‘The Testaments’.Credit : Disney/Steve Wilkie

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Testaments season 1, now streaming on Hulu.

NEED TO KNOW

The Testaments was renewed for season 2 ahead of the season 1 finale, which premiered on Wednesday, May 27
Showrunner Bruce Miller tells PEOPLE about his plans for the next installment and says the cast is “very eager to get back to work”
Rowan Blanchard, who plays Shunammite, also shares her hopes for season 2 after the “extremely traumatic” events of the season 1 finale

There’s a lot more to come in Gilead.

The Testaments was renewed for season 2 just before the season 1 finale premiered on Wednesday, May 27, but before the show had even aired, the writers’ room was hard at work on the next installment, showrunner Bruce Miller tells PEOPLE.

“We just want to be ahead of the game,” Miller says. Given how young the cast is, he says it’s also important that they don’t let too much time pass between seasons. “You can’t get too far behind,” he says. “Mattea is 19. We can’t be shooting season 3 when she’s 40.”

“And, of course, they’re so spectacular that you don’t want to sit on their schedule for the rest of time,” he says. “They’re all wonderful, and they’re very eager to get back to work.”

Miller confirms he has long-term plans for the story, which adapts Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel and follows Agnes (Chase Infiniti), her classmates and a newcomer, rebellious teen Daisy (Lucy Halliday), as they navigate being teen girls in Gilead. “I wouldn’t write a pilot if I couldn’t think of 200 stories, 200 things to happen,” he says.

Chase Infiniti, Mattea Conforti, Rowan Blanchard and Isolde Ardies in ‘The Testaments’.Disney/Russ Martin

“Because honestly, if you hit it out of the park and are the luckiest person in the world, then you’re screwed if you don’t have 200. At least I’m prepared for the best-case scenario.”

Even with all the ideas floating around in his head, Miller, who was also the showrunner on The Handmaid’s Tale, knows what the audience wants from the overall arc of the series. He says he’s “trying to be mindful, if I can, with something like this, to know it’s going to end well before so I can set it up and make it satisfying, because that, I feel like, is something I would like to do.”

His vision for The Testaments is roughly “30 to 40 episodes,” he explains. “Somewhere where I can kind of go, OK, I can figure out how to get to the end by there. I’m trying to be practical in the practical world of television — but as impractical as possible, which is also part of my job.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Lucy Halliday, Chase Infiniti and Rowan Blanchard in ‘The Testaments’.Steve Wilkie/Disney

For star Rowan Blanchard, who plays Shunammite, one of Agnes and Daisy’s peers, the dramatic way that season 1 ends — Becka (Mattea Conforti) killing her father, her mother taking the blame for the murder, and Agnes learning that June (Elisabeth Moss) is her birth mom — sets up an even more high-stakes season 2.

The season ends with a shot of Daisy, Agnes and Shunammite walking hand-in-hand through the school. Blanchard tells PEOPLE, “When we shot that, I had kind of assumed that in the meantime, offscreen, Agnes had told me what was happening and that there was a new, even closer intimacy formed.”

She says she’s “really curious” about how Shunammite “questioning Gilead” will look in season 2.

“I think she really wants to be pregnant and be a wife. I think that she doesn’t see anything wrong or oppressive about that, and she thinks the other girls are very strange for not wanting to do that,” Blanchard adds. “By the time the second season rolls around, I think that the circumstances of Becka’s father’s death and all of this extremely traumatic stuff happening at the school will maybe shift her perspective.”

Season 1 of The Testaments is streaming on Hulu.