The Testaments Series-Premiere Recap: Rage Finds a Way

The Testaments
Precious Flowers
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Even the cherished daughters of the most powerful men in Gilead aren’t safe from state violence. Anyone who watched The Handmaid’s Tale — and I’d wager that’s nearly everyone here — knows this, which is what makes its reiteration in the prologue to The Testaments so menacing. It’s a warning. Who is even more vulnerable than Handmaids, women who have been robbed of their freedom and their babies and, sometimes, their eyes, fingers, and tongues? I would have thought no one, but maybe these children are. Naïve little girls growing up illiterate in a conflict zone. “Precious flowers” coming of age in a cesspool where child marriage, rape, and female genital mutilation are biblically derived and state sanctioned.

I was so braced for violence against these girls that it was a relief when, three-quarters of the way through the series premiere, a man had his arm hacked off. He’s a Guardian at a Maryland all-girls school, where he’s caught masturbating on campus, which is disturbing. The audience for his punishment is made up of our ostensible protagonists: the prim pupils of Aunt Lydia School. Don’t be fooled by their sweet purple peacoats and the drivel they exchange about the weather, though. As soon as the table saw starts whirring, they’re out of their seats and screaming for blood. It should be terrifying to see these pathologically demure girls go suddenly demonic, but in the context of Gilead, it’s merely surprising. Rage finds a way. 

In fact, rage is simmering from The Testaments’ opening moments. Agnes MacKenzie — a teenage student at Aunt Lydia School and nothing more, as far as she’s aware — explains her life to us by taking us on a violent tour of her extravagant dollhouse. It’s an exact replica of the stately home she’s being brought up in. On Handmaids, getting a glimpse of Agnes, safe and loved, was a good thing, but as the episode opens on a wide shot of her home, I wished for it to somehow not be her.

Of course, Agnes doesn’t know — and I’ll be cagey here on the off chance that there’s a Handmaid’s newborn among us — what we know. And the show knows that we know that Agnes doesn’t yet know that there’s anything to know. Part of The Testaments’ peculiar challenge is to ground Handmaids viewers in a universe we believe we understand while still being plausibly accessible to new viewers — the kinds of people who don’t mind reading a book series out of order.

Agnes narrates the episode in the past tense, but it’s impossible to know from how far into the future she’s reflecting back. Decades? Months? Weeks? She manages to adopt the tone of the gullible girl she used to be back when she believed in the mission of Gilead. She loves her Commander father and the Marthas who care for her, and she treats those dolls gingerly. It’s the Mother doll, who represents Agnes’s new stepmom, Paula, that Agnes locks in the attic, an echo of something we watched Serena do to June. Later, she’ll decapitate the Mother doll using her bedroom window as a guillotine. 

In Agnes’s defense, Paula is rotten. When she sees Agnes in a new skirt, she remarks with astonishment that the girl doesn’t look more gawky. When she notices that Agnes’s favorite Martha, Rosa, is walking with a limp, Paula tells her stepdaughter about how her daddy would euthanize the lame horses on their farm. Plus hating your stepmom is a teenage rite of passage. Agnes is also low-key obsessed with the idea of kissing a boy, and she runs with a clique, which includes the usual cast of characters, like a bestie (Becka) and a mean girl (Shunammite). There are some parts of girlhood not even a totalitarian theocracy can suppress. 

Including a preoccupation with menarche. Just like adult women are separated into groups demarcated by clothing colors — red for Handmaids, sage-gray for Marthas, blue for Wives — so are the girls. The younger pupils at Aunt Lydia School wear pale pink. Girls Agnes’s age are called Plums. When they get their periods, like Becka recently did, they’ll be fitted for new green dresses that announce their eligibility for marriage, ideally to Commanders, who will hopefully impregnate them. Fertility is Gilead’s raison d’être. 

The Plums are as impatient to become women as they are to decorate their own homes and escape the clutches of the brown-clad Aunts who run the Aunt Lydia School. It’s been four years since the War of Massachusetts and the purges that followed, which is to say it’s been four years since the end of The Handmaid’s Tale series. (This is a significantly different timeline from the novel.) Somehow, Lydia survived her treachery to become a leading light again. She’s the headmistress of an important school that bears her name, and her dedicated students leave offerings of food at an imposing bronze statue of likeness, as if she’s a hungry ghost. “Prematurely petrified” is how Lydia describes her own predicament.

