Stadium
Season 1
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
One of the most harrowing chapters from the book makes its way to the series and depicts Lydia’s appalling descent into complicity.
Photo: Russ Martin/Disney
Women are compelled to suppress their desires, intellects, and emotions in Gilead. The expectation is that they should be seen, not heard, like Victorian children. Which is why Aunt Vidala’s struggle to conceal her contempt for Aunt Lydia has been difficult to understand. In a world where survival is a function of silence and compliance, why all the sideways looks and griping? Plaster on a smile, for the sake of your continued existence.
Now we get it. In “Stadium,” Aunt Lydia — a stately Ann Dowd — takes over the series-narration duties to staggering effect. This is what it sounds like when a person commands her own story. Lydia Clements walks us through her final days as an American schoolteacher and her first as a Gilead collaborator. She wasn’t a Sons of Jacob sympathizer before the occupation, but her instinct for self-preservation is tenacious enough to see her through the deadly culls of the female population. Asked how far she will go to save herself in the patriarchy crystallizing around her, Lydia answers resoundingly: She’ll kill an innocent woman, the only person she still knows from the world of yesterday. In America, Vidala was a schoolteacher named Vivian. Lydia, in more ways than one, has always been herself.
Classes were canceled again that day — the last day of Lydia’s American existence. But the teachers at the public school where she worked had already arrived. Punctilious Lydia is shit-talking Vivian for failing to replace the empty coffee canister when Vivian comes through the door with terrifying news. There are armed men in the school building. Before anyone can ask questions, a male colleague has been shot dead by guards.
When Margaret Atwood published her long-anticipated follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale in 2019, I swallowed it in a few sittings. I borrowed The Testaments from the library again, before this TV adaptation started airing, but I haven’t had the urge to open it until now. The novel’s stadium chapter is one of the few that I remember vividly for Lydia’s appalling descent into complicity. In the TV version, as in the book, the women teachers at her school are rounded up and brought to a local arena, where they’re robbed of their phones, jewelry, and purses. They are joined by other women, presumably corralled from their homes and workplaces. They are old and young and pregnant and married and single and scared as hell.
They sit on the bleachers as the hours pass. Occasionally, bottles of water and loaves of bread are distributed, and Lydia congratulates herself for having the discipline to make her slice last. Women are wrested from their seats and don’t return. The captives come to believe there has been a coup, which is confirmed by the executions. They kill one of Vivian and Lydia’s colleagues, likely because she was too old to be useful in Gilead. They execute a group of women for being “sinners,” including a woman in jorts, probably for being gender nonconforming. It’s terrible and fascinating to see our world disintegrate into this one. To watch Lydia and Vivian become the versions of themselves that we already know. At one point, when Lydia starts to make a huffy protest, it’s Vivian who quiets her and understands instinctively that obedience is a condition of survival.
In voice-over, Aunt Lydia likens teaching her Gilead pupils — her Plums and her Handmaids before them — to preparing a steak. The girls need to be hammered, seasoned, and tenderized if they’re going to make it. It’s a recipe she learned in the stadium, where women were starved of dignity and information, forced to defecate in the stands while their friends and colleagues disappeared. Before she’s taken by the guards, Vivian tells Lydia she was a good teacher. When Lydia wakes from her own nightmarish sleep, Vivian’s seat is empty. Friendship is a liability in a place this cruel. She tried to teach that to June and Janine in The Handmaid’s Tale, and she’s doing it again at the Aunt Lydia School. When Shu’s hands are whipped for striking Jehosheba at the ball, it’s Hulda whom the Aunts assign to restrain her friend. Every girl ought to be an island.
On the third night, the guards come for Lydia. It’s only when she’s dragged into the bowels of the stadium that she realizes how systematic this anarchy is behind the scenes. There are buckets of disabled mobile phones. Fine jewelry has been separated from the trashy costume stuff. The chaos is part of the harrowing performance; in reality, these men know what they’re doing. In a back room, she’s interviewed by Commander Judd, who was an architect of the revolution. (In the epilogue to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale novel, there’s even the suggestion that he might have been part of the U.S. government.)
Lydia isn’t scared of misogynists. It’s the ones who can weaponize women’s power that you have to watch out for. Judd knows everything about her. Devout Lydia had an abortion when she was young; that’s punishable by death in Gilead, he warns. Retroactively. Lydia is the one to suggest that Gilead will need a class of matronly Aunts — women to teach girls to be the kinds of women Judd wants them to be while men focus on the more important things.
