It’s been a year since viewers left Gilead behind for good, as the extended version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale came to an end in the sixth season. Now, the dystopian epic has returned with a dark coming-of-age fable in the sequel, The Testaments.
Set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is a plum (a pre-pubescent girl in Gilead) ripe for the picking for an arranged marriage by one of the aunts at Aunt Lydia’s finishing school for girls. Groomed until they are 'truly worthy' of a husband (aka become fertile), the teenage girls – dressed in plum, pearl or green – are primed to run a household with training in the culinary arts, lace work and the scriptures.
Daisy (Lucy Halliday), Agnes' newly assigned pearl girl, is both the bridge to the outside world and our eyes into this alternate perspective on the regime. Raised in Canada, Daisy is an outsider shrouded in secrets. Difficult to trust, Agnes and her allies cannot understand why anyone would subject themselves to this repression if they didn’t have to. And it’s clear she doesn’t belong.
From vomiting at the first assembly when a man is brutalised for his crimes to sneaking out a cassette late at night to relive the freedom of her life before the regime, Daisy is an anomaly in this well-orchestrated order that threatens to disrupt everything that these girls have been raised and trained for.
View Green Video on the source websiteNo one is without their own secrets though, every girl is working through their own demons, dilemmas and unanswered questions as they enter the next stage of their life: woman, wife, mother.
Inevitably, there was an immense amount of pressure for The Testaments to live up to The Handmaid’s Tale record-breaking success, both for the book, initially, and this adaptation. Yet, even with the minor tweaks to the novel to increase the possibility of a second season, The Testaments is a triumph.
The ten-part series achieves what few sequels or spin-offs do, to stand as an impressive entry outside of its predecessor and feel disturbingly familiar, while offering something new entirely.
Infiniti and Halliday shine in this fraught duality of their fragile and tested new connection. Agnes processes the confusion, confliction and fear about the debutant’s future as they all blossom into their green, grown-up uniforms, while Daisy’s secrets start to fracture and surface to explain the real reason for her relocation to Gilead.
For Aunt Lydia’s girls, friendship and collaboration is a dangerous commodity that can be exploited as a weakness, while disobedience can be punished by removing their very means to communicate with each other: by cutting out their tongue. Compared to the handmaids before them, like June, there’s a painful sense of foreboding as these girls grow into their bodies, as audiences have a stronger understanding of the horrors of what’s to come.
Through Agnes, Daisy and Becka (Mattea Conforti), The Testaments offers a darker insight into a girl’s coming-of-age, away from the nostalgic girlhoods that have washed the cultural landscape for the past few years, that focuses on domesticity, subservience and fertility as the epitome of a girl and woman’s ‘worth.’
These "lambs don’t stray" from their flock, under the Aunt’s watchful eyes, otherwise they are shunned and shamed not only for their own sins, but for every other man’s too. "Just by existing, we were mortally dangerous to otherwise perfectly good men," Agnes contemplates.
View Green Video on the source websiteThe plums are told they are not "blameless" in any man’s sin and to be proactive in avoiding shaming both themselves and the aunts by confining themselves to almost a doll-like state, as seen with the metaphor of Agnes’ dolls house.
Desensitised to the brutality of the state, the true violence of the series is witnessed not in bloodied acts (which are predominantly kept off-screen), but in the hunger, feral nature of (initially) these young girl’s craving for god’s justice.
The plums become their most animated, angered selves when they’re given permission to call for the murder or punishment of rapists and violent disturbing men in their assemblies. They may only hold a fallacy of true power, but it’s harrowing nonetheless to see the extent of the girl’s indoctrination to not only hold god’s grace, but his unyielding hand of judgement too.
Compared to the current political climate, Gilead doesn’t feel all that dystopian. Birth rates have fallen in the UK too, while women are slut-shamed and trained from young girls to not ‘tempt’ men to assault them, rather than address the concerning epidemic of male violence towards women. Atwood’s work has gone past a cautionary tale to hold a mirror to our own society to emphasise the dangers of radicalised misogyny that threatens to revoke women’s rights to exist, work, play and live in peace.
The Testaments premieres on Disney+ on Wednesday 8th April 2026.
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