Besides the Pinks and the Plums, Aunt Lydia is responsible for the Pearl Girls — the young girls from outside Gilead who come here to convert. Some of them may be true believers, but most, we’re told, are runaways. Poor souls with nowhere else to go. The Plums all agree that the Pearl Girls can’t be trusted. They’re too eager to impress the Aunts, to earn favor and show what holy terrors they can be. They’re usually easy to avoid in their bright-white skirt suits — an army of miniature brides — but Lydia gives Agnes a shocking assignment in “Precious Flowers.” She asks a skeptical Agnes to take Daisy, a Canadian runaway, under her wing. Let Daisy shadow her in embroidery class and sit at the cool-kids table in the cafeteria. 

Testaments sets a serious tone, but there are occasional jokes. When Hulda, another girl in Agnes’s gang, politely inquires whether Daisy misses home, Daisy answers that she prays for Toronto to be “swallowed up by the earth.” This isn’t how Plums talk. “May He hear your prayer,” Hulda responds tentatively. Shunammite suggests that Agnes needs to “Plum up” and report Daisy to the Aunts for a made-up infraction before Daisy can report Agnes. An eye before an eye.

One Battle After Another star Chase Infiniti conveys more about Agnes with her shifting eyes than she can via the episode’s tedious narration. She brings a sense of wariness into every room she enters, which is an interesting choice for a character whose day-to-day life appears routine. She sees the same people, attends the same lessons. Everything she does, she’s done before. Most of the unquestioning girls don’t even seem surprised on the morning that they’re diverted from their usual schedule of bible studies and decorative arts to the assembly room. When the Guardian we’ve seen making eyes with Agnes on the school bus gets dragged into the room, only Daisy looks concerned. “The gross one,” Hulda calls him.

Aunt Estee puts it to the girls: Should this lewd man lose his arm for his indecency? The crowd responds ferociously. “By his hand,” they scream until the blade emerges from the carriage of the table saw and starts making its dramatic way toward the guy’s preferred hand. We’ve seen some terrible brutality on Handmaid’s, to be sure, but here we get the actual sounds of bone being mechanically chewed up. Even Aunt Vidala, the most hard-ass of all the teachers we meet in episode one, flinches.

It’s more than Daisy can take. She runs out of the room and vomits. “Jesus, what the fuck?” she shouts as Agnes approaches to check on her. Followed very quickly by: “Don’t tell.” Don’t tell. Shu warns Agnes that you can’t rely on a Pearl Girl, but there’s little more bonding than a secret. Blasphemy is an affront to God, but Agnes reassures Daisy, “God is more merciful than the Aunts.” The girls seal their pact of silence with a pinkie-swear — another irrepressible relic of modern girlhood. 

It turns out that Shu is right not to trust Daisy, though not for the reasons she thinks. That night, when the Pearls are meant to be sleeping in their communal dormitory, Daisy crawls out of bed and (super loudly, if you ask me) removes a transistor radio she has hidden in another girl’s bed frame. She listens to a liberation station that I’m pretty sure is emceed by Stephen Colbert, who I guess survived the fall of America. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he tells his listeners. On Handmaid’s, the line was a survivor’s mantra and a rallying cry. Now it’s a DJ’s nightly sign-off.

Daisy tunes the radio to a station for messages from Mayday, the American resistance group trying to defeat Gilead. And then she listens to music and remembers being free. The breeze on Daisy’s face as she happily skateboards alongside Lake Ontario. When she stops at a shop, we see June Osborne watching Daisy. Whoever she used to be, she doesn’t seem like a Toronto runaway here. 

Before the episode closes, Agnes gets her period. Because girls don’t have access to calendars, she can’t be sure exactly when it happened, but she knows the spring was approaching and Rosa was still in the house making her cinnamon toast and telling her about the world before Gilead. It was some time in that chaotic period that started with the arrival of the new Pearl Girl and ended with the revelation of her mother’s true identity.