{"id":459851,"date":"2026-04-29T15:44:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T15:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/459851\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T15:44:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T15:44:18","slug":"the-testaments-recap-episode-6-stadium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/459851\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Testaments\u2019 Recap, Episode 6: \u2018Stadium\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The Testaments<\/a><\/p>\n

Stadium<\/p>\n

\n Season 1<\/p>\n

Episode 6\n <\/p>\n

\n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n

4 stars<\/p>\n

****\n <\/p>\n

\n One of the most harrowing chapters from the book makes its way to the series and depicts Lydia\u2019s appalling descent into complicity.
\n Photo: Russ Martin\/Disney\n <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Now we get it. In \u201cStadium,\u201d Aunt Lydia \u2014 a stately Ann Dowd \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Classes were canceled again that day \u2014 the last day of Lydia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

When Margaret Atwood published her long-anticipated follow-up to The Handmaid\u2019s 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\u2019t had the urge to open it until now. The novel\u2019s stadium chapter is one of the few that I remember vividly for Lydia\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t return. The captives come to believe there has been a coup, which is confirmed by the executions. They kill one of Vivian and Lydia\u2019s colleagues, likely because she was too old to be useful in Gilead. They execute a group of women for being \u201csinners,\u201d including a woman in jorts, probably for being gender nonconforming. It\u2019s 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\u2019s Vivian who quiets her and understands instinctively that obedience is a condition of survival.<\/p>\n

In voice-over, Aunt Lydia likens teaching her Gilead pupils \u2014 her Plums and her Handmaids before them \u2014 to preparing a steak. The girls need to be hammered, seasoned, and tenderized if they\u2019re going to make it. It\u2019s 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\u2019s taken by the guards, Vivian tells Lydia she was a good teacher. When Lydia wakes from her own nightmarish sleep, Vivian\u2019s seat is empty. Friendship is a liability in a place this cruel. She tried to teach that to June and Janine in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/a>, and she\u2019s doing it again at the Aunt Lydia School. When Shu\u2019s hands are whipped for striking Jehosheba at the ball, it\u2019s Hulda whom the Aunts assign to restrain her friend. Every girl ought to be an island.<\/p>\n

On the third night, the guards come for Lydia. It\u2019s only when she\u2019s 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\u2019re doing. In a back room, she\u2019s interviewed by Commander Judd, who was an architect of the revolution. (In the epilogue to Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale novel, there\u2019s even the suggestion that he might have been part of the U.S. government.)<\/p>\n

Lydia isn\u2019t scared of misogynists. It\u2019s the ones who can weaponize women\u2019s power that you have to watch out for. Judd knows everything about her. Devout Lydia had an abortion when she was young; that\u2019s punishable by death in Gilead, he warns. Retroactively. Lydia is the one to suggest that Gilead will need a class of matronly Aunts \u2014 women to teach girls to be the kinds of women Judd wants them to be while men focus on the more important things.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s not the first to fawn over Judd\u2019s vision to save herself, but she\u2019s 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\u2019s squad. \u201cPlease, God, help me,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The bullet chamber, thanks to dastardly Judd, is empty. Vivian lives to become Vidala, Aunt Lydia\u2019s second-in-command. That\u2019s who these women are to each other. Vidala isn\u2019t Lydia\u2019s 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\u2019 uniforms \u2014 an extra dose of discomfort to help transform women back from the \u201centitled little brats\u201d they\u2019d all become in the dying days of America. Lydia didn\u2019t want the revolution, but now that it\u2019s upon us, she can see the usefulness. In voice-over, she questions whether she\u2019s a phoenix rising from the ash or a cockroach among the rubble, dressing up her treachery in cheap metaphors when the reality isn\u2019t at all hard to understand. Aunt Lydia is a sympathizer. She\u2019s constructed a whole ethos from being too scared to die and has spent the years since she left the stadium inflicting it on others.<\/p>\n

Back in our present-day timeline, it\u2019s 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\u2019s an \u201cobject of curiosity\u201d around campus, but the truth is that the students give her no thought at all. She\u2019s the sound of the cough that silences their conversations. She\u2019s the heavy footfall that reminds you to scurry to class. She is not a person.<\/p>\n

Today, she is also the determiner of their fates, the iron fist of the future. It\u2019s \u201cContender Day\u201d 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 \u2014 it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wild card, but in \u201cStadium,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in love and it\u2019s horrible,\u201d she confides in Becka. She knows it\u2019s true because when Garth is around, she feels physically hot and her belly worries, which is how we\u2019re 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. \u201cAt least you can feel this way once,\u201d Becka tells her friend on the eve of their betrothals. \u201cNo matter what, that\u2019s a blessing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not enough for Agnes. She goes to Aunt Lydia to request that Garth \u2014 soon to be elevated to the rank of Commander \u2014 be eligible for marriage this season. Given that Lydia speaks to everyone as though they\u2019re 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\u2019s even implemented Agnes\u2019s suggestion, which stuns Vidala. Does she want to protect Agnes more than the other girls? When one of the Aunts vaguely suggests that Agnes\u2019s \u201clineage\u201d might prove a difficulty, Lydia responds energetically in Agnes\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s exceptionalism is revealed to be an illusion. She\u2019s married to Judd, the man who chose Lydia to run their lives. We don\u2019t see Penny in \u201cStadium,\u201d but over the course of the episode, she loses the baby she was born to have. For now, Judd refuses Lydia\u2019s suggestion that she could discreetly procure him a Handmaid, but how many more miscarriages until he says \u201cyes\u201d? Or until he decides he\u2019d prefer a new wife? They are all frogs. There are no exceptions.<\/p>\n

Well, I guess there is one: Lydia Clements. Of all the women to become Aunts, she\u2019s 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\u2019 houses to reveal the identities of their future husbands, Lydia opens a safe and takes out her Burn Book \u2014 a recording of every misdeed she\u2019s witnessed since the revolution in Boston, the mistakes of the women around her as well as the \u201cweak men\u201d who lead this broken country. The massacre at Jezebel\u2019s shifted her understanding of this place. Lydia was once a reluctant follower of Gilead, but now she\u2019s something more dangerous: a zealot of her own private church. She has rid their world of entitled little brats; her girls \u2014 the ones who have been under her care since Judd decreed it \u2014 are pure. Far too pure for the sinners who run this godless theocracy.<\/p>\n

Sign Up for the Vulture Newsletter<\/p>\n

Entertainment news, for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n

Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Notice<\/a> and to receive email correspondence from us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Testaments Stadium Season 1 Episode 6 Editor\u2019s Rating 4 stars **** One of the most harrowing chapters…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,13930,19,17,13928,2463,118705,128,13927],"class_list":["post-459851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-hulu","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-overnights","tag-recaps","tag-the-testaments","tag-tv","tag-tv-recaps"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116488770234597423","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}