The penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 featured a Taylor Swift song full of meaning for the songstress, giving fans yet another tease of her rerecorded sixth studio album.
Episode 9 of the dystopian series, titled “Execution,” featured a lengthy snippet from “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” and the significance of the needle drop was not lost on Swifties and viewers alike, considering that the handmaids are looking to take Gilead down once and for all in these final episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale.
The song opens the ninth episode as the handmaids come together for a planned uprising led by Elisabeth Moss’s June Osborne. D’Arcy Carden’s new character, Aunt Phoebe, can also be spotted as Gilead forces try to catch the group of red-robed figures loading into trucks. Bombs go off to separate the authorities from the rebels.
The addition of this song in particular sends the message that these women were pushed to the brink, forced into a last resort by the actions of others, much like Swift implied of her own life at the time she wrote the song. Moss told Billboard that the song was “perfect” for the scene, and that it was “an honor” to be able to incorporate Swift’s music in “the final episodes of our show.”
The singer’s fanbase has long speculated that she will launch her rerecorded version of reputation. It is one of two rerecordings yet to be released, along with her debut album, Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version). There are also some fan theories that wonder whether the singer will release both albums at the same time.
This wasn’t the first rerecorded reputation song to be used in a TV show. Two summers ago, The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2 debuted Delicate (Taylor’s Version) in a scene between Lola Tung’s Belly Conklin and Gavin Casalegno’s Jeremiah Fisher.
“Look What You Made Me Do” has also been used before in Prime Video’s Wilderness. However, that was not the rerecorded version of the song. When it was initially released in 2017, “Look What You Made Me Do” was accompanied by an elaborate music video full of Easter eggs for fans.
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There’s one episode left of this final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, but the story is set to continue in the follow-up series The Testaments, also based on a book by Margaret Atwood.
