‘The Testaments’ Episode 6 Recap – In the Nosebleed Seats

It’s worth wondering how someone gets into a position of power in a place like Gilead. Aunt Lydia, who’s very much the focal point of The Testaments Episode 6, at one point describes it as the plotline of her resolve giving way to the plotline of her survival. In other words, the only way you live in a totalitarian theocracy is by doing things you’re deeply uncomfortable with, that you might not have previously thought yourself capable of, to give the illusion of compliance. Your every moment is a balancing act between how far you’ll go to survive and how much you can live with.

This thematic underpinning is the backbone of “Stadium”, and it’s extremely compelling because there are no easy answers to be found. It’s tempting to despise Lydia, to point an accusatory finger in her direction and claim she’s as bad as the Commanders for perpetuating the system. But then, on the other hand, her performative adherence to doctrine positions her uniquely. Any minor act of rebellion she commits will tremor the faultlines of Gilead’s most essential institutions. She has the ear of its most influential playmakers. She’s in the belly of the beast, but her intriguing dilemma is whether she has the courage to do what in her creaking bones she knows is necessary.

The Contenders

The present-day focal point of “Stadium” is Contenders Day, the process by which the Greens are matched with appropriate — or close-to-appropriate, in some cases — Commanders. The Aunts all sit around and find the girls their future husbands, a process which is made a little bit more difficult by the very obvious ongoing tension between Lydia and Vidala.

I’ll just say now that we don’t find out who gets matched with who. But we do know who Agnes might potentially end up with, since she went out of her way to petition Lydia to include Garth in the dating pool, which she ultimately does, much to Vidala’s chagrin. Everything else is pretty up in the air, with Becka potentially being paired with Commander Maddox, the creep who got her drunk at the ball.

Since several Commanders are being moved to the front, they’re off the table for this season, which Judd arrives to point out so that Vidala can sycophantically suck up to him. This uneasy triumvirate of Lydia, Vidala, and Judd is very central to the macro plotting, and we get a bit more light shed on it during the flashbacks, but we’ll get to those in a minute.

Tragedy Strikes

In the meantime, we have the girls to consider. Jehosheba is still being awful, and Shunammite continues not to love that. Agnes is still pining after Garth, Becka is still pining after Agnes, and Hulda is just excited to be there, especially now that she’s a part of the Green gang, a distinction confirmed by Vidala in a rather undignified process witnessed by a comically agog Daisy. Comparatively, Daisy gets little to do in this episode, but she does have a brief chat with Aunt Estee that reveals she was in many ways the original Pearl Girl, and wasn’t originally from Gilead.

In a brutal bit of punishment reminiscent of the premiere, Hulda’s first act of womanhood is deciding which punishment Shunammite should receive for slapping Jehosheba. She settles — rather quickly, in my view — on having her hands bound and whipped. She has to participate, but is visibly distressed by it, and is apologetic after. Shunammite takes it all in her stride, though. Like Lydia — albeit for different reasons — she knows it’s part and parcel of surviving in Gilead. The rent is paid in blood.

In the background of the girls’ drama is the fact that Penny, whom we met briefly earlier, has gone into early labour with her first pregnancy, following two prior miscarriages, and she sadly loses this child, too. This is notable mostly because she’s Commander Judd’s wife, and because it’s Lydia, of all people, who offers him support while he’s grieving. He seems to genuinely respect Lydia and her opinion on some level, which is weird since things weren’t always like that.

Stadium Seating

And thus we come to the flashbacks. Guided by Aunt Lydia’s narration, The Testaments Episode 6 joins her back when she was a teacher, and Vidala was her colleague, which was when the Sons of Jacob, led by Commander Judd, pulled off a coup to form the Republic of Gilead. The women were all rounded up and taken to a stadium, the “sinners” among them — people who had, say, had children out of wedlock — executed in the middle of a tennis court, the bloody trail of their splattered heads forming a morbid replication of the missing net.

The surviving women stayed in the bleachers. Some tried to sleep, some wept, others, like Lydia, mostly stayed very still and quiet, and tried to wait it out. Every time they closed their eyes, they would open them to fewer compatriots as more were dragged away to be killed. Eventually, Vidala was taken, and Lydia was alone. And then, eventually, Lydia was taken too.

This is how she met Commander Judd, who was in charge of deciding where women would be placed in the new order. By this point, Lydia had already resolved to survive, so she pitched him the idea of delegating the task to a woman. To her, essentially, even though she could be retroactively put to death for having had an abortion in her youth. But proving her loyalty to the regime meant crossing a line she thought she couldn’t — executing one of the other women. And, of course, the woman she was expected to kill was Vidala.

There’s no wonder there’s tension between these two in the present day, since Lydia pulled the trigger. It just so happens that the gun was empty. But that must be a small consolation for Vidala. Either way, she proved something to Judd and herself that day. She was willing to do what it took to survive. Now, her main act of rebellion is documenting everything in a secret journal, but she remains unsure of whether she’ll be able to protect the girls at her school from the fates that inevitably await them. She’s probably right to be worried.