WENTWORTH What happens after last season’s cliffhanger?

Is the Freak really dead? That’s just one of the questions fans of the award-winning prison drama will be asking as the sixth season kicks off on Foxtel this week.

Spare a thought for Kate Atkinson—she can barely go a day without Wentworth fans asking her what’s ahead for Season 6 of the Australian drama. Is Joan “The Freak” Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) really dead? What about Sonia (Sigrid Thornton)? Will she be back to further terrorise Liz (Celia Ireland)? And what will happen now that her character, Vera, has been rendered all but powerless by Joan?

“I can’t say! Honestly!” Atkinson tells WHO. But if there’s one thing Wentworth fans have come to realise, it’s to expect the unexpected with this series.

Though tight-lipped about The Freak’s fate, Atkinson says the future for Vera revolves around the fallout from those shocking final scenes from Season 5.

“There’s a big storyline that occupies Vera, Jake [Bernard Curry] and Will [Robbie Magasiva] later on, which has a lot to do with Ferguson’s death,” she explains. “I can’t say much, except to say it takes the show in this really interesting, psychological thriller area.”

We pick up this season with Wentworth in lockdown after the escape of Frankie (Nicole Da Silva) and Ferguson. Commissioner Chandler (Gary Sweet) has been sacked, and Vera is struggling to maintain control over an increasingly strained inmate population. It’s a powder keg just waiting to explode.

Atkinson, who has been a cast member since Season 1, says fans can expect these new episodes to head in a very different direction, partly because of the addition of three new characters: biker Rita Connors (played by Leah Purcell), hot-headed inmate Ruby Mitchell ( Cleverman’s Rarriwuy Hick) and crime matriarch Marie Winter (portrayed by Susie Porter).

“It’s a good season for everyone, and the new characters bring a whole new energy to things,” Atkinson says. “This is great for those of us who have been here for six seasons—there are all these whole new relationships to unpack. The show is always different, every season, and

there’s a different theme for each season.”

This year, it’s all about survival and looking inward—both for the inmates and for Vera and her co-workers on the other side of the bars.

“Everyone, ultimately, has to make decisions about self-preservation,” Atkinson explains. “And Jake and Will and Vera, they have this moveable feast of allegiances, but they are all constantly thinking, ‘How do I protect myself? How do I protect my job?’ It all goes there a little later on, in amongst the other labyrinthine storylines this season—it’s great.”

For Atkinson, originally from Perth, filming Wentworth has been a blessing. It’s allowed her to remain in her new adopted hometown of Melbourne, where the show is filmed.

Yet has she ever tired of playing Vera? “Every time you think, ‘Am I treading water here and pulling the same old tricks out of the bag?’, the material on the page stops you from doing that,” she says. “A new cast member will come in and you think, ‘ You have just lifted the level.’ So then that brings us all up with them.”

Atkinson admits she never expected

The main cast of Wentworth for Season 6 (back Tues., June 19, at 8.30PM on Showcase). Notable absence: Pamela Rabe’s Joan “The Freak” Ferguson. Read into that what you will.

It would have been a nice happy ending for Liz to see Sonia neatly finished off by that poisoned tea at the end of last season. But is she really dead? Or will Liz have to contend with the knowledge that she didn’t finish the job?We don’t want to give too much away, but we will say this—sigrid Thornton was one of the actors present at the Season 6 launch a few weeks ago. We might not have seen the last of Sonia after all!

That’s the million-dollar question for fans—and one that Kate Jenkinson, who plays Allie Novak, says her character is just as obsessed with. “It’s Wentworth, so who really knows?” she says. “But if anyone is going to be able to claw herself out of a coffin underground, it’s Joan. Until Ali knows one way or another what happened to The Freak, she is going to always have that emptiness; that rage and desire for justice. She feels she owes it to Bea.”Kate Atkinson also refuses to be drawn on the subject, but, from a purely professional point of view, she says she always loved appearing opposite her on-screen nemesis, played superbly by Pamela Rabe. “We had a really terrific chemistry. She is just the most extraordinary professional, and so much fun,” she says.