Last week, The Testaments dug deeper into Aunt Lydia’s backstory, revisiting an agonizing moment in her past that illuminated—sort of—the decisions she’s been making in the present. For this week’s episode, “Commitment,” the show brought back another familiar character from The Handmaid’s Tale to give some fresh perspective on the events we’ve been seeing in the show so far.
In Gilead, “commitment” is a word with extra weight to it, and the events of episode seven brought that even more sharply into focus
“Commitment” fills in more blanks for Daisy (Lucy Halliday) and her emotionally fraught journey to becoming a Mayday operative. As June (Elisabeth Moss) has already revealed, Gilead ordered the murders of Daisy’s adoptive parents and would dearly love to reclaim the teenager who escaped its borders as a young child.
In the tumultuous days after Daisy learns this information, she’s brought to a safe house: the home of Rita (Amanda Brugel). In the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, we met Rita as the “Martha”—the head cook and housekeeper—at the home of Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), where June is serving as a Handmaid.
We learn a little about her past. Rita had a teenage son who was killed in the Gilead coup. She has a sister, who appeared in the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Though she started out as a background presence, offering June quiet words of support, she eventually emerged as an important ally for the resistance.
She’s a key operative in “Angel’s Flight,” the season three event in which dozens of Gilead children were spirited to safety in Canada. This is when Rita herself leaves Gilead.
In season six, Rita turns up in “New Bethlehem,” the Serena Joy-supported settlement designed to be a less cruel version of Gilead. Her motivation is to help her sister escape, but that plan falls through, and Rita then uses her position to help Mayday.
When she’s enlisted to make the cake for Serena Joy’s second wedding, Rita mixes in a strong sedative. Everyone who eats a slice passes out, allowing Mayday to slaughter dozens of powerful wedding guests. Then, Rita steps in to save June from certain execution before making her way back to Canada with most of the other Handmaid’s characters.
Which brings us to “Commitment” and Rita’s surprise presence in The Testaments. Rita’s still a Mayday agent, doing what she can from Canada. The Handmaid’s Tale viewers have all this context for her, but Daisy, of course, has no clue about what Rita has endured up to this point.
As “Commitment” begins, we return to Daisy, still at the diner where June told her to wait at the end of episode three. After several hours, she realizes the waitress is her Mayday contact. They head to Rita’s place.
There’s some relevent present-day Gilead business next. Agnes (Chase Infiniti) learns who her prospective husbands are, including Commander Westin (Reed Diamond). Not only is he much older—and very much not the Guardian she’s got a crush on, Garth (Brad Alexander)—he’s the head of the Eyes, Gilead’s secret police. Cut to Westin and the Eyes barging into the Aunt Lydia School, intent on finding the Mayday mole they suspect is based there.
Back in the past, in Rita’s Toronto apartment, the former Martha is all business at first. She has a friend in immigration who’s making Daisy a new passport; Daisy will need to leave Canada as soon as possible. Daisy doesn’t think much of the plan that’s thrust before her: take a freight plane to Colombia and start a whole new life in South American exile.
Rita agrees that it’s unfair that Daisy has to go through this but points out their options are limited. Rita also has a few details to share about Daisy’s past: her birth parents got her out of Gilead because they wanted her to have a better life. Unfortunately, they—like her adoptive parents in Toronto—are not alive anymore.
It’s a lot to take in. “Fuck Gilead,” Daisy says, and Rita tells her, “I’m trying my best.”
In the next scene, the new passport arrives, but Daisy declares she’s not going to run away. She’s got nothing left to lose (except her life, as Rita reminds her), and she wants to be a part of Mayday and help fight back.
Rita doesn’t go for it at first; after all, she says, there’s a difference between feeling brave and actually being brave. But she clocks Daisy’s determination and thinks there might be a way. June has a plan for everything, apparently, including smuggling a teenaged girl into Gilead as an undercover operative. It’s an extremely dangerous undertaking; we see from the show’s present-day timeline that anyone thought to be working with Mayday is subject to immediate public execution.
