Diksha Sundriyal
Things take a violent turn in the penultimate episode of Hulu’s ‘The Testaments’ when Becka decides to take justice into her own hands. She’d always been in love with Agnes, so when she discovers that her own father assaulted her best friend, she doesn’t wait for Gilead to go through the due process. She kills Dr. Grove with her own hands, but this means that now, she is the one facing criminal charges. With Grove, the administration tried to keep it quiet and took things slowly, but in Becka’s case, no such reprieve is provided. In the end, the price for her crimes turns out to be much higher than she’d expected. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Becka’s Situation Leaves Everyone Scrambling to Help Her
Even though Becka killed her father, Agnes knows her friend well enough to know that she was not in the right state of mind when she did this. Moreover, she didn’t exactly kill an innocent man. While everyone is losing their minds over what she did, isn’t this what the girls were taught from the beginning? Isn’t this what they’d been told the justice looks like? Everyone seems to understand this, which is why Aunt Lydia tries her best, Daisy tries to get Mayday to do something, and Agnes ends up asking Commander Weston for help. In the process of explaining why Becka did what she did, Agnes tells her future husband that she, too, had been assaulted by Grove. This revelation leads Weston to help Becka. He gets her out of the prison and back to her home with her mother.
Still, the fact remains that there is blood on her hands, and she must eventually face justice. Still, it gives the people around her enough time to figure out how to save her. Commander Judd had made it clear to Aunt Lydia that either Becka would be sent to the Red Center and turned into a Handmaid, because she is still a fertile young woman, or she would be executed at the Wall, because that’s what happens to cold-blooded murderers in Gilead. Lydia knows that while she may be an Aunt, she is not powerful enough to change the course of Gilead justice, which means they will have to find a way around this. Eventually, it is something that Daisy says that tells Lydia exactly how to save Becka from the options of terrible fates.
Becka’s Mother Sacrifices Herself to Save Her Daughter
Because Becka went straight to Agnes’ home and was then captured by the Eyes, she never got to talk to her mother about the murder. Had the mother and daughter had the talk in the immediate aftermath of Grove’s death, perhaps, they would have done the same thing then that Aunt Lydia proposes now. In a rare act of truce between Vidala and Lydia, both Aunts visit Becka and her mother at their house, which is being watched by the Eyes. The meeting is about figuring out the best course of action going forward, and Lydia reveals that the only way to do that is if someone else takes the blame for Becka’s actions. And it has to be her mother.
Lydia says that the mother and daughter must give a new statement, where it will be shown that Becka found her mother with the shears and her father’s dead body in the tub. She tried to revive him, but failed, and that’s how she got blood on her clothes. Then, she claimed to have killed her father because she wanted to save her mother. The moment she hears it, Becka’s mom knows what’s being asked for her and what it will mean if she goes along with. She doesn’t take a moment to think it over because she knows that if she doesn’t do it, her beloved daughter face a terrible fate. Becka, however, is heartbroken because she knows it means that her mother will most certainly die.
While Becka could still have been kept alive as a Handmaid, her mother is not fertile, and hence, there is no other option but to execute her. This is exactly what happens, as we watch her getting taken away by the Eyes and then getting hanged to death while the Commanders watch. Tragically, right at the same time, Becka is forced to march down the aisle and marry Garth because this is the only way to ensure she has a safe future. She will be protected as long as she has a husband. However, she is not in the state to consider what her new state of affairs mean. She has lost her mother, shortly after having killer her own father, and the trauma and grief of both these things will linger on her for a very long time.
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