Movies & TV The Testaments The Testaments Is Rewriting Gileadan Sisterhood, For Better or Worse Can the Handmaid’s Tale sequel succeed despite one big change from Margaret Atwood’s novel? By Natalie Zutter | Published on April 8, 2026 Credit: Disney / Russ Martin Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Disney / Russ Martin When the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in 2017, it quickly established a distinctive style—the delightfully bitchy needle drops, the closeups on Elisabeth Moss’ furious face—that became so familiar that in later seasons it lost some of its bite. By contrast, Hulu’s spinoff The Testaments finds more success in building on the nostalgic tropes of teenage coming-of-age stories, even as the series seems to want to stand on its own from its forebear. It aptly balances the softness and whimsy of teenage girlhood, of burgeoning adolescent friendships and attractions, with the sharpness of girls growing together and away from one another. Not to mention the dawning realization that they live in a world of monsters—not Gilead’s neighbors, but the Aunts ushering them toward the much-older Commanders who need (but also want) them to birth the next generation of Gilead’s poor girls. While The Testaments’ unflinching portrait of girlhood in Gilead works best in the scenes set in the cafeteria or at their closest approximation to prom, the series could trust itself more to build momentum. The first three episodes are a slow start, but the world they establish is key—not necessarily the Gileadean backstory (though the culture shift is fascinating), but rather the inner workings between this group of teenagers who are each other’s entire world. Spoilers for the first three episodes of The Testaments. Content warning for sexual assault of a minor. Dear readers, I’m going to assume that most of us have been watching and reading along for the past decade. That we’ve teared up through every increasingly more awful interaction between Offred/June and Agnes, the child she bore as Hannah in what was once the United States of America, now nearly subsumed into the new world order. That we’ve been eagerly waiting for this reintroduction to Agnes as she comes of age, to see Gilead through her eyes. To have her meet Daisy, her foil in so many ways and her link to both her life before and, hopefully, her life after Gilead. When I wrote about the Handmaid’s Tale series finale last year, I was under the impression that The Testaments would follow the book’s time jump, so that 15 years would have elapsed from season 1. Instead, only four years have passed since June and Mayday liberated the Handmaids and regained control of Boston, roughly a decade since the start of the series. The showrunners also moved around some key events in Agnes’ life, putting her into contact with Daisy at a much younger age. While this makes for an excellent teen dystopian drama framework, it futzes with one of the most compelling parts of the book and arguably the series’ overall lore. (Don’t worry, I’ll put book spoilers behind a tag.) Whether said narrative sacrifice is worth it remains to be seen. The Future of Gilead Credit: Disney / Russ Martin Gilead is scrambling, and it is fascinating to watch. No longer are they smugly lording their superiority over other nations; even after losing Boston a half-decade ago, they’re on the defensive. With the emancipation of the Handmaids, they’ve lost the cornerstone of their culture. That doesn’t stop them, of course, from subjugating the women who are left, but the hierarchy and the milestones are more reactive, more throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks.  Perhaps that’s why Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) has enjoyed the greatest elevation in status, immortalized both in statue form and with a premarital preparatory academy named after her. Despite Lydia’s clear faltering in conviction at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Gilead’s converse loss of faith in her, the two entities seem to recognize that they need one another if this twisted experiment is to continue on. Agnes MacKenzie (One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti) is the rare daughter of a Commander, seeing as her father was hastily promoted following the mass assassination of the core Commanders at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale season 6. Agnes is considered the privileged princess among her peers, whose fathers include a dentist and other humble Gileadean professions. Even in a dystopia, teenage girls are gonna teenage girl, which is to say bond over the shared quirks of their adolescence while still adhering to a subtle pecking order. Agnes’ best friend is Becka (Mattea Conforti), but they have to hide their bond behind platitudes and secret pinky promises, lest they be seen making any connections that could threaten future marriages and motherhood. Hulda (Isolde Ardies) is the lovable weirdo whose dangerous fascination with science seems to be tolerated for now, while Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard, a delight) is the queen bee clearly nursing her own insecurities about getting left behind in girlhood. Then there’s Daisy (Lucy Halliday), one of the foreigner Pearl Girls. These white-clad missionaries possess the obnoxious fervor of the converted, in that they’re trying to prove themselves twice as worthy as the girls who have grown up within Gilead’s structure. Their presence seems mostly tolerated by both Aunts (who put them to work as free labor while housing them at the school) and Plums (Lydia assigns Daisy to shadow Agnes), though no one seems to expect