Season 1, Episode 4
Admittedly, I have gone back and forth on “The Affair,” feeling at once kind of addicted to it – and not entirely unjustified in my addiction because it comes from a team of writers (Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi) whose work I have admired – and at the same time finding its overly theatrical sense of portent and incredible laziness to detail (not to mention moments of outright stupidity) really hard to stomach.
This week I feel less ambivalent, which is to say that I feel slightly more willing to concede that the 10 hours any viewer will spend watching “The Affair” may not turn out to be a waste of time. The construction of this last episode was a bit different, in a good way, and relied less on the good-witch, bad-witch dynamic and gimmick of conflicting viewpoints that has left one viewpoint – Noah Solloway’s – seeming consistently unbelievable.
This time out, Alison Lockhart’s perspective picks up where we left off in Noah’s telling. The two have stolen some hours together on Block Island on the pretense (semi-true) that Noah is doing some research for his novel. (Because the show has been so shoddy in its particulars, it is worth noting that there really is a ferry from Montauk to Block Island). After some shopping, some gloomy island history and a visit to a lighthouse, Alison and Noah end up in bed, finally. They get a room at the inn, and I don’t know about you, but I cringed in a good way when Noah comes up $50 short on the bill and clearly feels he can’t risk using a credit card. Noah’s obsession with not leaving a trace of his infidelity – his willingness to switch out a chest in the room they get because it gets banged up in a moment of anger and replace it with one from next door – makes you wonder, of course, if he’ll ultimately get found out.
Let’s shift for a moment to the flash forward scenes. What do we make of the fact that in Alison’s version the detective is in a long, happy marriage and in Noah’s version he is a divorced father? The episode begins with Noah on the phone to one of his children helping with an essay. The detective starts talking about his kids and his marital status. Is the implication here than Noah, too, is divorced? We know he is married to someone (given the details provided in last week’s flash forward) but we don’t know if he is still married to Helen.
It’s hard to talk about emotional authenticity in a show like this because the whole enterprise is predicated on the idea that there’s really no such thing, that all recollection is subjective and that we remember in ways that rationalize our more offensive behaviors. I’m not sure I buy this 100 percent, but in any event the moment that has made the show feel the most realistic so far is the moment in which Alison tells Noah that her son is gone. We’re not meant to believe that this conversation went any other way than the way it did. The revelation brings them someplace – to a place of real connection – that neither of them can dispute. I liked that Noah remained silent through much of Alison’s telling that he didn’t supply easy and false comfort. What did you all think?
Is there a consensus that things have taken a turn for the better?