Commitment
Season 1
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney
The second half of The Testaments’s first season is preoccupied with backstory. In “Stadium,” we watched Aunt Lydia take the horrifically short walk from disgruntled American schoolteacher to architect of an abusive patriarchal state. The answer to the question “How did Lydia get this way?” was anticlimactic because, on some level, she has always been herself. Self-righteous and self-important, priggish and nagging. In Gilead, she saw the worst of her personality enshrined as virtue.
This week, in “Commitment,” we dip back into Daisy’s half-formed prefrontal cortex to finish hearing the story that landed her in Lydia’s care. There have only been a few weeks between the end of her life as the beloved daughter of middle-class parents to her first days as a Pearl Girl. When we last left Daisy, in Canada, June told her to wait in an all-night diner for a Mayday handler to make contact. She dutifully stays put only to learn that the waitress who’s been refilling her coffee is the same person she’s been waiting for. Linda takes Daisy to a safe house, which — surprise! — belongs to Rita. After the role Rita played in the Handmaid’s Boston uprising, it’s a relief to see that Serena and Fred’s old Martha has evaded Gilead’s vengeful clutches. She’s living free and attending culinary school in Toronto.
The master plan is to get Daisy a new ID and smuggle her into Colombia, where she’ll be safe from the Eyes. Melanie and Neil set some money aside for their only daughter, just in case anything ever happened to them. In a deviation from Margaret Atwood’s novel that feels monumental to me — but much less so to everyone I’ve talked about it with — Rita confirms that Daisy’s birth parents died in Gilead. There are no other homes for Daisy to seek out. It’s Bogotá or bust.
But an increasingly defiant Daisy has another idea. She comes from a family of political agitators, and she wants to join the resistance, too. I was stunned to see how quickly Rita acquiesces to sending a grieving teen into a war zone but, before long, she’s helping Daisy memorize the details of her false identity. This Daisy ran away from her two dads, acquiring a rap sheet for petty theft along the way. She even gets a corny tattoo so that Gilead can polish her up like new. June, we’re told, has long wanted to infiltrate the Aunt Lydia School, and Daisy is a perfect candidate. She’s young — about the same age as June’s daughter in Gilead — and orphaned and likely infertile. In fact, Daisy lets slip that of all the girls she knows in insalubrious Toronto, only one has her period.
It’s Daisy’s hubris that Rita worries about more than her cover story. She wants to be taught self-defense, but the only defense in Gilead is to trust no one and lay low. She’s convinced she’ll run circles around the Plums, but they’re switched on in a way that Daisy has never needed to consider. Their composure, their vigilance. Mayday can dress Daisy up as a runaway and throw her in the path of proselytizing Pearl Girls, but there’s no shortcut to the self-discipline it takes to survive in Gilead. The more we learn about Daisy’s run-up to infiltration, the more unforgivable it seems that June and Rita let her go. At one point, Daisy even muses about what a bitching college essay she’ll extract from her experience as a teenage spy. She still believes that her life after Gilead will somehow be continuous with her life before it.
Daisy doesn’t have to spend too much time loitering in downtown Toronto before Gilead makes its move. “Do you know that God loves you?” a Pearl Girl asks her. It’s a helluva pickup line. Soon enough, Daisy is in the PG hotel room, freshly showered and scarfing down room service. She answers all their questions with dismissive jokes, which proves to them that she’s listening in the first place. Sitting on the bed in a clean white hotel robe, she’s already starting to resemble her future self. Before Daisy goes back to the streets, they form a prayer circle around her, which she finds unexpectedly moving. She’s already getting lost in the contradictions. These young girls have been brainwashed by a political movement that exists to disenfranchise them. And it’s true that they feel saved by God’s love. Slowly, so they can trust that it’s real, Daisy lets them win her over. But there’s no such thing as legal emigration to Gilead. When the Pearl Girls deliver a naive Daisy to the border, she’s greeted by guards — Garth included — who paint a much more terrifying picture of what it looks like to live under the light of God’s love.
The Green Girls, on the other hand, understand all too well that everything they’ve ever known is about to change, dramatically and irreversibly. When Agnes wakes up, Paula presents her matches: three old guys and no Garth. Commander Weston, who heads up the Eyes, is the most powerful among them, and, says Paula, the quickest pass to a comfortable life. He’s also included in the espionage dossier Daisy studies before leaving Canada, so we know things about Weston that even Paula might not be privy to. Before Gilead, he made a fortune in crypto, which tracks with the Silicon Valley to alt-right pipeline. More threateningly, back when there was a justice system, Weston had multiple TROs against him for domestic violence.
At school, Becka reveals that her matches include Commander Chapin, formerly doing business as Garth. Aunt Lydia listened to Agnes’s humble request last episode, and what she heard was a reprieve for Agnes’s friend. The established Maryland Commanders don’t want the prom-night drunk, but Garth doesn’t have the seniority to object. Agnes is stunned. She even pleads with Becka not to marry him, though her friend’s other choices would be a life in the Colonies or marrying the man who plied her with alcohol in the first place. “I want to jump off a cliff,” Becka insists despairingly.
