Green Tea
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
This week, The Testaments dares to ask, what would it be like if A Handmaid’s Tale were more like Bridgerton?
Photo: Russ Martin/Disney
We learn in “Green Tea” that the Aunts do more than morally instruct Gilead’s favorite daughters until they get their periods. They’re also involved in making matches for the blossoming young “women,” many of whom are surely child brides. This week, The Testaments dares to ask, what would it be like if A Handmaid’s Tale were more like Bridgerton? The answer is kinda boring. The eligible Greens co-host an afternoon tea to win the favor of the Aunts, who control the marriage market. The most dramatic thing that happens is that someone spills some tea. Not the fun kind — just actual oolong.
In voiceover, Daisy informs us that there has been extra security since last episode’s attack on the Plum bus. The Aunts are escorted to Commander and Mrs. MacKenzie’s suburban manor, where the party will be held, by bomb-sniffing dogs and armored vehicles. Testaments, like Handmaid’s before it, can’t resist an ironic juxtaposition. In this case, a genteel woman’s tradition is set against the sound of military helicopters whirring overhead.
For whatever reason, it’s still deemed safe for the girls — and their new mascot, Daisy — to walk the distance to Agnes’s house, where their mothers are waiting to remind the Greens just how crucial this day is for some of them. Power begets power in Gilead. Agnes’s Martha can oversteep the Earl Grey she serves, and she’ll still secure a good match because her dad is a big deal around here. But Becka’s (pervy) father, Dr. Grove, cleans all the other dads’ teeth for a living; she needs to brew the perfect pot or else live out her years in the Colonies.
The Aunts have been babysitting these girls for a decade. Realistically, they already know who is suited to the pressures of being a Commander’s Wife and who is better suited to domestic drudgery. But Gilead mothers are helicopter moms. Paula makes sure that their hall table is set with the preposterous gifts — exotic fruits, rare cuts of meat — that Agnes has received from potential suitors. Jehosheba’s mother has her daughter recite an ingratiating thank-you speech to the Aunts. There’s also endless picking. Paula tells Agnes that her hair is too frizzy. Later, when her stepdaughter cracks a back tooth on a ceramic bride figurine hidden in a slice of cake, she reacts as though Agnes has metamorphosed into a monster. For what it’s worth, receiving the slice of cake with the tiny bride inside is supposed to improve a girl’s prospects. (Not entirely unlike being named the Queen’s “diamond” on Bridgerton.)
The day goes smoothly for almost everyone. Cups are poured with precision; milk and sugar are stirred with a silent spoon. The Aunts, for their part, seem to be taking earnest notes throughout the performance. Before long, it’s time for the Greens to take a final curtsy at Lydia’s head table. It should be simple. These girls have not been taught much at this woman’s school, but they know how to walk from place to place. Like a cartoon villain, though, Paula kicks up the edge of the carpet, which causes poor Miriam to make a dog’s dinner of afternoon tea. She even dribbles a little brew on the floor.
Back in the kitchen, the Plums and Greens all huddle around a sobbing Miriam to offer their support. This is how precarious it feels to become an adult in Gilead. “Womanhood is a lifelong test,” Paula told her stepdaughter in a previous episode. I thought she was being metaphorical, but in this place, the tests are real. If Miriam ends up the Wife of a man in a distant Colony, where I doubt they even keep bone china teacups, she’ll think about this moment and blame herself.
What’s more striking about the kitchen scene, though, is Daisy’s initially callous reaction. She can’t believe that these foolish girls could care so much about a tea party. We watch as Daisy comes to understand that Plums are people, too — that they worry about their futures as much as teenage girls in Canada do. Daisy is young, of course, but it’s hard to understand why she’s risked her life to come to Gilead if she doesn’t yet have a sense of the girls she’s here to help as real people. Mayday is a liberation movement. Women’s rights are human rights.
Then again, Daisy’s decision to go undercover may not have been that well considered. The Guardians have responded to the bus attack by publicly executing suspected Mayday spies. It’s not just that Daisy is spooked by this. She seems to be confronting seriously for the first time that what she’s doing is dangerous — that an undercover agent is more likely to live and die in Gilead than be successfully exfiltrated before the revolution comes, assuming it comes at all.
Panicked at the sight of dead bodies hanging from bridge trusses, Daisy goes to Garth again. She wants to know what she needs to do to secure an early dismissal from her post. Garth reluctantly tells her that her best shot is to prove to Mayday that she’s worth the trouble. On both sides of the war for Gilead, usefulness is next to Godliness. Daisy has already delivered a map of Aunt Lydia School. And she’s getting good at reading between the lines of her classmates’ random moaning. For example, when Jehosheba complains that her Martha slacks off when her dad is out of town, Daisy infers that the Commander made a visit to the Colonies.
