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I had to give up on the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale quite early on – the mass mock execution scene did for me – because it was too relentlessly bleak, too full of dread, too awful, too true. Margaret Atwood’s future-dystopia tale, published in 1985, drew on nothing that had not already occurred in totalitarian and tyrannical regimes around the world. Translated to the screen, the visceral terror of it all was almost too much from the very beginning.
Now, the sequel Atwood published in 2019, The Testaments, has come for us, created by The Handmaid’s Tale’s showrunner, Bruce Miller. Brace yourselves.
In some ways, it is slightly lighter and brighter than its precursor – a kind of YA reboot. Set a few years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, it focuses on the next generation of Gilead women. But it’s a YA version that still encompasses bloody punishments, rotting corpses swinging from gibbets and indoctrination and abuse – with the youth of the protagonists making it even harder to watch. The iconography remains ravishing, though. The colour palette has been expanded beyond red, white and green. Young girls of the right class are dressed in pink dresses and cloaks, the older ones (“Plums” with all the connotations of ripeness for the picking) graduate to purple (including headpieces that are mandatory but far more stylish than the blinkering bonnets the handmaids have to wear) and, then, if they are lucky enough to begin to menstruate, they move into wifely teal.
Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is the adopted daughter of Commander MacKenzie and his late wife, Tabitha. We know she is also June/Offred’s stolen first daughter, Hannah. Either way, the commander’s new wife, Paula (Amy Seimetz), would like the child off her hands as soon as possible.
Agnes attends an elite preparatory school, run by Aunt Lydia. Yes, that Aunt Lydia. That genuinely savage Miss Trunchbull played by the inimitable Ann Dowd. Whether this is the old Aunt Lydia or the new, post-epiphany model that had come into being by the end of The Handmaid’s Tale remains to be seen. But whatever level of Gilead lore you have under your belt, the team behind this show has done well to make it work.
Aunt Lydia puts Agnes in charge of showing new student Daisy (Lucy Halliday) the ropes. Daisy is one of the Pearl Girls, white-clad devotees of Gilead’s version of Christianity, recruited, often as orphans, from outside the state by auntly missionaries, and generally suspected by other pupils of being spies for the teachers. (“The passion of the convert,” says Agnes, in voiceover. “What a pain in the ass.”) The two girls’ increasingly close and complicated relationship forms the backbone of the 10 episodes, which also see Daisy’s and Aunt Lydia’s backstories unfold in flashback. In the present, Agnes must also navigate the arrival of her period and “eligibility”. In one scene, she kneels before her father in her new coloured robes while his friends gaze at her, and it is as neat an encapsulation of teenage girls’ experience with men – albeit usually more subtle and drawn out over the months and years – as you could find. There are also revelations about her best friend Becka (Mattea Conforti) and Becka’s father, as life in Gilead becomes ever more intolerable to both girls.
Though it is slightly leavened by a little humour, but mostly by the innate hope offered by the age of the protagonists, The Testaments is, like its predecessor, a study in groupthink – in power, corruption and the ease with which ordinary people acquiesce to evil practices. And it is about, in particular, man’s inhumanity to woman, how willing men can be to subjugate, to reduce others to servitude and body parts and animal functions, and how there is nothing new under the sun.
