THT The Human Heart Ch. 3: For the moment we're mirrors.
Cut: The ice scene, or, the art of almost. (1x03)
"I wish I should've... I should've just driven away with you."
Here's the thing about Nick in these first three episodes. He's watching her.
By the car. Walking down the driveway. In the kitchen with no real reason to be in the kitchen. He keeps finding the edge of whatever room she's in and standing in it.
And he's careful. So careful. There's a distance he keeps and you can see him keeping it, which is not remotely the same thing as not wanting to close it.
Because he already does. That's what gets me. In the car this episode he tells her everybody breaks, everybody, and you don't say that to a woman you aren't thinking about. That's him warning her and warning himself in the same breath.
So that's where he is by episode three. As close as he can stand. Not one inch closer.
Trying desperately to hold the line.
And then Aunt Lydia turns up with a cattle prod and the line is just gone. He's down that hall like the building is on fire.
Not that it helps. He's the driver. No rank, no standing, no business having an opinion, so all he actually gets to do is stand in the doorway and watch, which is so much worse than not being there at all. Serena is the one who ends it, and only because June might be pregnant.
So what does he do with all of that?
He goes and gets ice.
An actual Eye of Gilead, with access to information that could end half the people in that house, and his big move is getting ice and going to see her.
It fixes nothing. It changes nothing. He does it anyway, and then he doesn't make her owe him a single thing for it.
And then he finally opens his mouth. To this point there has been a lot of blessed be the fruit and under his eye and praise be. Armor all the way down.
And then Nick stands in her doorway and tells her he wishes he'd driven away with her.
Out loud. In a house with ears in the walls. To a woman who could trade it for her own safety by breakfast.
And then, this is the part that ruins me, he doesn't do anything with it. Doesn't ask what she's thinking. Doesn't wait for her to say something back. Doesn't push, doesn't manage her, doesn't turn it into a moment she has to participate in.
He says the most dangerous sentence he owns and then removes himself so she doesn't have to answer it.
Six seasons of this man and it never once gets safer and he never once stops.
And then there's Max, doing all of this with nothing.
The ask here is genuinely unhinged when you think about it. Nick stays alive by hiding. So Max has to play a man successfully hiding, which should read as nothing, while also letting us see precisely what's underneath. Both. No dialogue.
And he's doing most of this while the camera is pointed at somebody else.
Then the ice scene happens, where he just lets all of it go. On purpose. While she's watching. While he knows she's watching.
Still not over it.
They don't kiss here and yet it is the hottest thing this show ever put on screen, and everything that comes after it starts here.
That's the art of almost.
Nick's POV.
I'm halfway down the hall already.
Here is the thing nobody warns you about. Being in the room is worse. Because I have no standing. I'm the driver. I have no rank, no authority, no reason on this earth to have an opinion about what an Aunt does to a Handmaid in a house that isn't mine. I can stand there. That's it.
And Serena is the one who ends it. Not me. Her. And she doesn't end it because it's monstrous, she ends it because there might be a baby in the room, which means the thing that saved her today was her own possible usefulness.
I keep my face still. It's the one thing in this house I'm genuinely good at, and I have never in my life hated a skill more than I hate it right now.
Afterwards there's nowhere to put any of it. That's the part they don't tell you about being the quiet one. Everything stays hidden. I can't hit anything. I can't say anything. I can't even look wrong at the woman who let it happen or the woman who did it, because a driver with feelings is a driver somebody starts asking about.
So I get ice.
I can't report it, I can't stop it happening again next week, I can't do a single thing about the appointed nights or the man upstairs or any of it. I can bring her something cold.
It melts the whole way up. Every step up the stairs is another chance to turn around. I don't take it.
Outside her door I stop and think about how to knock. A grown man rehearsing a knock. Too soft is a man with a secret. Too hard is a man with authority he hasn't got.
She opens it and I have to look at what they did.
And then, in a house with ears in the walls, I hear my own voice say it.
I wish I should've… I should've just driven away with you.
Nobody made me say that. That's what I'll be obsessing about at three in the morning. Not that I've been thinking it, because I've been thinking it since the first time I put her in that car. That I let it out.
And now she's looking at me.
I walk closer with the ice and my hand ends up on hers. Not a brush. Not something I could sell as an accident later. My hand on hers, holding it there, and I don't take it away.
She lets me.
Everything I've been holding back comes up at once and there's nothing I can do about it. The only thing I've ever been good at is showing people nothing, and it quits on me here.
I want to kiss her. Taste her. Feel my lips on her. I shouldn't.
My body and hand has already started making decisions without consulting me.
I can hear the house underneath us, somebody in the kitchen, and I catch myself working out how far away that is and how long it would take them to get up here.
She's close enough that I'd only have to.
If I do it, we're both dead. Not metaphorically. Dead.
I'd still do it.
