THE TESTAMENTS – “Stadium” – As the Aunts sift through ancestry records to finalize matches, Agnes plots for her chance at love. Meanwhile, Lydia contemplates the choices that shaped her rise in Gilead. (Disney/Russ Martin)
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What an episode! In “Stadium”, we finally looked into Lydia’s backstory. We’d gotten a peek only once during the entire run of The Handmaid’s Tale, but now we know where Lydia’s journey to becoming Aunt Lydia truly began. No one was more surprised than your hosts to see that Commander Judd had been there since the beginning. For better or worse, Aunt Lydia became what she needed to become as her drive to live her life according to her “resolve” fell to survival mode. We think Aunt Lydia has secretly switched back to “resolve” mode, but time will tell.

Meanwhile, during the current timeline, the Aunts converged and created matches between the new greens and the eligible commanders. Think of how much harder the process must have been, given their lack of access to technology! By hand, the Aunts must manage not only the political impacts of their decisions, but the limited gene pool in Gilead’s reproducing population. I wonder how close the relations can get before they nix a match.

The Testaments

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