The Testaments
Marat Sade
Season 1
Episode 9
Editor’s Rating
Gilead’s punitive culture has rubbed off on Daisy, who is hell-bent on taking matters into her own hands.
Photo: Steve Wilkie/Disney
Gileadean justice — forgive the oxymoron — operates on an Old Testament commitment to retributivism. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The guilty will be punished in proportion to their offences by the Aunts here on earth and then go on to burn in hell for the rest of eternity, God willing. It’s Draconian and reactionary, but it operates on simple playground logic, which is why young Plums find it so intoxicating. Bad people who do bad things get bad outcomes. Good people make sure that happens.
Daisy returns to the driver’s seat in “Marat Sade.” All season long, I’ve questioned whether she’s too grief-stricken and impressionable to be undercover, and this week she proves it beyond a doubt. She came to Gilead vengeful, and in Gilead, she’s been exposed to a justice system that indulges her heroic fantasies. Her mother, Mel, warned that “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”; Gilead has left Daisy questioning why that’s even a problem.
Consequently, after Lydia fails to protect the Greens from Dr. Grove’s predation, the Pearl Girl throws herself — righteously and recklessly — into his dangerous path. She rings the big bell that she’s been avoiding for weeks and marches proudly into the schoolyard to reveal herself. Daisy doesn’t quite have the whole “Rebecca and Leah” prayer memorized, and midway through the recitation, she gives up: “I got my period,” she blurts in the faces of the elated Aunts. It’s almost cute.
The next morning at school, Estee invites the existing Plums to give Daisy a purple makeover. Becka, more fearful than ever that Daisy will permanently steal Agnes from her, intentionally sticks Daisy with a pin — the emblem of Daisy’s eligibility for marriage (not to mention Becka’s first taste of blood). Now that she’s in the right clothes, it’s time for a dental checkup, Estee announces. I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but the very short line between getting one’s period and getting one’s teeth cleaned on Testaments is bizarre. Agnes bravely offers to accompany little orphan Daisy back to the scene of her own assault, and the girls lock pinkies in the waiting room, bracing for an attack that feels inevitable.
Except Dr. Grove doesn’t take the bait. Maybe he’s turned off by “foreign girls,” the pearl stud still lodged in Daisy’s tragus; maybe he doesn’t trust them to be good enough to keep his bad secrets. But that’s no obstacle for Daisy the super-spy. She takes things into her own hands, ripping the strap of her own pinafore and simulating panicked breathing. She bursts into the waiting room, screaming in fear and praying for mercy, where Agnes, Estee, and the Guardians can see. Later, when Vidala suggests — as she previously did to Hulda — that she could have misinterpreted the dentist’s actions, Daisy refuses to get back in line.
Why does she do it? According to the explanation Daisy gives Garth, she’s protecting the Plums where the Aunts failed them. In voice-over, she waxes poetic about catching the punitive spirit. But if she thought outing Grove would bring Agnes closer, then she critically misjudged the situation. Pearl Girls come to Gilead for organic food and clean water — to get a husband, have a child, and live in a nice house. Daisy just endangered all that. How can Agnes trust a Pearl Girl with no sense of self-preservation?
There are no B or C plots to “Marat Sade.” We follow Dr. Grove’s story line from Daisy’s specious allegations to his grisly end, which he hastens unwittingly. Commander Judd and Aunt Lydia conspire to delay Grove’s punishment until Becka is safely married into the Chapin family, where she’ll be insulated from her father’s disgrace. But Grove — unaware that Hulda and Agnes have already gone to the Aunts — decides the best defense is a good offense. He goes home and tells his wife and Becka that Daisy is lying; Daisy is unstable. Is Gilead really going to trust a misfit Pearl Girl over the man who looked after their pearly whites?
The next day at school is explosive. Becka attacks Daisy; Agnes pulls Becka off her new friend. (The fisticuffs attracts the lingering stares of the entire student body, which gives Shu occasion to utter the one real punch line of the entire episode: “Sketch us, it’ll last longer.”) Outside on the school veranda, Becka is incensed to hear Agnes take Daisy’s side over the side of her best friend. The girls tremble as Agnes confides the painful truth. She’s not taking Daisy’s side. She’s been in Daisy’s (made-up) place. This episode is the sum of its performances, and watching these two actors’ faces crumble — mirror images of pain and bewilderment — is its most lasting impression. At the dinner table that night, Becka will ask her father if the accusations are true and see through his slyly crafted, highly specific response: “I didn’t lay a finger on that Pearl Girl.”
As the episode opens, Daisy and her fellow converts are mopping blood from the floor at the Aunt Lydia School. Gileadean justice isn’t just retributive — it’s savage. And it’s the women and girls who are expected to execute the violent sentences: to cut the hands off perverts and stone the rapists. To scream and shout encouragement as the Lord’s work is done. How significant is the difference, in this context, between cleaning up the blood and spilling it? What’s the moral distance between bearing witness to punishment and carrying it out?
Later that evening, Becka marches upstairs in her white nightdress and stabs her father with her mother’s secateurs while he soaks in the tub, clearing up any confusion about the episode’s title. Becka doesn’t hesitate. In fact, when Dr. Grove protests, she stabs him again. Earlier in the episode, Becka let Agnes think that her father never abused her, but the ease with which she believes the allegations against him is disconcerting. Afterward, she throws a cloak over her soiled dress and hitches a ride to Agnes’s house on the Martha bus. For weeks, Becka has insisted she’d rather die than get married. Now she’s blown up her life.
A stunned Agnes quietly helps Becka into the bath. “He can’t hurt you anymore,” Becka assures her friend, searching for acceptance in Agnes’s eyes. “I did God’s work,” she insists — the justice Gilead was postponing. Agnes is quiet and careful. “I know,” she tells Becka. When her oldest friend suggests that the pair should run away together — where? anywhere — Agnes reluctantly agrees, then sends Zilla to wake up her dad.
Agnes betrays Becka, and Daddy betrays Agnes. He calls Garth, who tricks a wailing Becka into being captured by the Eyes. We see her hands gripping the window bars as she’s driven away from the only life she can remember. It’s hard to know what will happen to Becka next. (I, for one, have stopped believing that Margaret Atwood’s novel can provide much of a road map.) Will she be punished for her vigilantism? Didn’t she simply extract the tooth that the dentist already owed to Gilead?
That’s probably the wrong question, I realize — too sentimental for the material. The Testaments, like The Handmaid’s Tale before it, is set in the world of ideas. Its characters are their political fates. An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye. If a society is on the path to total blindness, I suppose it doesn’t matter the order in which its citizens lose their sight.
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