Determined to spy her way out of Gilead, Daisy uses the tea party as a chance to snoop around Commander MacKenzie’s study. The choice is as ballsy as it is misguided — the Commander is sitting in the corner when Daisy enters. Still, spygirl keeps her cool. When she tells him that she was lured into the room by the bowl of chocolates sitting on his desk, he even gives her one. When Agnes was a little girl, he used to bring her sweeties back from business trips. It’s a weird time of life to be a father in this place. Having successfully raised a daughter to the threshold of womanhood, his usefulness is up.
Ever the dutiful Pearl Girl, Daisy takes Agnes to the dentist to have her tooth fixed. I yelled at the TV for her to accompany her obviously wary friend into the examination room, but Daisy chalks Agnes’s hesitation up to age-old, cross-cultural dentophobia. It’s a fair assumption, but it did call to mind something Daisy confesses at the top of the episode. Gilead is so beautiful that she sometimes forgets where she is. Daisy objects to Gilead in every important way, and yet there’s a naivete about her understanding of the place. An assumption that, despite its reprehensibility, it’s working on its own professed terms. There’s no need for a friend of a dental hygienist to stay in the room with a sedated underage female patient in a world that has total respect for women.
While Agnes is with Dr. Grove, Daisy hands Garth two new pieces of intel. The first is that Agnes is in love with him, which surprises him despite the numerous occasions he’s gone out of his way to attract her attention. Is he developing her as an asset? Does he have a crush of his own? The second is the wrapper from Commander MacKenzie’s chocolate bar, which bears Japanese writing on the label. Japan is supposed to be neutral, Garth says, stunned at Daisy’s discovery. It’s called espionage, babe. Look it up.
When Agnes and Daisy arrive back home, Paula is outside pacing for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Are Commander MacKenzie’s daughter’s marriage prospects really to be undone by a crumbly molar? “It’s not your fault that you come from weak genes,” Paula tells Agnes. No, it’s probably because the anti-vaxxers who run Gilead removed fluoride from the water supply. Then she adds, for no reason at all, “That’s where that rebellious streak comes from.”
Daisy asks Agnes what Paula means by the dig, but Agnes tells her that it’s considered impolite to talk about birth mothers in Gilead. The Pearl Girl guidebook is more focused on rules than mores, I guess. But Daisy doesn’t take heed. She tells Agnes that her own adoptive mom died, like Tabitha did. She also mentions that her own birth mother died in Gilead, which is new information to us. It’s a compelling moment between the girls, who are tentatively revealing themselves to each other. If Agnes had warned Daisy that it was rude to talk about mothers a few episodes ago, her reply would have been, “I’m sorry, Miss Agnes.” Now she’s out here swapping genealogies and breaking down cultural taboos.
On the drive back to her dormitory, Daisy sees that the florist’s shop has been ransacked. The florist was Mayday, too, but when the Guardians came to question her, she tried to run for it and ended up on the Wall. Gilead killed her, but panic was the real cause of death. If she can learn anything from the Plums, Daisy realizes, it’s how to affect the perfect, serene exterior. How to push it all down and bottle it up until the tea party is over.
Easier said than done. Daisy’s in the dormitory bathroom listening to her transistor radio when the Boston station she prefers stops broadcasting mid-sentence. It was her only link to the world beyond Gilead. No, it was her only assurance that the world beyond Gilead continued to exist. She ends “Green Tea” clapping her hands over her own mouth, desperate to muffle her sobs.
Agnes, too, finds herself in a state of shock at the end of the episode. As she takes off her dress at the end of the long day, she notices that one of the tie closures of her undergarment is undone. What else could Dr. Grove have done to her in the time it takes to fix a tooth? Looked at her? Touched her? Agnes gasps for breath as her imagination plays out terrible scenarios that she’s never been given words for. She literally doesn’t know the worst that could have happened, but by the look on her face, there’s little solace in that ignorance.
Agnes has waited her whole life to get her period. Told that if she were a good girl, God would bless her as a Wife and a mother. But, like Daisy, she’s taken for granted that the world she lives in is working on its own terms. That the men whose Wife she might some day be are good, too. That they’ll honor and respect her goodness for its Godliness. “You don’t need to be worried,” she says early in the episode, as Daisy gawks at the dead Mayday bodies. The more bodies you see, the safer Gilead is. “The Eyes will always find them,” she tells her new friend at the time, but suddenly the young woman is alert to new dangers: ones that come from inside the safest country on earth to be a little girl.
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