them to grow up into proper Wives. Of course, it quickly becomes clear that the holier-than-thou Pearl Girl persona is just a cover for Daisy, who is working with the rebel network Mayday for her own vendetta. This is Gilead’s first generation of girls to properly come of age, even if it’s not entirely the way that Gilead’s architects intended for them to. With the Handmaids all gone, there is no safety net; if this totalitarian theocracy wants to perpetuate itself, these barely-pubescent girls will have to bear lots of children—and to believe that it’s everything they could ever want. Blessed Be the Fruit / May the Lord Open Credit: Disney / Steve Wilkie In just a few years, Gilead has retconned its own fertility rituals. Gone are the Handmaids in their blood-red gowns, moving through town in blindered pairs; the cruel monthly Ceremony has been replaced by a cheerily dystopian version of The Care and Keeping of You—just not one that the girls are allowed to read. Despite every single citizen acting as if it’s such a blessing to be potentially fertile, it’s the same messaging as before: Gilead’s women are only good for having babies. It’s shocking to watch a household function without a Handmaid, to see Agnes recreating Offred’s movements around her own home yet in an entirely different context. Her Martha, Rosa (Kira Guloien), is the closest thing she has to a nurturing mother figure (“Under His Eye, cutie pie” kills me every time), and while it’s clear that Agnes is constrained within this ecosystem, she is a much more pampered prisoner. Imagine being a preteen and proudly ringing the bell at school so that all your peers can obediently troop out and applaud your uterine bleeding, then gaze longingly at your shiny new green pin. Menarche triggers a midnight initiation ceremony that feels very secret society, yet it’s another cruel fakery, fooling these girls into thinking they have any power over their futures. I would be remiss in not mentioning Gilead’s previous failed experiments in child-brides. There was Nick’s Econowife Eden Blaine (Sydney Sweeney), who cheated on her husband with a Guardian and was sentenced to a Romeo & Juliet-esque death. Later we met Esther Keyes (Mckenna Grace), a senile Commander’s Wife who was raped by her husbands’ Guardians before getting her bloody revenge. Despite her eagerness to join Mayday, Esther was forced into Handmaid servitude; the last we saw her, she was unable to succeed in either poisoning herself or getting a hysterectomy because unfortunately she was finally pregnant. Both girls were seeming outliers, situations that quickly spiralled out of control without proper monitoring. Perhaps that’s why Lydia is running the premarital prep academy, to keep Gilead’s future Under Her Eye. But it’s still unclear what the most desired outcome is. The Powers That Be seem to have accepted that the Handmaid experiment is not worth recreating, but what will happen to either the Plums who don’t get their periods, or the ones who do and still struggle to conceive? Will they become Econowives, or Aunts, or something else? Field Trips & Assemblies Credit: Disney / Russ Martin You know what in Gilead does stay the same? The Particicution, although it’s been rebranded for the younger generation as an Assembly: the special guest is another sinfully lustful man, brought to their school for them to sentence. The Plums are too tender to rip a man limb from limb, which was how Gilead allowed the Handmaids to exercise their rage; but they still get plenty of practice in enacting violence, even if only by pointed fingers and vengeful screams. These scenes are among the series’ most compelling: the varying fashions in which the girls are conditioned to turn on one another, to voice their deepest insecurities into demeaning insults or watch with gleeful dread the impact that their words have on another’s body. When the Handmaids did it, the viewer could see via Offred that they were more coerced into it for survival; when it’s teenage girls, you can see how much more deep-rooted it is. While the pilot makes the Plums’ first Field Trip grimly funny, as they’re intentionally brought to regard the hanged bodies of men tempted to rape—tempted by girls just like them!—the second Field Trip is even more disturbing. In lieu of a museum or workplace, they are brought to the household of Penny Judd, their former classmate-turned-Wife. It might as well be a life-size version of Agnes’ dollhouse, the way the Plums flitter through its rooms, playing house and hostess while the Aunts stand around like bored chaperones (one of many small character moments that make for excellent details). Daisy & June Credit: Disney / Russ Martin Daisy’s first instance of losing her cool is perfect, as she is the only girl who can’t handle watching the Guardian get his hand chopped off at the Assembly. Though Agnes is the only one to witness Daisy’s outburst of blasphemy, it establishes the fascinating push-and-pull power dynamic between them. If Daisy were a real Pearl Girl, it would be a test that Agnes initially fails by offering not to tattle on the other girl. But when Daisy does confess—ostensibly to keep up her pious persona?