And we learn how extensive the process of sneaking into Gilead really is, especially if you want to assimilate into its rigid society. Daisy gets a tattoo to help bolster her cover story (later, as a Pearl Girl, she’s shown having it removed), and Rita arranges for a fake police record to make things even more convincing. She also gives some very important advice.
“You protect yourself by following their rules. And don’t trust anyone except your handler,” she says. No matter how lonely Daisy gets in Gilead, Rita tells her, she can’t risk making any friends. When Daisy jokes how she wouldn’t want to buddy up with the girls in Gilead anyway, seeing as how they “think the Earth is flat and can’t even do multiplication,” Rita turns deadly serious.
“Don’t ever underestimate them. Ever. They have spent their lives being vigilant in a way that you never have. So if you go in there thinking that you are smarter than them, you will die. Do you understand me?”
Oh, we understand. We see Rita grilling Daisy on the details of her fake backstory, and “Commitment” shows us how crucial this is when we hear Westin, who’s questioning all the Pearl Girls, ask Daisy about where she came from. Somehow, she keeps her composure, but in the past we see she’s still not quite taking things seriously enough, joking that her Gilead escapades will make for a killer essay for any future college applications.
Rita—who sternly reminds Daisy that her main objective is to be a “sponge” that soaks up information—tells Daisy that June has a daughter in Gilead who’s about Daisy’s age. (The Testaments is still pretending like her identity is some big secret to be revealed, so we won’t spoil it here, but… you know who it is, right?)
Rita is also schooling Daisy on all the top Commanders. There’s a dossier filled with photos and personal details. “Before Gilead, this guy worked in crypto, and now he’s a Commander,” Daisy snorts about one man in particular. “Oh, and he racked up a couple of restraining orders for domestic violence.” Then we see who it is: our pal Commander Westin.
After parting ways with Rita, Daisy moves on to the next phase of their plan. She pretends to be a runaway, roaming the downtown streets until she catches the attention of the Pearl Girl recruitment squad. The ruse works perfectly.
There’s one problem starting to emerge, though: once in Gilead, will Daisy be able to heed Rita’s warning about not trusting anyone or making any friends? Observing Daisy’s distress after being interrogated by Westin, Agnes invites her over, and the girls seem on the verge of actually bonding. Then Daisy makes a mistake when they start talking about dating and romance. Sure, the heartbreak she experienced in her old life sucks, but it’s better than what’s on offer in Gilead.
“Your worth has already been decided for you,” she tells Agnes. “You don’t even need a personality.” It’s hurtful, not the least because—after her initial shock at hearing such a blunt remark—Agnes realizes Daisy is probably right. The moment of shared closeness, something both girls are in desperate need of, quickly passes.
We then get a montage of the girls meeting their suitors. Agnes is clearly still thinking about what Daisy said, not to mention her forbidden feelings for Garth. We learn that Westin’s first wife died in childbirth, and he was more sad about losing his child than his spouse. It’s unclear if this is the same woman involved in those domestic violence charges Daisy had spotted in his file. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for Agnes’ future.
The last scenes of “Commitment” see Daisy recalling her journey across the border. The Pearl Girl recruiters drop her off and drive back to the sinful streets of Toronto to continue their mission. There, Daisy meets Garth—who we already knew to be her Mayday contact—and that’s how her undercover journey begins.
Will she follow Rita’s advice? It’s too soon to tell, but it’s starting to feel like Daisy isn’t going to be OK with merely being an information-gathering “sponge.” That’s way too passive for how pissed-off she is—and now that she’s fully embedded in Gilead and has seen firsthand how things work here, she’s ready to take matters into her own hands.
“There comes a time when we have to take action,” she says in voiceover. “You have to choose your own destiny. We were teenage girls, so fuck it. That time was now.”
New episodes of The Testaments arrive Wednesdays on Hulu and Disney+.
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Source: Gizmodo