What ‘The Testaments’ Is Really Doing To Hulda Is Bleaker Than Her Bright Smile Suggests

Hulda has emerged as one of the most quietly devastating figures in ‘The Testaments’, and viewers asking what actually happens to her on Hulu’s sequel series have good reason to feel uneasy. The wide-eyed Plum has gone from grinning hopefully about her future husband to becoming a tool of Gilead’s punishment system, all within the span of a few episodes.

Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel barely lingers on the character, but the Hulu adaptation has quietly built one of the season’s most affecting subplots around her. The further the story moves, the more it feels like Hulda is being primed for a fall.

Who Hulda Is In Atwood’s Sequel Novel

Before Hulu’s adaptation reshaped her, Hulda existed as a small but specific figure in Atwood’s 2019 follow-up novel. She is a Daughter who was a classmate to Agnes when she was growing up, with Atwood marking her through a single quirky physical detail. Agnes describes Huldah as having a squint.

The character’s name itself is a religious flourish baked deep into Gilead’s worldbuilding. Huldah is one of the seven prophetesses in the Bible, with the original Old Testament figure consulted by King Josiah’s emissaries about the eventual fall of Jerusalem. Atwood routinely pulls names from scripture for her Daughters of Gilead, and Hulda’s biblical counterpart spoke pointed truths to powerful men.

Inside the novel itself, however, the character never gets a major arc. The Testaments is written from three alternating viewpoints, those of Aunt Lydia, Agnes Jemima and Daisy, with the women each offering us their personal account of what’s happened. The schoolyard girls who orbit Agnes mostly serve as texture rather than central characters in Atwood’s prose.

That left the Hulu showrunners with room to expand. When the series picked Hulda up off the page, she was less a finished story and more a sketch waiting to be filled in.

Hulda’s Coming Of Age Sets The Tone In ‘The Testaments’

The TV adaptation has handed Hulda a much bigger seat at the table. Isolde Ardies plays Huldah, a guileless and optimistic young “Plum” who is eagerly anticipating her coming-of-age and future womanhood within Gilead’s traditions. That description matters because the show uses her brightness to underline how thoroughly the regime has scripted these girls’ inner lives.

In the early episodes, Hulda is part of Agnes’s orbit alongside Becka and Shunammite. During lunch, Hulda, Shunammite, and Agnes chat about boys and Commanders while the camera tracks how each girl is being prepared for marriage. Where Agnes is conflicted and Becka is panicked, Hulda is the one looking forward to the life she has been promised.

That eagerness becomes the engine of her plotline. By Episode 5, titled ‘Ball’, the Greens are dancing with their fathers and future husbands while Hulda is still a Plum stuck in the dressing room. Tucked away in a corner, Shunammite produces a mason jar of homemade herbal tea, a recipe from her cousin, and begrudgingly shares it with Hulda, with both girls hoping it will jump-start their periods.

By the end of that hour, the tea has done its work. Hulda got her period, and she joyfully kneels before Vidala, while a stunned Shunammite is left behind as the only Plum without a place at the marriage table.

How Hulda’s Storyline Curdles In The Sequel Series

The Hulu series wastes no time twisting that triumph into something sour. Vidala certifies that Hulda did, indeed, reach menarche. In typical Gilead fashion, there’s a humiliating special seat made just for the occasion. Within the same hour, the consequences of growing up land on her shoulders in the most chilling way possible.

Aunt Vidala decides that Hulda’s first job as an adult will be to choose what happens to a girl who uses violence against another, with the target being Shunammite, who had slapped Jehosheba in a previous episode. Even though Hulda is vehemently against her good friend being bound and whipped for her transgression, Vidala makes her hold Shu’s arms down while Shu is punished. Hulda is the one who has to hold her wrists down while Vidala strikes her.

It is a brutal piece of writing, because the show frames Hulda’s coming-of-age not as freedom but as conscription. Her reward for the body she so desperately wanted is being made to inflict pain on someone she loves. The earlier softness of her character makes the moment land harder, with Hulda’s bright optimism colliding head-on with Gilead’s appetite for cruelty.

By Episode 7, ‘Commitment’, the character has been folded fully into the marriage market. Hulda tells the table about her matches, a commander with beachfront property and another with a 10 handicap in golf, while Becka quietly absorbs the news that Garth has been paired with her instead of Agnes.

Where Hulda’s Fate Is Heading As ‘The Testaments’ Wraps Its Season

The first season then steers her into an even darker corner. As Agnes is swept up in wedding plans, Daisy hides a life-altering secret, and Hulda faces backlash after speaking out, according to the Hulu synopsis for Episode 8, titled ‘Broken’.

That single sentence reframes everything the audience has watched her do. The most loyal of the Plums, the one who literally knelt in gratitude when her body cooperated with the regime, is the same girl the show is now positioning to push back. Whether her dissent unfolds quietly inside Ardua Hall or spills into something more public, Gilead’s track record with disobedient girls is not encouraging.

Fans have already noticed something is up. OK Magazine has reported that viewers are convinced they know Hulda’s fate after spotting a chilling clue, with the discourse around her arc turning into one of the season’s most discussed character beats online. The conversation has grown loud enough that a footnote from Atwood’s novel is now functioning as a barometer for how cruel the show is willing to be.

The series holds an 88% approval rating based on 51 critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and Hulda’s road to whatever waits in the finale will hinge on how much of that bright girl Gilead leaves behind. Atwood’s sequel ends with the regime cracking from within, and characters like Hulda are exactly the pressure points where those cracks tend to form.

If you have been watching Hulda’s slow erosion in real time, what do you make of the speaking out tease in the Episode 8 synopsis, and is there any version of Gilead that lets a girl this hopeful survive what is coming next?