HuluThe Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 is coming to Hulu very soon, but one mystery still remains: what happened to Dr. Emily Malek (or Ofglen/Ofjoseph as she was known in Gilead).
Emily (Alexis Bledel) is a key character in June’s (Elisabeth Moss) journey to joining the Mayday resistance movement. Her time under the Gilead regime was particularly brutal, having been sent to the colonies after suffering a forced surgery that left her permanently mutilated.
Eventually, she made it out of Gilead with the help of Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), but she later made the unexpected decision to go back and hunt down her aggressors in Season 4.
Since then, she’s nowhere to be seen. Given her integral role in the binge-worthy TV show, there’s hope that The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 will reveal what happened to Emily after she left Canada.
What happened to Emily?
HuluIn The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5, we find out Emily went back to Gilead to fight after helping June kill Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes). It’s assumed she’s dead, but what actually happened to her remains a mystery.
At the end of Season 2, Emily made it out of Gilead with June and Nick’s (Max Minghella) baby, Nichole. Although June was supposed to go with her, she decided to stay and try to save Hannah.
Emily reconnected with Moira (Samira Wiley) and Luke (O-T Fagbenle) in Canada, and eventually made it back to her wife Sylvia (Clea DuVall) and their son Oliver. But the trauma of what she’d been through proved tough to work through.
By Season 4 of the dystopian series, June was out and determined to get revenge on the Waterfords. Thankfully, Nick’s on hand to help arrange this, bringing Fred to No Man’s Land. Meanwhile, June enlists the help of other survivors.
Together, June, Emily, and the team beat and torture Fred. The following morning, they congregate at a diner to celebrate their win, and they’ve clearly all got a taste for blood. But June notices Emily’s missing.
She goes to her house to check in, where Sylvia reveals that Emily’s gone back to Gilead. “She went back to fight, I think. To find Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) if she can. It’s what she needed to do,” she says.
Hulu“She called, she said goodbye. I wanted to wake Oliver up but she said no. I don’t know why she’d say no.” June insists she can “fix” it, but Sylvia tells her to “shut the f**k up.”
“She’s gone. I’m never going to see her again. Oliver is never gonna see her again,” says Sylvia, insisting that finding a person to blame is futile.
“Oliver and I are going to be happy with the time we had with her. She was gone and then she was here. It’s more time than I ever thought I’d get. We’re lucky in a lot of ways.”
June asks if she’ll get in touch if she hears from Emily, to which Sylvia says no.
Although we don’t know what happened to her after she left Canada, fans have their theories.
As said by one Redditor, “I know it really isn’t keeping with the show’s themes, but I imagine Emily being like Robert DuVall’s character in Apocalypse Now, leading a band of fighters in Gilead territory, walking around, throwing ‘death cards’ on dead Eyes after a battle.”
Another said, “I feel like she’s training freedom fighters.”
The reason Emily left so abruptly
HuluThe answer is simple: Emily’s actress, Alexis Bledel, decided to depart The Handmaid’s Tale after four seasons, and so they had to come up with a way to write her out of the Hulu series.
The Gilmore Girls star said in a statement at the time: “After much thought, I felt I had to step away from The Handmaid’s Tale at this time.
“I am forever grateful to [showrunner] Bruce Miller for writing such truthful and resonant scenes for Emily, and to Hulu, MGM, the cast and crew for their support.”
Miller spoke with THR back in 2022 about her departure from the show, saying that the scene in which Sylvia explains her absence was written from real emotion.
“[Alexis] made that decision completely on her own; it was a complicated time and she let me know,” he told the outlet.
“What I tried to do was deal with it in the way we were all feeling at that point. Like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ So I think that, in some ways, the real emotions wag the dog.”
Some fans believe Bledel left the show as she was dealing with a difficult divorce with Vincent Kartheiser, who she shares a child with, at the time. However, this is just speculation.
Will she be in Season 6?
Given that Bledel left the series for good, Emily is not expected to return in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6. However, her character may get a mention in the final chapter of the show.
There’s been plenty of speculation, with some suggesting that she might appear in flashbacks, or her journey back to Gilead might be discussed by other characters.
As said by one fan, “Do you think Emily will make an appearance somehow in Season 6? I’m still so annoyed with the way they wrote her off. Seemed so implausible.”
Another replied, “Unfortunately, no. Writers always are constrained by real-world issues and the actress appears to have left for good after whatever happened in her personal life after the filming Season 4.
“At the very most they could use some archive footage for a very quick flashback, or mention that people have had contact with her offscreen.
“I agree that her exit was jarring. I mean it seemed a weird way to write it, having the departure slotted in after barely any in-universe time passed since she was on the Fred mission.
“Then they suddenly gave us a misdirect that she’d be hunting Lydia, knowing we would see Lydia but not Emily. I mean so many viewers say they never even realize that was effectively Emily’s departure.”
A third added, “Even though the actress is gone I hope we can hear some details on her in passing.”
The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 premieres on Hulu on April 8, 2025. Until then, be sure to check out our roundup of the best TV shows of 2025 so far, the shows to get excited about in 2025, and new series coming to streaming this month.
