The Handmaid’s Tale: What happened to Emily Malek, and where did she end up

The Handmaid’s Tale is an American dystopian series adapted by Bruce Miller and based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic.

The Handmaid’s Tale puts you right into a hyper-religious world called Gilead. In this fictional place, birth rates have drastically declined, and hardly anyone can have babies. The United States is overrun by hyper-religious people who twist the Bible for their propaganda. So, women are slotted into roles based on whether their uterus works. The most valued role is that of the Handmaids– fertile women forced to give birth for rich couples who can’t.

The Handmaid's Tale portrays that life in Gilead is one big twisted system where everyone is miserable, and the stakes are life or death. Handmaids get the worst gig. If you’re fertile, you’re now a government-owned baby machine, and you must forget your birth name. You are just “Of [Commander’s Name]”.

Wives are married to the big shots (the Commanders). On the outside, they play a holy, proper wife act, but behind closed doors, they are just as pathetic because they can’t have kids, which drives half the drama.

Then you’ve got Marthas. These women can’t have babies, so they’re stuck cooking and cleaning.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunts are the self-appointed women with authority. Their job is brainwashing the Handmaids and making sure every woman stays “in her place.”

We also have Econowives, who scrape the bottom of the barrel. These ladies do it all—clean, cook, give birth—because their families have “lower status”. Other classes include: Guardians (low-level male enforcers), Eyes (the spies), and Unwomen (those sentenced to colonies for being perceived as “useless” by the regime). These rigid social tiers are central to the dystopian framework in The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Handmaid’s Tale plot revolves around June Osborne, who gets the name Offred, literally because she’s “of Fred,” her so-called Commander. After she is taken away from her husband, Luke, and their kid, Hannah, June gets thrown into the absolute nightmare that is Gilead. She is supposed to play along, but she is stubborn. She keeps pushing back against all the cruelty, even when it seems pointless.

She sneaks around, linking up with the underground resistance—Mayday, which is the only glimmer of hope in The Handmaid's Tale. June forges complex relationships with other Handmaids, the Commander, his wife Serena Joy, and Nick, who’s both the driver and her secret lover.

The Handmaid's Tale doesn’t hold back. You get brutal public hangings, sickening “ceremonies” that are just state-sanctioned rape, and non-stop mind games. The way Gilead locks down women’s bodies is suffocating. But what really hits hard are the little rebellions—quiet moments where someone risks everything for a friend, or even just a sliver of dignity.

And then there’s Emily, aka Ofglen. She’s like the user manual for surviving Gilead. Through her, you see just how twisted the system is in The Handmaid's Tale, what it takes to fight back, and the brutal price people pay just to keep breathing.

The Handmaid’s Tale flips between past and present, showing how regular people get sucked into being monsters, victims, or rebels. It’s not just black and white; everyone is a mess, and nobody gets out clean.

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Who is Emily Malek in The Handmaid’s Tale?

Emily Malek, portrayed by Alexis Bledel, starts as a university professor of cellular biology in The Handmaid's Tale. She is a married lesbian, and the couple has an adorable little boy. Life’s pretty good for them, until Gilead crashes in.

Now, Emily is not Emily anymore. She is “Ofglen,” which is just Gilead’s way of saying that you belong to a Commander. Also, being a lesbian is a ticket to being labeled a “gender traitor,” and in The Handmaid's Tale, that’s a death sentence. Except Emily can have kids, and in this nightmare world, that makes her too valuable to just kill off.

So, instead of execution, they put her into the Handmaids, which is the regime’s idea of a second chance.

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Emily Malek’s storyline in The Handmaid's Tale: Major arcs and turning points

Emily shows up as June’s shopping partner in The Handmaid's Tale and has her inside scoop on the Eyes and the Mayday rebellion. At first, she’s got this poker face, which is totally unreadable, all cold and composed. But hang around long enough, and you see there’s way more cooking under the surface.

