The first three episodes of The Testaments premiere on Hulu on Wednesday, April 8, with new episodes arriving weekly thereafter. This is a spoiler-free review of the first season.
When Bruce Miller’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale dropped in 2017, we were three months into President Donald Trump’s first term. The show initially had a seismic impact on the zeitgeist as subsequent protests featured iconography and quotes from it, but attention waned as time went on and The Handmaid’s Tale’s cardinal sin was testing the resolve of viewers to watch heroine June Osborne/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and her handmaiden kind weather the horrific slings and arrows of Gilead for six long seasons.
No, it wasn’t a fun watch, but Atwood’s cautionary tale and Miller’s interpretation of her text remains important storytelling about what resistance looks like in action. It’s also why Atwood wrote the sequel, The Testaments, based in part on her appreciation for what actress Ann Dowd did with the Aunt Lydia role. Atwood wanted to flesh out the character’s path to Aunt status, and now Miller is back with another richly made series adaptation, this time focusing on the grooming of the young women of Gilead into docile breeders under God’s eye.
Overall, The Testaments is an odd amalgam of Gossip Girl meets The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a bit disconcerting to process in the watching. The series is both fascinating and disturbing at how well it portrays the mundanity of fascist life. The stakes haven’t changed at all from the scenarios of The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s still disturbing to watch these young women navigate the benign norms of teen social orders and then see them act out the sadism of their patriarchal regime. What helps smooth out the rough tonal patches is the throughline of the outside resistance infiltrating the Gilead system as they plant moles who will give these girls an opportunity to take off their blinders.
Much like The Testaments book, the series is told from three perspectives. The pilot, titled “Precious Flowers,” and the second episode, “Perfect Teeth,” as well as several others are told through the eyes of Agnes (Chase Infiniti), a teen on the cusp of puberty and still designated as a Plum girl in training. More importantly, and unbeknownst to her, Agnes is the Gilead-kidnapped daughter of June (Moss) and Luke (O-T Fagbenle) from The Handmaid’s Tale.
The second narrator is Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Pearl girl managed by Aunt Lydia (Dowd, reprising her role) and her equally restrictive teachers. Always dressed in austere white outfits, she is one of the female teens from the outside world who were either recruited into Gilead or taken by force, then retrained to be “godly” servants. On the surface, Daisy acts like a pious recruit who is tasked by Lydia to get to know her fellow students, but she’s holding back secrets of her own that get revealed – thankfully – sooner than later.
Aunt Lydia provides the third narrative perspective, particularly in the episode “Stadium,” where her pre-Gilead origin story is expanded upon from what we knew in The Handmaid’s Tale. Otherwise in this series, we’re observing an evolved, post-The Handmaid’s Tale Lydia who is far more weathered by the loss of her favorite handmaidens and has fully learned the hypocrisy of the Gilead patriarchy through ruthless loss, giving the character fresh motivation.
While many of the details of the season are under review embargo, what I can say is that the series is a satisfying, slow-building thriller. Characters are slowly defined by their actions in the present and through flashbacks about their lives before Gilead. The season does take its time creating urgency, which is going to tax less patient viewers; ultimately, there are rewards in observing these separate factions creep towards a united goal of undermining Gilead’s shaky hold on power.
Early episodes lay a lot of foundation for audiences to understand the doctrines and strict penalties imposed upon the girls of Gilead, and that’s important, as several of them will find reasons to rebel from within as they experience the darker sides of their world. Agnes, in particular, is eager to achieve the milestones of their society, yet she also possesses the internal musings of a rebel who’s not entirely sure about what everyone is asking her to give up and accept without question. Chase Infiniti is very good at playing Agnes’ warring morals as she barrels towards puberty to become a Green girl, eligible to be married off to a much older Commander. Halliday is an equally spirited scene partner for Infiniti as the two girls attract and repel one another in various situations as they decide if one another is to be trusted.
The Testaments is almost more sobering for exposing how fascist and patriarchal regimes start their control from the womb. There are fairly frequent sequences that had me wincing in disgust, but that’s because they cut a little too close to the bone in our current times. The truth is that Gilead remains some folks’ foulest desires put into action, where the most subjugated readily accept their subservience because so much work has been done to make sure they know nothing else. But all regimes fall, and that’s what Miller, Atwood, and this series are laying bare for audiences to witness and internalize. Their thesis remains that even the best laid authoritarian plans can’t quell the power of rebellion, and perhaps The Testaments is a potent reminder that the young, and women, can save us all.
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