‘The Testaments’ Boss Explains Why Agnes Doesn’t Remember June & Luke

Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti) knows that her biological mother was a handmaid in The Testaments, and Gilead has taught her to be ashamed of that, but she also knows that she was born before Gilead. What she doesn’t seem to remember are any details about her life before the regime, including her own name and family. Agnes was old enough pre-Gilead to have childhood memories, so why are the memories gone?

We had the creator of The Testaments explain why Agnes doesn’t remember life before Gilead, and it turns out there was a lot of research into children in similarly traumatic scenarios. Warning: The Testaments spoilers ahead.

The Handmaid’s Tale viewers know that Agnes MacKenzie is really Hannah Bankole, the daughter of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) and Luke Bankole (O-T Fagbenle). Hannah was kidnapped by Gilead at a young age and adopted by Commander MacKenzie and his wife, Tabitha, who renamed her Agnes. Hannah has seen her mother, June, two times since she was taken. Now, June has escaped Gilead and is living in Toronto, Canada, with Hannah’s half-sister, Nichole. Her mom and dad are still involved with Mayday and trying to find her as of The Handmaid’s Tale series finale.

There were a lot of conversations behind the scenes about what Agnes remembers about her past, and how and why she would repress her childhood memories. Bruce Miller was the creator and showrunner of The Handmaid’s Tale before moving over to the same job on The Testaments. He explains Agnes’s faulty memory.

“The first thing you do is try to experience The Handmaid’s Tale through Hannah’s eyes from what you know,” Miller tells TV Insider. “And she has very little [memory of her past]. She’s seen her mom once, that she remembers, and then again, she sees her very later, but she’s a pregnant handmaid. She doesn’t even look like the same person.”

“I tried not to make assumptions” about her memory, Miller continues. “We did research. We talked to a ton of people who deal with children who go through these kinds of traumatic events, children who are taken from one parent forcibly and given to another parent, and what do they remember? And so all of this was based in not only terrible situations in the present, but terrible situations in the past when it happened to whole populations, and what did they remember?”

That research was used to imagine how this would look in Gilead. What they kept in mind was that Agnes would have no resources to revive her memories in this society, even if she realized she wanted or needed to.

“There was a lot of thought about how Gilead would do it,” Miller explains. “We tried to be down the middle of what she would remember and how she would remember it. But you’ve got to remember, Gilead has no therapy. There’s no way for her to access that stuff. There’s no way for her to talk about it with anybody. It fades away in a different way until someone brings it up. Even if you grew up in Florida for a couple of years until you were three, and then you’re in college, and you meet someone who grew up on the same block, you’ll remember it then, but you wouldn’t have remembered it any time in between, so it’s a little bit like that.”

The trauma of the forced separation would be enough for Agnes to repress her memories of her parents, but Miller feels there’s a dark layer to this that should be considered. Gilead would have a vested interest in making sure that these children don’t want to find their families.

“What we tried to do is keep it grounded in these people. And honestly, I thought they would drug the kids for years to make that all fade away,” Miller shares, adding, “That was something that was talked about by a lot of experts in that world, that there’s often some sort of long-term medicine that makes that stuff stick better.”

With June in The Testaments, will Agnes have reason to remember her biological parents?

The Testaments, Wednesdays, Hulu