THT The Human Heart Ch.1: He's just taken a risk, but for what?
Cut: Oranges, tuna, and that look. (1x01)
"You should definitely avoid the tuna."
Here's the thing about their very first scene together. Nothing happens in it.
He's in the kitchen getting oranges for the Commander. She's there for something else. She asks about the tuna and he gives her a look, and that's it, that's the entire encounter, and if you weren't paying attention you would swear nothing occurred at all.
Everybody remembers the look. The raised brow, the almost-smirk, the way he goes still the second she walks in. It's one of the most gif'd two minutes of the pilot and it earns it. But the look is just the surface. The thing I want to sit with is what's underneath it, which is that this man just took a real risk, in episode one, over nothing, for no reason he could explain to anyone if they made him try.
And the show can't tell you why, because Nick doesn't get to explain himself. He never does. That's the whole problem with him, the thing that gets him misread for six seasons: he acts, and he never accounts for it, and you're left to fill in the inside yourself.
I clock it the way I clock everything now, without moving my face. New red walking up the drive. Don't look. You know better than to look.
Except I've already looked.
Here's what I've learned about staying alive in this house, in this country, in whatever this is now. You make yourself furniture. You go where you're told and you carry what you're handed and you keep your eyes on the middle distance, and you do it so consistently that people stop seeing you at all. That's the whole trick. Not hiding. Disappearing in plain sight. A man nobody looks at twice is a man who lives to the next morning, and I have gotten very, very good at not being looked at.
And the way you keep it that way is you don't do it to anyone else either. You don't look. Because the second you actually see one of them, really see her, the disappearing stops working. That's the safety. That's the whole reason I'm still breathing.
I know all of this. I could recite it.
And then she comes into the kitchen and I forget every word of it.
It's nothing. I want to be clear with myself about that, standing here, because it helps to name it small. It's nothing. A moment. She wants something and I happen to know something about it and there is a completely safe version of the next few seconds where I keep that to myself and let her find out on her own, the way this place lets all of them find everything out on their own, a half step behind, always, by design. That's how it's supposed to go. I say nothing. I stay furniture.
I let her see that I know. I let her see that I've been paying enough attention to have an opinion about her afternoon, that she registered, that somewhere behind the wall there's a man keeping track of her. And I do it in a kitchen with ears in it. With Rita three feet away. For no reason that would survive a single question if anyone thought to ask one.
That's the part I'm going to be turning over later. Not that I slipped. That she caught it, instantly, and looked back at me like she was solving something. Most of them have gone somewhere behind their own eyes by now, gone quiet and careful and far away, and this one is right here, present, sharp, reading me while I'm reading her. And the thought lands before I can stop it, she's quicker than the last one, and that thought is the single most dangerous thing that's happened to me in months. Quicker is worse. Quicker means she'll see. Quicker means I'll want her to.
I run it like I'd run any risk, because that's the other thing I'm good at, the math of who could hurt me and how. If she takes this to the Wife, the driver's getting familiar, that's the end of it. A truck out of here if I'm lucky. The wall if I'm not. And I know that, I can see the whole chain of it, and I did the thing anyway, over nothing, over a look I could have kept behind my teeth.
I already know how this goes. I've watched it go before, in this exact house, and I know what it costs and I know where it ends and none of that knowledge is doing me the slightest bit of good right now.
So I take what I came for and I leave, because leaving is the last smart thing available to me and I'd better take it while I still can.
And I already know I'll do it again the next time she's in a room.
That's the part that should frighten me.
So here's what gets me about my interpretation of all of that. It isn't the show inventing a character. It's the show reading the book correctly, which is more than I can say for a lot of what came later.
Because this scene is in the novel. Chapter four. Nearly beat for beat.
In the book, June's walking back to the house and Nick's out by the car, cap tilted wrong, sleeves rolled up, a cigarette going, all these small liberties a man in his position has no business taking. And he looks at her. And then, and this is Atwood's word, not mine, he winks.
And June's reaction is the entire series folded into one moment. She doesn't melt. She gets suspicious. Her actual thought is: He's just taken a risk, but for what? What if I were to report him? And then, a beat later, colder: Perhaps he is an Eye.
That's the whole dynamic, right there, fully formed, before a single thing has happened between them. He does something small and dangerous and pointless to make contact. She's sharp enough to catch the risk and turn it over instead of swooning at it. And the turning-it-over is exactly the thing that makes her keep looking at him.
What the pilot does with the kitchen is take that wink and build it a room to live in. Same beat. A man taking a risk he can't justify just to be seen by her, and a woman quick enough to notice the risk and wonder what it's costing him. Atwood wrote Nick as a question June can't stop trying to answer, and the show introduces him as the exact same thing, a look instead of a wink, but the same unanswerable question underneath.
And that "perhaps he is an Eye" line matters more than it gets credit for. Because she's right. He is one. She suspects it from the very first time she looks at him, and she moves toward him anyway, again and again, for the rest of the book. That's not naivety. That's a woman deciding, with her eyes open, that whatever he is, she wants to find out for herself.
Which is a choice. Hers. Quite possibly the first real one she gets to make in the entire nightmare, one that's actually her own and nobody else's.
They handed her that in episode one.
And then forgot it later.
I'd love your thoughts on the POV, because that's the direction I want to take these.
I could do more straight analysis, but honestly I've analyzed these cuts to death. And the more I sit with them, the more I think that's not where the meaning lives.
It's in the interiority. It's in how he's understood, not what he says. Which is exactly what the Nick critics get so wrong. They hear a man who barely speaks and decide there's nothing there. They couldn't be more wrong.
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