The Testaments reaches episode eight with “Broken,” and the hour leans hard into its connection to The Handmaid’s Tale. Two major events from the earlier series are referenced, including one that happened in season three, as the spinoff brings its own story into sharper focus.
The episode centers on the eligible Greens — Agnes, Becka and Hulda — as Agnes pines for Garth, who is engaged to Becka. At the same time, Shunammite has not gotten her period yet, and she and Daisy are excluded from copulation class. The title lands like a warning: in this world, growing up is never only about age. It is about what the system decides a girl is ready for, and what it withholds when she is not.
Daisy’s first period arrives in “Broken,” a moment complicated by the fact that she is also an undercover Mayday agent with no access to tampons or pads. She is forced to dress entirely in stark white Pearl Girl outfits, a detail that makes the episode’s control over her body impossible to miss. Shu then reveals that his little brother was one of the 68 taken on the Night of Tears, a term Daisy knows as “Angel’s Flight,” tying the hour back to the wider history of Gilead in a way that is both personal and brutal.
The show has been careful to operate as much as it can as a standalone from The Handmaid’s Tale, but “Broken” is a reminder that separation is not the same as independence. Watching the earlier series gives more understanding of what is happening here, especially when the new story reaches back to old wounds. Agnes’s complaint that “our education was left wanting” fits the hour’s central idea: these girls are being shaped by a system that teaches them little, asks everything of them and treats their bodies as proof of obedience.
That tension is sharpest in Shunammite, who keeps insisting, “I’ve done everything that I’m supposed to,” and “I can’t let my parents down,” before she adds that she “can’t be barren… she doesn’t deserve that.” Her fear is not abstract; it is social, familial and immediate. When Shunammite later calls Daisy “You lucky slut,” the line cuts through the ceremony and shame with plain cruelty, underscoring how quickly privilege and panic can turn into contempt in this world.
“Broken” does more than connect The Testaments to The Handmaid’s Tale. It shows why the earlier story still matters inside the newer one: the old atrocities are not backstory, they are the machinery still turning beneath the surface. This episode answers the question of whether the spinoff can stand apart on its own. It can, but not by forgetting what came before.
