Is Season 5 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” setting Aunt Lydia up to join the resistance? According to Ann Dowd, the answer is yes.
“Lydia is tracking all of it,” Dowd recently told TheWrap of Lydia’s Season 5 story. “She’s alert. She’s aware. She’s smart. She knows how to get the job done, and she is patient.”
The answer won’t come as a shock to those who have read Margeret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel, which was published in 2019. “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.
When asked point blank if Lydia would be joining the resistance, Dowd was clear. “The answer to that question lies [in ‘The Testaments’]. Nobody does it better than Margaret Atwood.”
It wasn’t necessarily a given that the character would follow that path, especially considering not only had the show taken its own liberties beyond the ending of the original book, but there were also three seasons already released by the time the novel was even published.
In the first four seasons of the Hulu series, Ann Dowd’s character is a complicated woman who, despite her fierce desire to protect the women in her care, appears to put her loyalty to Gilead above all else. However, it seems like the tides might be shifting as the war between Gilead and the outside world brews.
While it’s been clear all along that Lydia wants the best for the Handmaids, some scenes in Season 5’s third episode allude to the idea that she might finally be realizing that those calling the shots in Gilead do not.
After Esther (McKenna Grace) poisons herself and Janine (Madeline Brewer) at the end of the second episode, an emotional Lydia slaps Esther as she lays unconscious in her hospital bed. She then moves to Janine’s room, where she prays to God and promises to “turn things around.”
Lydia’s roller coaster of emotions “made complete sense,” Dowd told TheWrap.
“I totally understood why she wanted to slap Esther. From Lydia’s point of view, Esther has always been a problem and Lydia did her best to take her back in and get her on a much better path, which Lydia would say is in her best interest,” she said. “It was written in the [script once Lydia slaps Esther that she feels immediate remorse. I think, as she continues into that night, she realizes, ‘I’m losing my way. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And she’s distraught, frankly.”
New episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale” stream Wednesdays on Hulu.
