In the season finale of the Handmaid’s Tale spin-off The Testaments, Handmaid’s protagonist June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) returns to engage in a feisty but necessary battle of words with her teenaged Testaments equivalent, Daisy (Lucy Halliday). Daisy was sent to infiltrate the Republic Of Gilead—the totalitarian theocracy June escaped from four years prior—and now she’s being called back to Canada for her own safety. But Daisy refuses. She wants to quash the oppressive regime from within, just as June and her fellow Mayday warriors once did. “I’m not just standing by, that’s the whole fucking point,” Daisy tells June.
Daisy’s words are stirring, but the viewers at home might understand where June’s coming from. One of the biggest hurdles—if not the biggest—facing The Testaments is whether anyone would want to stay immersed in Gilead’s dreary, patriarchal dystopia for another season (or two) of TV. The Handmaid’s Tale’s excruciatingly prolonged run only ended a year ago! Sure, when it premiered three months into Donald Trump’s first presidential term, the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed cautionary tale provided an odd sort of salve to the actual tyranny seeping into American life. But with a sequel to Trump’s time in the White House unfolding alongside The Testaments, weren’t the events of everyday life torturous enough to keep anyone from wanting to know what happened after June and her comrades liberated Boston?
Yet, by the end of season one, The Testaments’ shift in perspective reinvigorates this tired saga. Through Daisy’s watchful eye, the show offers a fresh insight into the horrors Gilead’s young women face. “You cannot save them yet. They don’t know they need saving,” June says of the friends Daisy has made in Gilead. How can Agnes (Chase Infiniti), Becka (Mattea Conforti), Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), and Hulda (Isolde Ardies) desire escape when they were programmed to believe it’s okay to have no bodily autonomy, to be under constant surveillance, and to live in a society guided by a willful, fundamentalist misreading of Christianity? But Daisy (and the audience) knows that her pals are waking up to the nightmare around them—particularly Agnes, who we also know is June’s daughter.
Like June passing the torch to Daisy at the end of the finale, the urgency of The Handmaid’s Tale’s first season has carried over to The Testaments‘ core theme of resilience. But creator Bruce Miller’s take on Atwood’s 2019 novel puts all of this in a more inviting package. What’s immediately striking about The Testaments is its almost Bridgerton-like pastel aesthetic, from the lush lawns of the mansion where Agnes lives to the pristine hallways of the elite school run by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), the imperious instructor who inducted June and her peers into a life of sexual subjugation and forced breeding. As daughters of high-ranking Gilead officials, Agnes, Becka, Shunammite, and Hulda all wear uniforms of an earthy plum, while Daisy—one of the so-called “Pearl Girls” who have been “rescued” from other countries—wears milky white.
To further distinguish itself from The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s nary a sign of that show’s signature red cloaks. Such a fiery shade would be a poor match for a YA drama composed of tea parties, dances, field trips, and craft lessons—though it would fit with the threat of severe punishment lurking beneath the surface of these activities, like the beatings Lydia and her fellow Aunts dole out for errant curse words. On The Handmaid’s Tale, the physical brutality could be outright bleak and gratuitous. Gilead’s many atrocities are never far from The Testaments’ mind, but it remains easier to digest because there’s less focus on onscreen violence (with the exception of a Lydia-centric flashback hour).
As the show digs deeper into the girls’ trying coming-of-age, its message of solidarity and rebellion in the worst of times takes shape. Agnes and her friends were raised in a broken and corrupt system amid turbulent political times. Their counterparts in our world can probably relate. The same goes for the issues that might activate a real teen’s political consciousness—The Testaments’ causes of revolt are obviously on the more extreme end of the spectrum, but they’re still grounded in concerns of equity, personal freedoms, and civil rights. It takes a little while for the girls to realize these problems exist and affect them directly, but once they do, their survival instincts kick in.
Having no control over their circumstances and yet being burdened with the task to fix them is yet another sentiment that might resonate with today’s youth. Or the youth of any generation, really: The Testaments commits to evocatively portraying how its characters yearn for common adolescent experiences amid the common (stringent rules, closed-off parents, wanting to learn more than they’re being taught at school) and uncommon (being married off to an older man as soon as they can menstruate, not being taught how to read) ordeals of their situation. Agnes harbors a crush on her guardian, Garth (Brad Alexander), but is afraid to express her feelings because, after she smiled at a boy on the playground once, the Aunts taped her mouth shut for two days and made her hold a sign that said “slut.” Shu worries she’ll be condemned to manual labor in the ecologically ruined, irradiated Colonies because she hasn’t gotten her period. Becka is secretly in love with Agnes, but she knows that if anyone finds out, she’ll be killed because homosexuality is a capital offense in Gilead. All recognizable anxieties gaining heft—and, for viewers who’ve never felt them themselves, the chance to relate—thanks to The Testaments’ dystopian setting.
Over the course of season one—and after the girls take revenge for their sexual assault at the hands of Becka’s dentist father—Agnes embraces her June-like qualities. That is, she’s determined, wily, and, thanks to prodding from Daisy, finally ready to fight in season two. Infiniti’s charged yet vulnerable performance recalls her turn in 2025’s One Battle After Another, in which she played another young woman thrust into a generational fight for justice. The emphasis on Agnes’ increasing revolutionary fervor further tightens the parallels between the works. Agnes and Infiniti’s OBAA character, Willa, are fighting different types of battles, but they’ve inherited the fighting spirit of their parents. But there’s a key difference between those parents: June actually managed to secure a win in her crusade. That’s hopefully a sign of where Agnes, Daisy, and, by extension, others their age might just end up.
“These girls are stronger than you think,” Daisy writes to June in the finale. “Maybe God made them that way, or maybe they just came out that way.” Then she ends the letter with quite the musing: “Nothing can be more powerful than a teenage girl.”
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
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