Throughout its first season, The Testaments did an excellent job depicting the various horrors that young women face in Gilead, especially the wealthy teens groomed to be obedient brides for the country’s much older men in power. But for the show’s main characters, including Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Becka (Mattea Conforti), the brainwashing has started to crack long before it’s time to take their vows.
These two are best friends in a place where the very concept of “best friends” is frowned upon. That mini-rebellion brings them even closer, and it’s not long before we realize that Becka has romantic feelings for Agnes—though neither girl has been allowed to mature emotionally enough to really understand what that means. For her part, Agnes thinks her crush on Garth (Brad Alexander), her hunky bodyguard, means she’s in love with him.
A rift appears between the besties when Agnes begins spending more time with Daisy (Lucy Halliday), who’s new to Gilead. But things really fracture when Becka, who doesn’t want to get married in the first place, becomes engaged to Garth—who’s been promoted into Gilead’s husband-material ranks only after a starry-eyed Agnes makes a plea on his behalf.
Haven’t had a chance to watch the finale episode yet? We’ll be discussing “Secaterus” specifics, so turn back now.
As The Testaments entered its final episodes, both Becka and Agnes saw their carefully plotted lives veer completely off course. When Becka learned her father, Gilead’s resident dentist, had been sexually assaulting his patients—including her beloved Agnes—she acted on the lessons about righteous vengeance that had been drilled into her over the years and stabbed him to death.
After Agnes and Daisy push their teachers to stand up for Becka, it’s decided that Becka’s mother (Kate Hewlett) will confess to her daughter’s crime. This is not a happy ending for Becka, though her future gets slightly less dire when Agnes makes Garth promise he’ll honor his promise and go through with the wedding.
In “Secateurs,” Becka—teary-eyed over the loss of her mother and having just been injected with a heavy sedative—gets a precious moment alone with Agnes ahead of the ceremony. In this scene, she murmurs that she knows everything is going to be OK because Agnes is there with her. Then she leans in and kisses Agnes on the lips; they embrace after, but we see Becka’s dreamy smile settle into a look of dread.
In a new interview with Variety, the actors talked about the scene as well as what lies ahead for Becka.
Agnes, Infiniti said, had a completely innocent reaction to the kiss; she’s so sheltered, she simply has no other way to interpret it.
“She knows that a ‘gender traitor’ in Gilead is bad,” she said, referring to Gilead’s derogatory term for queer people. “But she doesn’t really know what that means. I think her interactions with Becka and the emotions that Becka is feeling for Agnes, I think Agnes just views it as Becka loves her, just like Agnes loves her. And whether or not it’s in the same way, she just knows that that’s her person in life.”
For Becka, Conforti said, marrying Garth is the safest of all her bad options. She doesn’t yet know that her new husband is secretly a Mayday operative, helping the anti-Gilead rebellion—season two will no doubt dig into that—but she senses that he’s against the grain in some ways.
“He’s willing to relocate so that she can be close to her friends, and he’s willing to support her in that way and really give her the future that she actually wants, which is not being a wife and not becoming a mother,” Conforti said. “She can kind of understand, oh, there’s this partnership here; we can have a mutual sense of trust and understanding. She also knows that Agnes is in love with him, so I think in some capacity being involved in their relationship is allowing her to remain close to Agnes, too. But she’s willing to marry Garth because there’s no expectations of anything romantic.”
The Testaments season one is streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
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