The first three episodes of The Testaments are now streaming on Hulu, opening a 10-episode first season that returns to Gilead four years after the Handmaid’s Tale series finale. The new chapter puts June Osborne’s fight back on the screen through a new protégée, Daisy, a Toronto teen pulled into the same struggle after her parents were killed by Gilead agents for working with Mayday.
Daisy enters Gilead as a Pearl Girl at Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory academy and quickly comes face-to-face with Agnes McKenzie, the Gilead name for June and Luke’s daughter Hannah. Agnes is introduced as a plum who will soon be eligible for marriage, and that collision gives the series its immediate charge: two young women on opposite sides of the regime, each marked by what Gilead has taken from them.
Bruce Miller adapted the series from Margaret Atwood’s sequel novel The Testaments, which was published in 2019 and is set 15 years after her Handmaid’s Tale novel. Miller said last July, while discussing the adaptation on the Toronto set, that he was not necessarily taking the story in the order it appears in the book. He said he was trying to keep the book’s central elements while moving them into a timeline that made practical sense, because the characters are different ages and Daisy had to be redefined to fit the show’s world.
That compression matters because the television version is not following Atwood’s chronology piece for piece. The sequel series picks up after June vowed to keep working underground to bring down Gilead at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, but it arrives with a shorter clock and a more immediate confrontation between Daisy and Agnes. The first three episodes are available now; the rest of the season is still behind the streamer’s rollout, leaving the show’s next moves to unfold one week at a time in the airless logic of Gilead.