She’s not the first to fawn over Judd’s vision to save herself, but she’s the first to think constructively about how she can be of service to God and country. If Lydia wants to join the Sons of Jacob, though, she must first prove her mercilessness. Judd hands her a gun and tells her to join the executioner’s squad. “Please, God, help me,” Lydia murmurs to herself as she shakily steps up to the firing line. God does, I guess. He helps her to raise the gun and take aim. When her target is revealed to be her trembling colleague, Vivian, He even helps her to fire it.
The bullet chamber, thanks to dastardly Judd, is empty. Vivian lives to become Vidala, Aunt Lydia’s second-in-command. That’s who these women are to each other. Vidala isn’t Lydia’s last tether to the world before Gilead but to the roughest, ugliest part of herself. Afterward, she chooses the roughest, ugliest fabric for the Aunts’ uniforms — an extra dose of discomfort to help transform women back from the “entitled little brats” they’d all become in the dying days of America. Lydia didn’t want the revolution, but now that it’s upon us, she can see the usefulness. In voice-over, she questions whether she’s a phoenix rising from the ash or a cockroach among the rubble, dressing up her treachery in cheap metaphors when the reality isn’t at all hard to understand. Aunt Lydia is a sympathizer. She’s constructed a whole ethos from being too scared to die and has spent the years since she left the stadium inflicting it on others.
Back in our present-day timeline, it’s the Monday following the ball, and the girls are settling back into who they really are without the heady booze and fancy dresses. Aunt Lydia believes she’s an “object of curiosity” around campus, but the truth is that the students give her no thought at all. She’s the sound of the cough that silences their conversations. She’s the heavy footfall that reminds you to scurry to class. She is not a person.
Today, she is also the determiner of their fates, the iron fist of the future. It’s “Contender Day” in Gilead, and the Greens will soon learn the identities of the two or three Commanders in contention for becoming their husbands. The mood among them is worse than tense — it’s dour. Somewhere in their young hearts, they must feel as only Becka has had the nerve to express outright: This is the beginning of a prison sentence. After this, it’s hasty interviews and house visits and wedding days, followed by a long, lonely life in a house with a husband, who may turn out to be a monster but will definitely be a stranger.
Lydia believes she can soften the blow by giving the girls what they want. For Jehosheba, power; for Hulda, who got her period on prom night, safety. Agnes is Lydia’s wild card, but in “Stadium,” she finally tips her hand. Agnes wants love. She looks at the awful world she lives in and somehow holds on to the hope that there is room for it.
“I’m in love and it’s horrible,” she confides in Becka. She knows it’s true because when Garth is around, she feels physically hot and her belly worries, which is how we’re left to imagine Becka feels around Agnes. They are teenage girls talking about crushes in the relaxed supervision afforded by gym class. But this poignant adolescent moment is undercut by their desperation. “At least you can feel this way once,” Becka tells her friend on the eve of their betrothals. “No matter what, that’s a blessing.”
But it’s not enough for Agnes. She goes to Aunt Lydia to request that Garth — soon to be elevated to the rank of Commander — be eligible for marriage this season. Given that Lydia speaks to everyone as though they’re in trouble for starting a conversation with her in the first place, I was surprised to hear her agree to consider the proposal. By the end of the episode, she’s even implemented Agnes’s suggestion, which stuns Vidala. Does she want to protect Agnes more than the other girls? When one of the Aunts vaguely suggests that Agnes’s “lineage” might prove a difficulty, Lydia responds energetically in Agnes’s defense.
All season, the girls have yearned for true companionship in their matches, like they believe their friend Penny has in her marriage. This week, even Penny’s exceptionalism is revealed to be an illusion. She’s married to Judd, the man who chose Lydia to run their lives. We don’t see Penny in “Stadium,” but over the course of the episode, she loses the baby she was born to have. For now, Judd refuses Lydia’s suggestion that she could discreetly procure him a Handmaid, but how many more miscarriages until he says “yes”? Or until he decides he’d prefer a new wife? They are all frogs. There are no exceptions.
Well, I guess there is one: Lydia Clements. Of all the women to become Aunts, she’s the only one who kept her own name. And Aunts are the only women in Gilead with permission to read and write. After her disciples are dispatched to the Greens’ houses to reveal the identities of their future husbands, Lydia opens a safe and takes out her Burn Book — a recording of every misdeed she’s witnessed since the revolution in Boston, the mistakes of the women around her as well as the “weak men” who lead this broken country. The massacre at Jezebel’s shifted her understanding of this place. Lydia was once a reluctant follower of Gilead, but now she’s something more dangerous: a zealot of her own private church. She has rid their world of entitled little brats; her girls — the ones who have been under her care since Judd decreed it — are pure. Far too pure for the sinners who run this godless theocracy.
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