‘The Testaments’ Brings Us Back to Gilead

The 2019 novel The Testaments by Margaret Atwood came out at peak hype for the third season of the series based on her classic fundamentalist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale. At the time the series had not descended into the increasingly disjointed and contrived writing that disillusioned fans. Despite that later disappointment, the show continued to receive high marks from critics who found the show’s politics too agreeable to want to quibble over anything as silly as internal continuity or increasingly gratuitous Elisabeth Moss closeups.

An adaptation of The Testaments seemed inevitable, although the TV world-building had taken a different turn from the books. Among other things, for example, The Testaments book featured Lydia, the infamous handler of the handmaids in all versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, as a major character who helped to bring the nightmarish fundamentalist state Gilead down from the inside, testifying about her past experiences. In all six seasons of the show, though, Lydia consistently supported Gilead, despite its apparent destruction in the sixth season finale.

Executive producer Bruce Miller, who also adapted The Handmaid’s Tale, gets around the awkward events of that series finale mainly by ignoring them at the start of The Testaments. Although the previous show suggested that Gilead had been destroyed once and for all thanks to a plane crash killing dozens of commanders, the new show starts with the freedom fighting group Mayday continuing to wreak havoc on the religious extremists of Gilead. Apparently, there are so many commanders in Gilead that a bunch of them still need wives, hence The Testaments centers around a girls’ finishing school where teenagers aspire to creepy marital lives.

The Testaments benefits from this new perspective, since teenagers in any country don’t really need to know how their country works. After all, their general daily life is concerned more with high school drama than geopolitics. The new star of the show is Agnes (Chase McKenzie), a teenager who fans of the previous series will instantly recognize as June’s daughter (Agnes herself only remembers her life as a privileged child of the Gilead elite). Then there’s Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a refugee from Canada who, because she is a refugee from Canada, is arbitrarily treated worse than the other girls. Their world is run according to a simple framework: Gilead is under attack by terrorists, men have impure thoughts about girls, and all bad people need to be executed.

The finishing school also benefits from being an attractive set that lends itself well to large, colorful group shots which emphasize how the women — and men — are forced into narrow costume based categories. The ritual dress also helps to transition the action to creepier ritualistic set-pieces. Despite its fundamental ridiculousness, the Mennonite dystopia of Gilead is almost sold by the cinematography.

As well as being pulled together by the visual vocabulary of the ceremonials, The Testaments coheres around its characters being consistently two-faced. They carefully tread a line between what they want to do in their internal monologues and what they have to say in order to fit in. This makes them far more compelling as characters than anyone in The Handmaid’s Tale, who would simply tell each other how they feel without regard to whether it was a good idea to have emotional heart-to-hearts in the middle of spy operations.

But, at the end of the day, The Testaments is still the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and quickly becomes as unsubtle as its predecessor once Daisy is revealed to be a spy working for Mayday. This isn’t as big a spoiler as it sounds since it was in the first week of episode drops and was also basic backstory in the book. With unintentional hilarity, Daisy seems to have almost no idea what she’s doing, not owing to any lack of spunk on her part, but because Mayday’s plans are every bit as half-baked as they were in The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s more than a little surprising they were able to sneak any spies into the finishing school at all. Given no clear directives from Mayday, Daisy just stumbles into a Commander’s office in today’s episode and is astute enough to notice that he has a piece of chocolate from a foreign country with whom Gilead has no formal relations.

Daisy, to her credit, is pretty angry that she got talked into this operation where stuff like this is about the best she can hope to do. In general the catty energy by the cast is a lot of fun. The trouble is, The Testaments isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a deep, profound look at the horrible world which might exist only ten years away from right now, where teenagers are no longer allowed to listen to hip and relevant bands like The Cranberries.

We are not, mind you, supposed to wonder how exactly any of this could have happened. Apparently back in Canada, Daisy still had regular access to Big Macs, implying an ongoing economy and cultural environment not that different from our own. This nostalgic representation takes on amusing irony in Daisy’s internal monologue, though, in that it’s prompted by teenage girls being mean to food service workers, as if such a thing could only ever happen in Gilead.

Ultimately, the problem with The Testaments is the same as the problem of the final two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale. This is a franchise so devoid of nuance there’s not even any ideology here that can really be critiqued, despite this possibly being the single most explicitly political TV show of the last ten years. Gilead is a horrible place of sex criminals and corporal punishment hated by everyone, even its own people, yet somehow they’re bringing in so many refugees that Daisy is able to fool Gilead into thinking that she’s a sincere immigrant.

All these criticisms noted, I should note that if you’re the kind of person who doggedly insisted that The Handmaid’s Tale was good to the end, you’ll almost certainly find The Testaments a triumphant return to form. The story benefits a lot from finally having more source material thanks to Atwood’s novel, as it also does from demoting Moss from main cast to recurring. Yes, people do continue to act as if June is the unimpeachable moral paragon of the revolution, whose level of recognizable fame seems to change at random on a scene-by-scene basis. But at least they have other more interesting things to talk about most of the time.