'Brave New World' Episode 3: The tragedy of Linda, the 'abandoned' Beta Plus who survived motherhood
When we first meet Linda, played by Demi Moore, she is sitting by the window sill, her nightgown falling off her shoulders, a drink in hand. John, after he gets home, sighs in exasperation and tells her to put some clothes on and not let the whole neighborhood see her like that.
It is a sight he has obviously seen before and he is used to his mother not knowing how to behave. Linda has a disconnected air and it is not because she is sozzled most of the time. It is because she is waiting to go home to the New World. She has fed John stories of the New World and his "Alpha plus" father since he was a child — tales that he thinks are just fanciful delusions. Despite her disheveled state, she holds herself like a queen who is slumming it. You also get the sense that neither John nor she are fully integrated into the Old World's society. But it is in Episode 3 is when we understand how tragic a figure Linda is.
When John saves Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx from the massacre and gets them home, Linda's eyes are as big as saucers. In the next instant, she has shaken off the apathy that has been clinging to her for years. For the rest of the episode, she acts like Sarah Connor, the 'Judgement Day' version. She digs the bullet out of Bernard, shakes the shell-shocked Lenina out of her terror-induced paralysis, argues with her son John, kills Madysun, seduces her neighbor, convinces her son to keep going and in the final tense moment, pushes John through AI Indra's blue barrier, taking a bullet for him.
In her final moments on the plane, right after she has seen a glimpse of the 'Promised Land' of New London from the rocket, she dies like Moses. But not before giving John a final hint about the world he is about to enter. Despite taking a bullet for him, being an exemplary mother in a moment of crisis, she tells him, "Don't call me mother," — her last attempt to teach him about the place he belongs to but has never experienced.
We get a sense that she hasn't been a "good mother" according to Old World customs, but she has prepared him relentlessly for returning to the New World. Her actions show that she reached beyond her conditioning to be as much of a mother to John as she possibly could. She shows him a slap-dash kind of friend/lover type of mothering, molding what she knows about human connections to nurture him.
In an earlier exchange with Lenina, Linda tells her that she is a "Beta Plus", straightening with pride, as she says the words to someone who will get what those words mean. Lenina is part horrified and part astounded by this revelation. She looks disgusted when she says, "then, how are you a...?", leaving the question hanging on ellipses, unable to say the taboo word "mother". Linda completes her sentence and then adds that she once thought like her but has realized since that being a mother isn't as bad as "being abandoned".
Lenina is shocked that an Alpha lover could ever abandon a Beta, since Betas are conditioned since birth to trust an Alpha, completely, giving over their bodies and selves completely to anyone above them in the hierarchy. Being abandoned is a scenario she can't even imagine.
The original 'Brave New World' has a lot of references to Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', where Prospero and his child, Miranda, are abandoned on a rotting boat by his own "trusted" brother, mirroring Linda being betrayed and abandoned in the Savage Lands when she got pregnant. She, like Prospero, keeps her child alive despite not being equipped to do so.
But her years in the Savage Lands also change her intrinsically as a human, which shows in the way she treats Bernard, an Alpha Plus. She wants to keep him alive but it is not because she values his life but because he is her ticket back to the New World. She in fact takes perverse pleasure in his pain when they are patching him up. In comparison, she is much kinder and sweeter to Lenina, a Beta plus like her, and similarly vulnerable to her Alpha's whims.
Her death just before they reach the New World is also a great update on the original novel in which the character of Linda gets to the New World, lives in a soma haze, ignores John, and then dies.
In the TV update, her death has meaning and is the final act of her tragedy. Not only does she not get to the New World and get revenge for her abandonment — she is also unable to help John integrate into New World's society even though that is the role she has wanted to play all these years. She can only give him her last piece of advice — "Don't call me mother".
'Brave New World' premiered on Peacock on July 15 and is available to stream.