The new Hulu drama The Testaments takes place a number of years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s considered a sequel to that series, told from the perspective of teen girls who have grown up knowing nothing but the repressive life in Gilead.
Opening Shot: A shot of a mansion. Then we see the same mansion in dollhouse form, and push in until we see a girl looking out the window of her room, through the windows of the dollhouse.
The Gist: Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti) has grown up in Gilead, having been very young when the revolution and crackdown happened. She’s the daughter of a Commander, so she’s treated about the best that any teen girl is treated in the restrictive society. She’s a “plum”, which are the daughters of Commanders who haven’t had their periods yet; they dress in all-purple and are generally trained to be married off to other Commanders. When they get their periods, they become a “green” and a Commander is selected for them to wed.
Agnes goes to a finishing school founded and led by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd); despite still being very much alive, there is a statue of her in the main hall of the school, where the girls tend to leave small gifts as a tribute to her. She knows she’ll be losing her best friend Becka (Mattea Conforti) soon, given she’s had her period and is being fitted for her green dress. There are other signs of her burgeoning discomfort with the situation in Gilead, like her hatred of her “mother” Paula (Amy Seimetz) and her friendship with Rosa (Kira Guloien), one of the “Marthas” who work as servants.
One day, Agnes is called into Aunt Lydia’s office; Lydia asks her to watch over Daisy (Lucy Halliday), one of her new “pearls”. Pearls are girls who wear white; they have come from outside Gilead and have a desire to learn the ways of this God-fearing country. Agnes, of course, takes the assignment as an honor, but as she introduces Daisy to her plum friends, they are all suspicious of the “pearl girl,” especially Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), who thinks Agnes should report Daisy for a minor offense, just to let her know who’s higher on the school’s ladder.
After an assembly where the girls witness what happens to a man who was “wicked,” due to too much temptation from Gilead’s girls and women, Daisy’s pious exterior crumbles in front of Agnes. When Daisy thinks she should report herself to the Aunts, though, Agnes assures her that her meltdown will stay between them. Little does Agnes know what Daisy is really there to do.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Testaments is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, created by Bruce Miller and based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel.
Our Take: There’s a lot about The Testaments that feels less like the dystopian nightmare series that Handmaid’s Tale was and more like a Gilded Age teenage drama like The Buccaneers, where women whose fates are decided for them band together to fight the patriarchy any way they can. There are moments when we hear a similarly sparkly soundtrack, and we hear lots of narration from Agnes that reminds us of the coming-of-age period genre.
It seems out of place, given the fact that anyone who watches the show knows how oppressive things are for women in Gilead. But while the first episode reacquaints audiences with just how much of a horror show Gilead is, it’s also sowing the seeds of the revolution that Agnes and Daisy are going to help lead.
There are certainly hints that Daisy isn’t there to be converted, as she hides a transistor radio and listens to “Radio Free Boston” late at night. Also, when she thinks back to her days in Toronto, outside of Gilead’s grasp, we see her encounter someone who could have sent her down there to try to destroy Gilead’s patriarchy from the inside. Heck, she may purposely have been sent Agnes’ way, if the clues in the first episode mean what we think they mean.
All of this means that The Testaments isn’t going to play out like a modern-day version of a Gilded Age drama, like it seems it will on first glance. But the sooner that the show gets away from the structure and formality of Gilead, which wore on us during the original Handmaid’s Tale run, and the more we see Agnes, Daisy and the “plums” in a more revolutionary state of mind, the better.
Performance Worth Watching: Chase Infiniti effectively portrays Agnes as a person who grew up in Gilead from a young age, but someone who has a revolutionary somewhere inside of her.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After seeing that she “became eligible,” i.e. got her period, Agnes looks out the window of her room. Her narration mentions that she will find out who her real mother is. The Cranberries’ “Dreams” plays.
Sleeper Star: Rowan Blanchard’s Shunamite seems to be the plum that wants to cause the most trouble. There’s always one of them, right?
Most Pilot-y Line: Given how old all the actors playing the “plums” are, it’s hard to believe any of them are supposed to be playing girls that have yet to have their periods. Infiniti, for instance, is almost 26 in real life, and the idea that she’s playing someone who is in their early teenage years, even just for an episode or two, is a stretch.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we have some issues with how The Testaments is structured, given how depressing the world of Gilead continues to be, we are looking forward to seeing Agnes and Daisy starting to agitate for change as the show goes forward.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
