What is The Testaments about?
Set over a decade after the final events of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments follows the story of a group of young women at Aunt Lydia’s premarital preparatory academy, Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Daisy (Lucy Halliday). So we don’t see one handmaid in the entirety of the series – this is all about the more privileged women in Gilead and their story.
As Agnes, Daisy and their peers encounter their forays into womanhood, and what that looks like for them coming of age inside the walls of the Gilead regime.
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Links between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments
Here are some key characters, elements and plotlines of The Handmaid’s Tale to look out for in The Testaments.
Aunt Lydia is back
A familiar face from The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia (played by Ann Dowd) returns for The Testaments. This makes sense, as a certain amount of Atwood’s novel is told from her perspective. While she is something of an antagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale, enforcing the harmful doctrine of Gilead and controlling the handmaids at every turn, we see more of Aunt Lydia’s life and choices in The Testaments.
Aunt Lydia heads up the preparatory school where most of The Testaments takes place, described by the show’s synopsis as “a place where obedience is instilled brutally and always with divine justification”. We also get a fair amount of insight into Aunt Lydia’s experience when the Gilead revolution took place, where she stood politically and what it took for her to survive at the beginning of the new regime. Again, it’s not crucial, but already being aware of Aunt Lydia’s story from The Handmaid’s Tale will increase the impact of her scenes in The Testaments.