Most of the action of “Commitment” — and there’s not much — is dedicated to interviews. Just as the Greens and their families interview their matches, the Eyes turn up unannounced at the Aunt Lydia School to interrogate the Pearl Girls, which means Weston is pulling double-duty. Shu overheard from her father that they’re investigating the Mayday attack on the Plum bus based on new intel recovered in Gilead’s failed attempt to retake Boston. Daisy is rightly panicked when she’s called to Commander Weston’s makeshift office to recite her made-up life story. The Eyes must have tossed the Pearl Girls dormitory, too, because Daisy’s pocket radio — the one she’s been hiding inside her bunkmate Thalia’s bed frame — is sitting on the desk.
Still, her reserves of bravado serve Daisy well. She tells Weston about running away with her boyfriend and, eventually, running into the arms of the Pearl Girls. After the interrogation, Agnes finds Daisy hyperventilating from relief that it’s over or, maybe, fear that it never will be. For as long as she’s alive in Gilead, this is what it will feel like. But there will be balms, too. Daisy had no one left to love in Canada, but here, she’s making friends again. Agnes invites her over after school.
A teenage girl’s bedroom is as unique as her fingerprint. Daisy tells Agnes that, in Toronto, hers was a constellation of band posters. There is more to music than that which can be played on the hammered dulcimer. There are empowering anthems and devastating love songs. I found myself wondering why any Gilead mother would let their daughter hang out with a Pearl Girl; Daisy’s a periscope into a world so much richer with possibility. But almost as soon as I had the thought, Agnes shows me that I got it wrong. The chaos of American life repels her. When Daisy tells Agnes about the thrill of choosing your own partner, even at the expense of heartbreak, the Green thinks it sounds more confusing than alluring. On the Gilead marriage market, “You don’t even need a personality,” Daisy cruelly quips to Agnes. Attraction is a function of parentage and looks and submissiveness.
Which isn’t to say Agnes has no interest in Before. Like Disney’s The Little Mermaid, she saves up the artifacts of that strange world and imagines what they could have been. Instead of dinglehoppers, Agnes has pens and keychains and even a crackpipe with a lovely rose inside. Given the chance, though, Daisy doesn’t tell Agnes the seedy reality of her treasure. That’s the upside of living in Gilead, isn’t it? Agnes doesn’t need to know about drugs or the countless other ways there are for the world to hurt you. God has loved her from the beginning.
Agnes’s own interviews go fairly well. Unlike the fathers of Hulda and Becka, Commander Mackenzie’s status means he doesn’t much need to peddle his pious and obedient daughter. Weston is Agnes’s second house visit, and he gamely asks Agnes if she might have any questions for him. She obliquely mentions his previous marriages, which somehow curdles an already tense atmosphere. Before Weston leaves, he tells Agnes that he lost his wife and baby in childbirth. The intimation seems to be that there might even be a human being hidden inside Daisy’s dossier.
After being chastised by Paula for her boldness, Agnes runs out to the garden, where she picks up Garth’s embering cigarette and brings it to her own lips. Not to smoke it, but to feel it. The Testaments spends too much time functioning like a dystopian procedural, but occasionally it offers up magic like this — a subtle and affecting metaphor for what human wanting feels like. “You know smoking’s not allowed, right?” Garth says when he catches Agnes. It’s an echo of her admonishment from an earlier episode, and it’s an excuse to talk to her when he has nothing to say. Agnes, on the cusp of being married away to a man who wants her for her father’s power, asks Garth if she has a personality. “I see it,” he tells her longingly. You don’t need to know much about the world of Before to feel its call.
By the end of “Commitment,” Daisy understands as well as Agnes that After is all there is. She starts the day trading stupid stories of their misspent youths with Thalia. When the episode ends, Thalia has been violently hauled away by the Eyes for betraying God and her sisters. Is it Daisy’s fault for hiding her radio in Thalia’s bed? Perhaps. How often have we seen June’s schemes ensnare unintended victims?
Or maybe it has nothing to do with Daisy. Maybe Thalia had come to Gilead under false pretenses and gotten caught. Another Pearl Girl wets herself when the Eyes come for Thalia. Is she just petrified, or is she Mayday, too? Daisy falls asleep that night reciting the same hushed prayer that the Pearl Girls invoked for her back in Toronto. It’s not the first time we’ve seen her susceptible to Gilead’s pull. In “Green Tea,” she spoke of the country’s beauty. She appreciates Agnes’s innocence, and, now, she’s flirting with its Godliness. She knows that Gilead is terrible, but if she lets her eyes go soft, she can see the other half of the picture, too, like an optical illusion. One second it’s the pretty young woman and the next it’s an old hag.
Before bed, Agnes adds Garth’s cigarette stub to her grab bag of mementos. The flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives. Evidence of who they were and what made them different. In voiceover, Daisy tells us that she misses looking up at billboards. The advertising infrastructure is still there in Gilead, but they paint them black, like censor bars across the tree line. It’s interesting that Daisy finds their absence so conspicuous — the pithy advertising slogans (no reading), the objectifying photos (no skin), the phone numbers for so many personal-injury lawyers (no justice system). Billboards strike me as an obvious metonym for our rampant consumerism, but maybe that, too, is only half the picture. If you let your eyes go soft and look at them again, you can see a symbol for the permission to want things in the first place.
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