Overview
- The Hulu/Disney+ sequel, set four years after The Handmaid’s Tale, has reached midseason with episodes centered on Aunt Lydia’s school for girls being prepared to become Wives.
- This week’s chapter highlights courtship rituals for the teens, with the show keeping Agnes’s marriage prospects unresolved, while the novel has her avoid marriage and begin training as an Aunt.
- Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia is presented as a gentler figure than before, and the actor has said the character is a changed person since the events of the original series.
- Showrunner Bruce Miller made one major shift from the book by recasting Daisy as a Canadian teen tied to the Mayday resistance so she can interact on screen with Agnes.
- Coverage also unpacks Gilead’s world-building, noting that Aunts select names derived from familiar pre-Gilead consumer brands, a tactic meant to make the regime’s new order feel reassuring to older women.