Warning! This article CONTAINS spoilers for The Handmaid's Tale season 5, episode 9 "Allegiance," future episodes, and Margaret Atwood's book The Testaments! Commander Joseph Lawrence just teased Hannah's book fate by telling June that she's never leaving Gilead, basically setting up her Testaments story in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale. Two years away from being shipped off as a child bride, 10-year-old Hannah (Jordana Blake) resides at a Gileadan wives school under the tutelage of Aunts teaching them how to manage a household. With the knowledge that their poor baby is going to be married soon, June (Elisabeth Moss) and Luke (O-T Fagbenle) are desperate, now more than ever, to reunite with their daughter, Hannah Bankole (known as Agnes MacKenzie in Gilead.)
Based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, Hulu's screen adaptation has flowed beyond its original source material and is slowly weaving some storylines from the 2019 book sequel called The Testaments. Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale is set to end with its sixth and final season which makes it safe to assume that The Testaments won't be covered in its entirety. But that doesn't mean that the show won't allude to its existence, especially with it dropping references in The Handmaid's Tale season 5, episode 9 (Hannah writing her real name illegally and Commander Lawrence guaranteeing she's never leaving Gilead), begging to question: what really happens to Hannah and will she ever reunite with her real parents?
What Happens To Hannah In The Testaments
Much like the Hannah in The Handmaid's Tale show, Agnes Jemima (Hannah's book counterpart in The Testaments) attends an elite Gilead preparatory school (essentially similar to The Handmaid's Tale's wives school) reserved for Commanders' daughters. In The Testaments, Agnes shares a loving relationship with her adoptive parents, Commander Kyle, and his wife, Tabitha. Things change when she learns about pregnancy and reproduction, she confronts Tabitha regarding her origins and discovers that she's actually a handmaid's daughter (speculated as The Handmaid's Tale's June Osborne). When Tabitha dies, Commander Kyle marries Paula Saunders, a widow who hates Agnes and arranges her marriage to Commander Judd to get rid of her. With marriage always being an anxiety-inducing topic for Agnes, she escapes her looming nuptials by entering as a Supplicant in Ardua Hall. There, she's taught how to become an Aunt, an elite class of women in-charge of indoctrinating handmaids and other disciplinary jobs.
Agnes is educated as a Supplicant for nine years, schooled on reading and writing (something that is outlawed for all classes of women except Aunts). Given Agnes’s status as Aunt Victoria, she has access to highly classified documents. But it's only when an anonymous sender (later revealed as Ann Dowd's Aunt Lydia) provides her files of Gilead’s corruption and human rights violations that she fully entangles herself in a plot to overthrow the government from the inside. Later, Agnes is promoted to Pearl Girl, a missionary traveling to neighboring countries to spread Gilead’s good work. But instead of bringing in female immigrants to Gilead, Agnes successfully smuggles highly incriminating information to Canada with her half-sister, Daisy/Jade (the famous Baby Nichole).
What Agnes Writing Her Name As "Hannah" Could Mean For The Testaments
Despite Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale deriving its storylines from Atwood's novels, they aren't as specific with its characters as in the show. For one thing, Offred's real name isn't confirmed to be June Osborne nor was it ever revealed; similar to Agnes Jemima never really knowing her pre-Gilead name in the books. Deviating from The Testaments' Agnes Jemima's lack of memories, Hannah writing her real name changes her book motivation for joining the Aunts. Because rather than being deathly afraid of Gileadan marriage and the abuse that comes with it, The Handmaid's Tale tweaking Hannah's character gravely shifts her Supplicant journey from a convenient escape into a deliberate decision to gain information about her biological parents. And while the Testaments does (eventually) reunite Agnes Jemima and Daisy with their birth mother in Canada, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale won't be doing that anytime soon.