I had to surrender on the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale fairly early on – the mass mock execution scene did for me – as a result of it was too relentlessly bleak, too stuffed with dread, too terrible, too true. Margaret Atwood’s future-dystopia story, revealed in 1985, drew on nothing that had not already occurred in totalitarian and tyrannical regimes all over the world. Translated to the display screen, the visceral terror of all of it was nearly an excessive amount of from the very starting.
Now, the sequel Atwood revealed in 2019, The Testaments, has come for us, created by The Handmaid’s Tale’s showrunner, Bruce Miller. Brace yourselves.
In some methods, it’s barely lighter and brighter than its precursor – a type of YA reboot. Set a few years after the tip of The Handmaid’s Tale, it focuses on the following technology of Gilead ladies. But it’s a YA model that also encompasses bloody punishments, rotting corpses swinging from gibbets and indoctrination and abuse – with the youth of the protagonists making it even more durable to watch. The iconography stays ravishing, although. The color palette has been expanded past crimson, white and inexperienced. Young ladies of the appropriate class are wearing pink attire and cloaks, the older ones (“Plums” with all of the connotations of ripeness for the choosing) graduate to purple (together with headpieces which are necessary however way more fashionable than the blinkering bonnets the handmaids have to put on) and, then, if they’re fortunate sufficient to start to menstruate, they transfer into wifely teal.
Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is the adopted daughter of Commander MacKenzie and his late spouse, Tabitha. We know she can be June/Offred’s stolen first daughter, Hannah. Either manner, the commander’s new spouse, Paula (Amy Seimetz), would really like the kid off her fingers as quickly as attainable.
Agnes attends an elite preparatory faculty, run by Aunt Lydia. Yes, that Aunt Lydia. That genuinely savage Miss Trunchbull performed by the inimitable Ann Dowd. Whether that is the outdated Aunt Lydia or the brand new, post-epiphany mannequin that had come into being by the tip of The Handmaid’s Tale stays to be seen. But no matter degree of Gilead lore you’ve gotten underneath your belt, the crew behind this present has finished effectively to make it work.
Aunt Lydia places Agnes answerable for exhibiting new scholar Daisy (Lucy Halliday) the ropes. Daisy is likely one of the Pearl Girls, white-clad devotees of Gilead’s model of Christianity, recruited, typically as orphans, from outdoors the state by auntly missionaries, and customarily suspected by different pupils of being spies for the academics. (“The passion of the convert,” says Agnes, in voiceover. “What a pain in the ass.”) The two ladies’ more and more shut and sophisticated relationship varieties the spine of the ten episodes, which additionally see Daisy’s and Aunt Lydia’s backstories unfold in flashback. In the current, Agnes should additionally navigate the arrival of her interval and “eligibility”. In one scene, she kneels earlier than her father in her new colored robes whereas his mates stare upon her, and it’s as neat an encapsulation of teenage ladies’ expertise with males – albeit normally extra delicate and drawn out over the months and years – as you possibly can discover. There are additionally revelations about her greatest pal Becka (Mattea Conforti) and Becka’s father, as life in Gilead turns into ever extra insupportable to each ladies.
Though it’s barely leavened by a little humour, however principally by the innate hope provided by the age of the protagonists, The Testaments is, like its predecessor, a research in groupthink – in energy, corruption and the benefit with which abnormal folks acquiesce to evil practices. And it’s about, particularly, man’s inhumanity to girl, how prepared males could be to subjugate, to scale back others to servitude and physique components and animal capabilities, and the way there may be nothing new underneath the solar.