That's what stops me. Not the risk. The fact that I've already said yes to it somewhere and I'm the only one who knows.
Which is how I know I have to leave, right now.
I let go of her hand.
That should be simple. It isn't.
She doesn't step back.
That's the part I'll be stuck on later. She had every reason to. She doesn't. She stays exactly where she is and she keeps looking at me.
I start to walk out of the room, but before I leave I look back.
I don't decide to. My body turns me around and I go with it, because whatever's been pulling at me all night is stronger.
She hasn't moved. Still holding the ice, still looking right at me, and the second her eyes land it goes straight through me. Not in my head. Lower.
That's what she does. From across a room, saying nothing, doing nothing. I have had women in my hands and felt less than I feel standing in this doorway not touching her.
And I breathe out. All of it. The way you do when you've been holding something without noticing and your body decides it's finished asking.
She can see me do it.
Nothing about this ends well and I can't make myself mind.
I should say I'll be more careful. I know I won't.
---
This cut is a departure from the book. No ice in the novel, no Aunt Lydia in the house, no knock at the door but I'd argue this is the most Atwood thing the show ever did.
Because her entire method with Nick is withholding. Offred narrates every page and he barely speaks. You get almost nothing from inside him, ever. What you get instead is behavior with no explanation attached. He does things, at cost, and never once accounts for himself, and you are left to build the man out of the evidence. That isn't a gap in the writing. That is the writing. It's the same instrument the show is playing here, just with a doorway instead of a page.
In the novel there's a night in Serena's parlour. June is downstairs in the dark, somewhere she isn't supposed to be, and Nick is there too. He tells her not to scream. Then he asks what she's doing in there.
She doesn't answer him.
What she thinks instead is the line this chapter is named for.
"I don’t answer. He too is illegal, here, with me, he can’t give me away. Nor I him; for the moment we’re mirrors. He puts his hand on my arm, pulls me against him, his mouth on mine, what else comes from such denial? Without a word. Both of us shaking, how I’d like to.”
Mirrors is doing more work here than it gets credit for.
The obvious read is exposure. He's illegal, she's illegal, neither can move on the other. True, and that alone is more than she gets from anyone else in that house.
But look at what a mirror actually does. It shows you yourself. Not a version of you that's been corrected or improved or made useful, just the thing that's there.
June has not had that in a long time. Everyone who looks at her in that house is looking at a function. She is looked at constantly and seen by nobody, which is the point. Take her name, take her clothes, take her language, and eventually she'll stop being able to find herself.
And Nick is the one man in Gilead who has nothing to gain from her. He can't assign her, breed her, promote himself with her, or punish her. There's no version of this where she's useful to him. So when he looks at her, there's nothing between him and her but the looking.
That runs both directions, which is the part people miss. Nick is also unseen, by design, because that's how he stays alive. Nobody in that house has any interest in what he is underneath, and he's spent years making sure of it.
Two people who have both disappeared on purpose, and the only place either one of them still exists is in the other one's eyes.
That's mirrors.
And it's why the wanting is inseparable from it. Look at what Atwood does with the rest of that sentence: his mouth on hers, both of them shaking, and what else comes from such denial. Not lust as a separate event. The direct consequence of two people being denied everything and then, for a second, being seen. The body answers before either of them has said a word, and neither of them explains it, because there's nothing to explain.
The book then gives them a kiss. And it gives Nick a reason to have been down there at all, because the Commander sent him with a message, which he delivers only after everything else has already happened.
The show takes both of those away.
Nobody sent Nick upstairs. There's no message, no errand, no line he can fall back on if anyone asks him later what he was doing outside her door. He has no cover story and he goes anyway, and then he says a sentence that puts his life in her hands and leaves without waiting to see what she'll do with it.
She doesn't step back.
Strip out the kiss and strip out the summons, and what's left standing in that doorway is the mirrors line with nothing else in the room. Two people holding each other's lives and both choosing not to put them down.
I've been calling these two twin flames for years and I'll keep doing it, but this is the cut that earns it. Not because they're fated or matched or any of the softer things people mean by it. Because the term is about recognition, and about the fact that being recognized costs you something. You see yourself in someone and afterwards you can't go back to not knowing.
Nothing is fixed. They've just both been seen, once, and that's now a thing they have to carry.
That's why it plays hotter than anything that comes after it.
And it's why she keeps going back to him in the novel, on her own, with no excuse, again and again. It's why the appendix works. A room of academics two centuries later works out that Nick was almost certainly the one who got Offred out, that he was Mayday, and that he'd been an Eye the entire time. The book exists because of him.
Every word of it.
No Nick, no tape, no story, no Handmaid's Tale.
His last words to her in the novel: trust me.
No terms. No explanation. No promise he'll be there afterwards.
That's Atwood's Nick.
Image credit: @trademarkblue
