Lydia turns out to be the mastermind of Gilead's destruction: She's long served as a source for Mayday in Canada, readers discover, and it was she who crafted the plan to smuggle damaging information out of the country in order to ultimately weaken the Gilead regime's leadership.
“The Testaments” is set 15 years after the events of the first book (which ends nearly beat-for-beat the way Season 1 of the series does). In the story, we learn that Lydia had a direct hand in the fall of Gilead, supplying critical information to to the resistance organization Mayday.
Despite knowing that she would have to participate in an execution of other women, Aunt Lydia decided to do whatever necessary to survive and take down Gilead from within. Alongside three other women—Elizabeth, Helena, and Vidala—she became one of the Founders of the Aunts.
4) Aunt Lydia
Secondary to Fred Waterford, the following prominent villain in the series is Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), the head of the handmaid system in charge of indoctrination and discipline.
Though no longer officially a judge, Aunt Lydia continues to administer justice in whatever ways she can. She also uses her power to gather evidence against Gilead's authorities and to plot the regime's downfall from within.
Aunt Lydia's asserts that Handmaids should always use the front door as befits their honored status. This subtly indoctrinates the Handmaids into thinking their lives are better and more worthwhile than before, one of many examples of Aunt Lydia's master manipulation.
The childbirth scene is primal and intimate and prompts the women to confess their secrets: June tells Serena that she didn't kill her when she had the chance because she simply didn't want to, and Serena realizes she has been forced into essentially being a handmaid in the Wheelers house and begs June to take her baby ...
Lydia sees Janine as a good girl who is unfairly judged and misunderstood. This is the first inclination of a softening heart that audiences preview for Aunt Lydia.
After publicly beating Janine, Lydia excuses herself from the company of the commanders, their wives and all the other witnesses in attendance. Alone in a quiet corner of the Putnam household, Lydia cries to herself, overwhelmed with the enormity of her own actions.
It drives her to report Noelle to authorities for being an unfit mother—a decision that spurs Ryan to be separated from her. Dowd, though, doesn't think Lydia herself understands that her sexual rejection and her sudden desire to shield Ryan from Noelle might be connected. “She just thinks, I gave her too many chances.
But what's the cause? In The Handmaid's Tale, infertility is linked to another one of Gilead's prominent problems: pollution. As revealed in the season 1 episode "A Woman's Place," inorganic farming and radioactivity are to blame for declining fertility.
The highest ranking in Gilead, the Sons of Jacob amassed power through terrorist acts, and some members form a 'Committee', who oversee the theocratic reign.
Daniel O'Day. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Gilead Sciences, Inc.
She was detained, tortured, deprived of food, light, and answers, and eventually given a choice: Cooperate or face the consequences. Lydia sees herself as someone who did what she had to do in order to survive. Eventually, she becomes integral to the fall of Gilead.
In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale novels, Gilead does eventually fall, but the timeline would have to be majorly disrupted if this were to be in the show. The Handmaid's Tale season 6 will be the final installment of the Hulu series, but in Atwood's books, it takes Gilead 20 years to collapse.
Merciless Matriarch As an Aunt, Aunt Lydia adopts a semi-maternal role and cares for the Handmaids while they're at the Red Centre. Despite this, she is also merciless, and often uses her position of power to inflict harm on the Handmaids.
Despite seeming to be a true believer at the start of the story (at least in June's eyes, indicating that she might not always be a reliable narrator), Lydia is actually a part of Mayday, working against Gilead in the long game.
Three bells, that is a death knell in The Handmaid's Tale (Channel 4). There is to be an execution today, or a “salvaging”, as they call it in Gilead. The handmaids gather in the snow, and kneel when instructed to by Aunt Lydia (so good by Ann Dowd).
In secret, Aunt Lydia despises Gilead and becomes a mole supplying critical information to the Mayday resistance organization.
After Janine becomes a Handmaid, she takes the name Ofwarren. She has a baby, which makes her the envy of all the other Handmaids in the area, but the baby later turns out to be deformed—an “Unbaby”—and there are rumors that her doctor fathered the child.
Obsessed. June is having a restless night and thinks about Serena, prompting her to bury her gun under a tree. During a game night with Luke, Moira, and Rita, she spots the Scrabble box and flashes back to when she played with Fred. But again, Serena comes back in mind.
She was raped and her children were taken away from her, as is the practice for handmaids in Gilead, but she was also told the rape was her fault, she had her eye plucked out in an attempt at Biblical justice, she suffered breakdowns, and most recently, she was poisoned by a young handmaid she took under her wing ( ...
Williams and Alexis Ohanian shared their pregnancy publicly at the Met Gala. Serena Williams announced her second pregnancy publicly at the 2023 Met Gala. Now, she is sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how she and her husband Alexis Ohanian told their daughter, Olympia.
Noah Waterford is a character in The Handmaid's Tale. He is the son of Serena Waterford and Fred Waterford.
Serena Helped Create Gilead
It is important to note that Serena did not come up with the handmaid system itself or any other of Gilead's social stratifications, merely the idea that if women shifted their priority to making a home rather than working, as a solution to the declining birth rates in America.