She’s sharp and courageous in a quiet way, but you can tell the stuff she has been through has made her super guarded. Emily is the poster child for surviving in The Handmaid’s Tale: you play along on the outside, but your real self is plotting in the shadows, waiting for a shot at freedom.

In the deal in the Glen house, Emily starts a forbidden romance with Martha. As mentioned earlier, in The Handmaid's Tale, women loving women is an instant death sentence. Their love affair is discovered, and it all goes sideways. Martha is hanged, and Emily is dragged out, forced to watch her girlfriend die. It’s the moment that shows how Gilead doesn’t mess around when it comes to “punishment.”

But it gets even more twisted. Instead of killing Emily, the regime decides to mutilate her genitals. It’s supposed to “fix” her and strip away her control over her own body and sexuality. The Handmaid's Tale calls it “purification,” but it’s just another way to break her and make her fall in line.

One day, just totally fed up and running on pure anger, she straight-up runs over an Eye with a stolen car. The Handmaid's Tale doesn’t take kindly to that sort of thing, so they condemn her in the Colonies as punishment for being difficult to control.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Colonies are absolute nightmare fuel. It is just endless stretches of radioactive trash, busted-up women scraping by while scrubbing toxic filth, coughing their lungs out. The place is a slow death by poison. But Emily is tougher than she looks. She patches up sick women, stirs up little rebellions where she can, and slips poison to a former Commander’s wife.

Eventually, Janine shows up—a fellow Handmaid and a bit of a wildcard herself. The two of them manage to carve out some kind of friendship, even in the middle of all that misery in The Handmaid's Tale.

Following a bombing that killed many Handmaids and Aunts at the Red Center, Gilead panics and scoops up anyone still breathing and able to have babies. Emily and Janine are brought back into the Handmaid role.

Emily gets a new identity in The Handmaid's Tale. Now she’s “Ofroy,” and lands in yet another Commander’s house. But her very first Ceremony doesn’t go as planned. The Commander suffers a heart attack, right in the middle of the whole grim ritual.

Even with Gilead breathing down her neck and all that trauma baggage, Emily still throws her lot in with June and Mayday. She winds up in the middle of a bold mission: smuggling baby Nicole (June and Nick’s kid) out. Emily’s life is on the line every step, but there’s this glimmer of escape in it, too.

So, fast forward to the end of The Handmaid's Tale Season 2. Emily, clutching baby Nicole, hustles her way to Canada with some help from the underground crew. The whole escape is pure adrenaline, terror, and hope.

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Emily’s fate after Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale

Emily finally makes it to Canada in The Handmaid's Tale. She gets asylum, is back with Sylvia and Oliver, which, on paper, is supposed to be this happy ending. But Gilead doesn’t just evaporate from your head because you crossed a border. She is carrying all the trauma, flinching at shadows, zoning out at the dinner table, barely able to breathe sometimes.

Guilt hits her hard, too—she got out, but what about everyone still stuck there?

Emily’s family tries to help her pick up the pieces, but she is just not having it. She can’t shake off the horror-show memories of Gilead, no matter how safe Canada looks from the outside. Plus, everything she has seen and lost puts her right back into the fight.

On screen, we last see her getting back into the resistance, trying to protect the people still trapped under Gilead’s boot. The Handmaid's Tale doesn’t spill any tea about what happens to her after that—she just disappears after Alexis Bledel departed before season 5.

In a public statement, the actress talked about her exit from The Handmaid's Tale:

"After much thought, I felt I had to step away from The Handmaid’s Tale at this time. I am forever grateful to Bruce Miller for writing such truthful and resonant scenes for Emily, and to Hulu, MGM, the cast and crew for their support."

So Emily’s storyline is left hanging, but it kind of fits. She becomes this symbol of survival in The Handmaid's Tale. She’s still out there somewhere, doing what she can, and the fight is not over.

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Emily’s story in The Handmaid’s Tale authentically depicts the trauma from the torture, the stolen choices, everything ripped away. The character’s departure in Season 4 left this massive hole in the show. Her presence set the bar for how deep this story could go.