment Weekly that Luke's emotional response in those final moments plays off a recent flashback. "I think based on the episode before where her flashback with Luke says, 'I'll love whatever you become. Don't worry, I love whatever you turn into.' In this moment, she's saying, 'Yeah, remember when he said that? This is obviously not true. So I'll go.' But he may come back and say, 'No, no, no, no.'"
Whatever is in store for June, Luke, and the rest of the crew will have to wait until The Handmaid's Tale returns for Season 5.
