Landing this week on Disney+ is the long awaited follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments. With Handmaid’s Tale driving force in front and behind the camera, Elizabeth Moss and television creator Bruce Miller, both in tow to lead this spinoff, though Moss’s June Osborne is no longer the focus of the show. This time around, the series adapts author Margaret Atwood’s follow up novel of the same name which follows a new group of girls under the watchful tutelage of Ann Dowd’s returning Aunt Lydia, now stationed at Gilead’s finishing school for the daughters of commanders and others of high standing.

The Purples (no red and white to be seen here) are girls that are of age to be married off, if they are blessed with the ‘gift’ of fertility in the form of getting a period, which is celebrated like the Fourth of July. The show introduces us to its protagonist, a Purple who also splits the series’ narration duties for the season – Agnes McKenzie (Chase Infiniti), a teen girl in Gilead who knows nothing of the world outside. Agnes is fully indoctrinated, desperate to impress her father (Nate Corddry) and Stepmother Jane (Amy Seimetz). Agnes develops  a small posse of friends at school which include Becka (Mattea Conforti) who is the first of the group to have their period and as such is in the process of becoming a Green, the color for those to marry  in the current wedding season. Hulda (Isolde Arides) is an affable girl who tags along just clamoring to be liked while Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard) comes off as tough as steel, your typical ‘cut a bitch’ type, but remains fiercely loyal to her friends.

Into their group is dropped a ‘Pearl Girl’ Daisy (Lucy Halliday), an outsider from outside Gilead that has been recruited from her native Toronto. The Purples inherently distrust the Pearl Girls due to their wild and unfettered background, but must learn to get along and interact with Daisy due to Aunt Lydia directly assigning Agnes as her guide. The girls slowly start to develop a modicum of trust between them as they deal with the daily dramas within the school walls. They also deal with the Aunts; strict discipline and oversight, the most overbearing of them being Aunt Vidala (Mabel Li). But by the end of the first episode, we start to believe that there may be another reason for Daisy’s sudden appearance.

The Testaments manages to pull off what many other shows have struggled to do, dedicate a show towards the lives of teenage girls uniquely. This thankfully doesn’t devolve into a CW style melodrama. While infinitely less violent than its predecessor, there are many times in The Testaments when we see the lead up and/or the aftermath of violence without actually seeing the violence onscreen.  This manages to punctuate the times that bold faced violence appears on screen, giving it a more impactful result. The script also smartly devises ways for the audience to relate with the girls through its storytelling and dialogue, like when Daisy lets her ‘Toronto-Side’ slip out during high stress moments.  Unlike the Handmaids, the audience feels the impact of the patriarchal society on the Purples more because of their age and the clear signs of coercion and manipulation that’s clear as day for the audience but completely lost on the girls. The girls have never known any different, until Daisy comes along.

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The action is few and far between here – this is more engrained in the political side of Gilead than anything else. Its all about maintaining and furthering social standing. But that doesn’t mean there is no tension involved as the set pieces set in place through the season are rife with it. The episode surrounding a very different type of prom is a prime example as what is traditionally a night of frivolity and rejoicing is replaced with what is basically a dog and pony show to display greens with potential suitors, no matter what the age difference may be. And perhaps my favorite episode of the series, simply titled’ Stadium’, is the only episode not narrated by Agnes or Daisy, but Aunt Lydia herself and it shows the circumstances behind her entry into Gilead. It’s a tense and violent episode with a smart script and great performance from Dowd. It’s also a prime example of the stellar set design of this entire season.

The casting here is excellent as well. Infiniti is solid as our lead Agnes, and perhaps the most recognizable of the group after her appearance in Oscar winner One Battle After Another last year. Halliday’s Daisy is perhaps the more showier role, and the relative newcomer (she was excellent in last year’s TIFF entry California Schemin’ though) handles it with aplomb. Her work is what eventually grounds the show and allows for more perspective as we can see what she has given up to now be in Gilead. But the scene stealer here is Blanchard. The Girl Meets World alum is snarky, devious and fiercely loyal all at once and became one of my favorite characters. Of the rest of the cast here, I must also solo out the contributions of Mabel Li as her Vidala could have been a one dimensional caricature, but she fiercely does not allow it.

Deftly managing to steer clear of typical YA waffle, The Testaments manages to keep an undercurrent of danger and distress just below the surface at all times. It’s palpable enough to be a secondary character. And with an ending that clearly establishes that there will be a follow up season to come, which is apparently already in pre-production, there seems to be more legs to this story than what we have seen so far. Which clearly shows that Gilead isn’t all just red and white after all.