—and Agnes joins in on the “dirty girl” shaming, Daisy reverses it by accusing Agnes of not reporting her, which leads to a very sisterly scene of the two of them suffering through brushing their mouths out with soap. Daisy the double agent is a bit confounding; she didn’t have to go through these mental hoops, unless part of her Mayday mission is to determine how brainwashed Agnes is? If her endgame is to smuggle Agnes out, as I initially suspected, it would make sense for her to test the boundaries of how much the two might form camaraderie or if Agnes is likely to turn on her when the stakes are higher. Except that may not be The Testaments’ intended story, because of how the timeline got shifted. There is one sticking point I have to address; it involves book spoilers, click here to skip past them. SPOILERS START In the book, Daisy is Baby Nichole (let’s just use the show spelling), the child that Offred has with Nick, who is eventually smuggled into Canada by Mayday. Writing the novel in 2019, Atwood drew from the show plotlines to make Baby Nichole an international news story, a symbol for Gilead versus Canada, imprisonment versus freedom. Daisy-as-Pearl-Girl doesn’t find her way to Agnes until the latter is training to become an Aunt, which further highlights the age difference. Discovering that they’re sisters strengthens their bond for escaping Gilead, and is heightened by both meeting Offred and eventually their respective fathers.  But by the Handmaid’s Tale series finale, Nichole/Holly is only three or four years old, meaning she would be seven or so at the start of The Testaments. So instead it seems as if the writers gave Daisy every other character detail except for her true parentage; later episodes give her a birth name that’s a lovely Easter egg but seems to cement her status as someone else. But then why cast Halliday, who’s a dead ringer for Moss? It would have been equally cool if Daisy were Janine’s daughter Charlotte—which would also explain some of the tenderness that June has for her—but the timing doesn’t line up for that, either. The next best guess is one of the Angels’ Flight kids that June got out at the end of season 3… although that would make her old enough, it doesn’t jibe with June’s comment about Melanie and Neil adopting a baby. Come on, guys! The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation built its strongest and most devastating emotional beats upon mothers saving each other’s children, even or especially if they couldn’t be reunited with their own. June interacting with Daisy as a wry mentor figure while a stranger to her own daughter grounds their brief scenes together and makes me hope we’ll get more flashbacks of the two of them crossing paths before Daisy becomes a Pearl Girl. It also parallels the Star Wars problem of, everyone can’t be a Skywalker; at some point, you have to broaden the scope to include more ordinary people caught up in these extraordinary times. (Can you tell I’m talking myself into it?) SPOILERS END I’m struggling a bit with Bruce Miller’s quote that “there’s nothing in the world as powerful as a 14-year-old girl.” It makes Agnes or Daisy sound like disenfranchised Katniss Everdeen, when the Plums are more like the District 1 tributes. It was difficult enough for June, who knew exactly what was going on, to be able to rebel both in small everyday ways and then in massive, border-shifting ways. And she was aware every day of her subjugation and how things were before! Agnes and her peers have the added hurdle of having to unlearn the ways in which Gilead brainwashed them. It doesn’t mean they can’t have an impact, but it makes me more skeptical of how much they’ll change the world. If anything, them being 14 makes me want to freeze time for them, to linger in that period before adulthood and everything changing. That’s what The Testaments captures, even in a dystopia; the second half of Miller’s quote is about Agnes, and June, and the others, creating forbidden bonds where they’re meant to compete and cut down. That’s what I’m most watching The Testaments for. Pearls & Pins Credit: Disney / Russ Martin Agnes and Daisy’s voiceovers, like June’s, imply some sort of frame narrative. (BOOK SPOILERS) In the Testaments novel, they’re witnesses quoted in an investigation related to Gilead’s fall (SPOILERS END), but whether these voiceovers are diegetic like June’s or standard TV voiceover is yet to be seen. I’m digging how both this show and the new season of For All Mankind play with familiar coming-of-age tropes with their teenage protagonists—the Plums and the Happy Valley high school grads in alt-history 2012 figuring out how to spend their last summer on Mars before real life encroaches. The needle drops continue to be excellent, from the trailer’s nostalgic conjuring of the Cranberries’ “Dream” to Blondie’s “Dreaming.” And what song(s), I wonder, will accompany the shift to nightmares… The new colors and cuts of this show’s dystopian fashions never fail to fascinate me. While purple would initially seem a head-scratcher of a color to bridge the little girls’ pink and the Wives’ teal, Miller clarified in the THR feature that it’s actually plum—intended both as the metaphor for ripeness, but also with the justification that it’s a natural dye; no chemicals for these future Wives. I’ve noticed no one has yet adopted Serena Joy’s widow mauve pantsuit ensemble. Daisy’s daring pearl tragus piercing must have some ulterior purpose and/or meaning, though I did notice it on the other Pearl Girls; interesting for Gilead to support piercings in that context. “May the Lord open, Daddy” is a line that makes me shudder-scream every time I say or type it. I’m still holding out hope that the Testaments showrunners are intentionally playing with time, especially with Agnes narrating that she can only approximate the passage of time. Could it be that the four years is a red herring and it’s been far longer? Most likely not, but a girl can dream. What’s your read on The Testaments so far?[end-mark] The post <i>The Testaments</i> Is Rewriting Gileadan Sisterhood, For Better or Worse appeared first on Reactor.