Summary
The Testaments threads a relatively uneventful episode with a real sense of peril, but it’s primarily a building block for things to come.
Generally speaking, tea parties are about as fun as they sound. This, it turns out, is especially true of The Testaments, wherein tea parties are the most highly strung affairs imaginable. Episode 4, “Green Tea”, builds most of its runtime around this idea, and while the whole thing isn’t quite as tense as it would probably like — does anyone really care who Miriam marries? — it’s nonetheless threaded with quite a palpable sense of peril and does, to be fair, set up a handful of things for later.
As with the previous episode, Daisy is handling narration duties. But with all her backstory uncovered, we’re confined to the present day, and a more straightforward narrative arc unfolding on the back of Mayday’s attack on the school bus and Agnes having become a Green. The tea party, staged at Agnes’s house, is an important part of the marriage season, an opportunity for the mothers to suck up to the Aunts in the hope of securing the best marriage possible for their daughters. It’s about as grim as you’d expect.
Inside Woman
As we now know, Daisy is working with Mayday, spying on Gilead from the inside and reporting to Garth anything that she finds. She’s still trapped between two worlds; Gilead’s oppressive conservatism on the one hand — she describes the Aunts as “frigid sadists”, which got a chuckle out of me — and her relatively innocent classmates on the other, who she is beginning to recognise as unwitting victims of the system, much like her.
But it takes some effort to remind herself of that, since the kind of things that are normal to the Plums, such as happily strolling past a trio of hanged bodies, are still alien to Daisy, who is worried not just about Gilead’s cavalier attitude to executions but also the fact that she might be next on the chopping block if her ulterior motives are discovered. And her being discovered is becoming increasingly likely, not least because Mayday’s other inside agents all seem to know who she is. A florist stops her rather suddenly and begs her to tell Garth to move her. “They’re closing in,” is her only explanation.
Predictably, towards the end of “Green Tea”, Daisy passes the florist’s in the other direction and sees the place being raided by the Eyes. Her narration explains that she later found out the woman who petitioned her for help was unceremoniously gunned down in the street. Daisy resolves to keep herself together from that point on. The final scene of the episode is her weeping and screaming into a towel, though, so she’s not doing an especially goob job of it.
The Tea Party
As I mentioned at the top, the tea party isn’t as tense as it would perhaps like to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s unenjoyable. Unless you’re Miriam, obviously, who spills some tea and sobs for the remainder of the event, worried that she might subsequently be married off to a man from the colonies.
That aside, most of the attention is on Agnes, in part because it’s taking place at her home and Paula is keen to hog the limelight, but also because she’s the co-protagonist, so it’s kind of unavoidable. She gets sent a bounty of impressive meats and love notes from potential suitors, Becka teaches her the waltz for an upcoming ball in a scene dripping with one-way sexual tension, and Daisy is sneaking around the place trying to dig up some dirt on Commander Kyle.
It’s interesting to see the smaller dynamics at play, such as how the Aunts behave around the mothers compared to back at the school, how Lydia undermines Vidala — who has really had her pride knocked in the last couple of episodes — and Daisy’s scene with Commander Kyle when he catches her snooping. The latter is particularly illuminating, since he seems to be genuinely interested in Agnes’s well-being and worried about her future now that she has come of age, and he even allows Daisy to take away one of the chocolates she claims to have been looking for in his office.
Nobody Likes the Dentist
There’s a tradition in these tea parties where a little porcelain bride is hidden inside a cake, and whichever of the Greens happens to find it will, apparently, be married first. Naturally, it’s Agnes who finds the figure, but she finds it with her teeth, leading one to snap completely in half, much to Paula’s horror. Luckily, we know a dentist: Becka’s father, Dr. Grove, who already sexually assaulted Agnes when she first met him.
When it turns out that Agnes needs to be anaesthetised for the procedure, it’s really obvious that something is going to happen while she’s unconscious. Luckily, The Testaments Episode 4 deigns not to show it, but the implication is very clear, and is later confirmed when Agnes, to her shock, finds that her shirt was unfastened. There’s something particularly defeating about this development, since there’s nobody Agnes can feasibly tell about it, but such is Gilead. Nobody comes here for a good time.
In the waiting room, Daisy surreptitiously passes Garth the chocolate that Commander Kyle gave her, which reveals he has been to Japan on some as-yet inscrutable business, which is weird since they have sanctions against Gilead. Is Kyle secretly not towing the party line? We’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps he isn’t such a bad guy after all, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.
