Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season 6 episode 1. Hallelujah! And again, hallelujah! Something unambiguously good has happened to June Osborne. After Canada turned out not to be the promised land, she was forced apart from Luke again, and her escape chute slammed her with pinpoint accuracy into the person she’d spent most of last season trying to murder (and vice-versa), June finally got a win.  “Mommies always come back”, June cooed to baby Noah in the episode’s opening scene, and she was right. Her mom Holly, assumed to have died in the Colonies, came back. I’d add a third hallelujah but this is The Handmaid’s Tale, where optimism is rarely rewarded. Let’s keep our yippees to a whisper for fear of alerting this show’s powers-that-be, who might send a Gileadean air strike to that Alaskan camp just to cancel out the good vibes. This Elisabeth Moss-directed episode did not keep its celebrations to a whisper. June and Holly’s reunion was presented with a sweeping romantic score, soaring camera and all the emotion of… well, a mother and daughter separated for seven years by wartime. The full-fat satisfaction of that ending was earned after years of watching June suffer degradations of various magnitudes, and at the end of a tense episode filled with the threat of violence. June was always going to push Serena off that train. The fact that she did it to save her was the surprise. The gap between last season’s cliffhanger meeting and this episode’s opening scene of June blissfully cradling baby Noah with no Serena in sight, in fact, made me wonder if she’d already done it. Hi Serena. Bye Serena?  But no, having lost herself in the ecstasy of salvaging Fred, June has learned that bloody revenge may feel great in the moment, but it doesn’t heal deep wounds. Only grace, such as she offered a labouring Serena in a cow shed, can do that. That’s why June didn’t join the baying mob in tearing Serena limb from limb, but stood against them.  A little further along her recovery journey than the train’s other passengers, she knows that more violence against women and children, and another baby torn from its mother’s arms, isn’t the answer. From the moment the train doctor’s memory was jogged to the point that he publicly named her, the tension built beautifully and really made the most of the claustrophobic carriage setting. The whole sequence was filmed like a zombie movie – the women who’d been swapping Gilead war stories with Serena moments before became rampaging creatures ready to rip her apart when they realised who she really was. By the time the would-be attackers were clawing at the door glass, their transformation into wild beasts was complete.  Before that turn, all of the episode’s drama and entertainment had to come from a single source: June’s deep well of antipathy for Serena meeting Serena’s robotic pronouncements on the sunlit uplands towards which they were heading, praise be. Thanks to our familiarity with these well-written and even better-acted characters, that turned out to be plenty. Their double-act was compelling, and even funny. Serena’s clueless attachment and attempts at fellow-feeling coming up against June’s ‘WTF lady?’ boundary setting made for good viewing.  Serena’s key character moment in the episode though, was the bitter outburst she made when cornered. A dumber show might have made that Serena’s epiphany, in which she’d look around at the suffering caused by Gilead, realise her wrongdoing and plead for forgiveness. Not The Handmaid’s Tale. Nika Castillo and Bruce Miller’s script knew that under pressure, fundamentalists gonna fundamental, and that’s exactly what Serena did. “Your children were saved!”, “God took your country away!” she screamed, revealing the snarling teeth beneath her wishy-washy “It seems that all of us here were at some point involved in some kind of violence” support group platitudes. Serena’s outpouring was intense even for Gilead, to judge by the scene between Nick and his father-in-law High Commander Wharton – a new character for this season. A powerful DC commander responsible for God knows how many atrocities, Wharton came across as surprisingly chill. His language was relaxed, and his attitude to Nick – who’d just spent a night in jail after punching out Commander Lawrence – was casual and almost modern. No hellfire and brimstone there, at least not on the surface. Nick’s new spying-for-the-US gig will clearly be extra dangerous though, under his eye. Speaking of danger, we don’t know what Holly has gone through to get to that Alaskan outpost. The last we’d seen her face was in a photograph of “un-women” condemned to toxic agricultural work in the Colonies, used in a Red Centre training slideshow. That picture was proof to June that her mother didn’t get to Canada and was now almost certainly dead. It turns out though, that June isn’t the only exceptionally tough woman in her family; Holly also survived and escaped Gilead. Could she even have been the “really smart doctor who gave a shit” mentioned by the woman on the train? That certainly sounds like Holly – an activist and feminist who saw Gilead coming long before June did. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! What next for Holly (the name originally given to little Nichole) and June, and for season six’s ‘rescue Hannah’ mission statement? Let’s not take a single step into their future right now, filled as it likely is with peril. Let’s do what the episode did and leave them both in that smiling, I-can’t-believe-it embrace. Something good happened to June Osborne, finally. Hallelujah.  The Handmaid’s Tale season six episodes one to three are available to stream now on Hulu in the US. Episode four arrives on Tuesday April 15. The new season will air on Channel 4 in the UK at a later date.