Elisabeth Moss' Game-Changing Cameos In The Testaments, Explained

Put down your Plum dress and don't contact any Mayday spies if you haven't watched the first three episodes of "The Testaments." Major spoilers ahead!

"The Testaments," the new Hulu series that just dropped its first three episodes on the streamer today, is — as fans know — a follow-up series to "The Handmaid's Tale," Bruce Miller's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction novel. What fans didn't know is that the protagonist of "The Handmaid's Tale" would pop up in "The Testaments," even though she doesn't appear in the novel (also written by Atwood).

That's right. June Osbourne, the "Handmaid's Tale" heroine played by Elisabeth Moss, is back in action.

We already know, from the end of "The Handmaid's Tale," that the protagonist of "The Testaments," Agnes MacKenzie — played by "One Battle After Another" standout Chase Infiniti — is June's long-lost daughter, as well as her first daughter ... who was born before the totalitarian theocracy of Gilead rose to power and subjugated women. (Gilead is most of North America, though Canada, Atwood's real-life home, is notably separate.) Still, it was a very pleasant surprise to see Moss back on our screens, and according to Miller, he always planned it that way. "From the beginning, I felt like June would end 'The Handmaid's Tale with certain business unfinished,' so if you were going to tap back into Gilead, you would want to know what June was doing," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

"You really want those scenes to feel particularly epic," Miller continued. "There's an aspect of superhero to June that we wanted to have in this, because her shadow is over the whole show. She's looming over the whole thing." So, how does June factory into this new story? It's not through Agnes, but a different character: Daisy, played by Lucy Halliday.

Let's focus on Daisy for a minute, who's introduced in the pilot of "The Testaments" after Agnes is called to speak to the infamous Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd, another returning cast member from "The Handmaid's Tale"). Lydia, who runs a school for young women in Gilead named after her, asks Agnes to watch over Daisy, a newcomer and so-called "Pearl Girl" (a term that refers to young women who travel to Gilead by choice to convert rather than being born into the oppressive society). When Daisy witnesses a brutal punishment ceremony attended by Plums, the age group of girls that, at the time, includes Agnes (a ceremony where a man's hand is taken off with a table saw), she flees and throws up, letting a volley of expletives loose that genuinely shocks an all-too-innocent Agnes.

This is our first clue that maybe, just maybe, Daisy isn't a willing convert. We see a brief flashback of her in "Precious Flowers" hanging out at her parents' vintage store in Toronto (which, remember, isn't part of the regime of Gilead), and guess who else is there? June. In the show's third episode, which centers around Daisy's past in Toronto, we see her meet June after her parents are murdered; as June tells Daisy, her seemingly innocent parents adopted her as an infant refugee from Gilead, and the religious republic has been hell-bent on stealing her back ever since. There's an attack by the Mayday resistance, of which June is a member, in "Daisy" where a bus full of young girls is attacked ... and as Daisy learns, it was a retrieval mission to take her back. So, what does this all mean?

The biggest thing about Daisy's connection to June is that she's now under the watchful eye of June's eldest daughter. (During "The Handmaid's Tale," June gives birth to a daughter, Nicole, while under the control of Joseph Fiennes' Commander Fred Waterford and his wife, Yvonne Strahovski's Serena Joy.) Still, there's one big complication. Agnes, June's biological daughter, has no idea who her real mother is; as far as she's concerned, it's her father's first wife, a woman named Tabitha that we see briefly in flashbacks. What this clearly means is that even if Daisy brings up a mysterious woman in the Mayday resistance named June Osbourne, Agnes won't know what the heck she's talking about.

Still, in a voiceover in the pilot (as Agnes gets her period for the first time, marking her as a woman who can now be married off in Gilead), she says that everything in her life changed after meeting Daisy, including learning the real identity of her mother. Elisabeth Moss returning for a cameo in the "Testaments" pilot and a flat-out supporting role, frankly, in the third episode is clearly meant to serve a larger purpose in the story, and as Bruce Miller himself noted, her job in Gilead isn't finished. We'll have to wait and see how the story unfolds in "The Testaments," which dropped three episodes for its premiere and will continue to premiere new episodes weekly on Wednesdays on Hulu.