Season 2, Episode 5
One complaint I have heard from readers and friends as I’ve tracked the progress of “The Affair” is that the two actors at the center, Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, have no chemistry. I don’t happen to share this view, but my position isn’t easily defensible, because the perception of chemistry between two people is something that is largely instinctual and individual.
Maybe because both actors are Britons of a certain kind — relatively high-brow with impressive résumés — and both great-looking in a way that feels earthy rather than ethereal, I dig them together as two outcasts in their own worlds. This is the real connection between Noah and Alison, and one that is more firmly established now. In this hour, we learn that Noah’s mother was a waitress and his father was a truck driver; the Williams College education came via a scholarship. Let’s leave aside the heavy — to the point of rhino-weight — symbolism: He won a swimming scholarship, while Alison can’t navigate the water, lost her only child to a drowning accident and is essentially looking for a lifeguard in the most literal reading of the term.
“Things have really changed for you,” Alison observes to Noah one day in bed during her erotic turn at house sitting. Through his marriage to Helen, he has alighted in a world of excessive privilege and moral shortfall, and we are increasingly seeing that he is not all that comfortable there.
Noah’s reaction to his daughter Whitney’s ostensible foray into online bullying — an exercise that causes one troubled girl from the wrong side of the tracks to attempt suicide — is to feel rage, mostly directed at his wife for a parenting style that has presumably been too permissive.
“You were a popular girl, and you raised her to be a popular girl!” Noah explodes to Helen, suggesting that his wife has no idea what it’s like to be an outsider.
I came upon all kinds of reasons to dislike Helen during this episode, the chief one being that she seems to find little repulsion in her father’s immediate plan to lawyer up when Whitney is accused of driving another child to near suicide and to prevent her from writing a note of apology.
Second, Helen just seems like a narcissist. Some of you may object to this diagnosis, because Helen was the one who apparently had wanted to get Whitney into therapy and who suggested going back to Brooklyn as Noah bumbled through his phony objection. But it did seem to say everything about Mrs. Noah Solloway that her plan to get more consolidated parenting for Whitney in the fall was to have Noah take a sabbatical from his job as a high school teacher — and announce it in July — so he could take care of things at home in the afternoons. Let’s remind ourselves here that Helen does not run global assets management at Credit Suisse or the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District; she owns and operates an eco-store in Brooklyn that allows her to take the entire summer off and requires her to test-drive organic deodorant.
Moreover, Helen clearly just sees Noah’s writing as a dilettante’s project and measures success in her father’s terms — blockbuster novels, one assumes, in the mold of James Patterson. How has Noah never cheated before?
These episodes that have veered away from the trickery of conflicting perspectives and have instead merely aimed to contextualize the characters are stronger than the ones that have come before. During Alison’s 30 minutes, we see a further delving into her family problems, particularly with her loopy energy-healer mother (Deirdre O’Connell), a narcissist among narcissists. I like this character, though, because she seems to be as maniacally intuitive as she is self-involved. She immediately sees that Noah and Alison are having an affair, and she quickly provides Alison with the means to forgive herself.
We know that Alison is not destined to stay a Lockhart forever, because in the flash-forward scenes she is living in New York, and Cole just doesn’t seem like a TriBeCa kind of guy. Was the ranch ultimately sold? And do we suspect that Alison got a piece of Cole’s $6 million in a divorce settlement? We know that Alison has a chip on her shoulder. She had wanted to go to medical school and couldn’t afford the prep courses for the boards. “The system is rigged,” she tells Noah, which you know he understands because in some sense he has been a beneficiary of the rigging.
I want to think that Alison took her $3 million and put some of it toward Kaplan courses and got into medical school at Columbia. I want to think that she had nothing to do with the murder of Cole’s brother. And maybe I even want to think that she and Noah eventually end up together. (I definitely want to think that Alison really isn’t the kind of person who, in the 21st century, has never heard of Sonoma, Calif., particularly because she works in a restaurant in Montauk, where you would think the menu would feature at least one California chardonnay. I know that the writers are going to call me and say, “You must have lowered the volume to get a phone call then, because it wasn’t Sonoma she’d never heard of, it was Shenyang, the largest city in northeast China!”)
But I digress. I am feeling so taken with this romantic fantasy that I will leave it all to the rest of you to hash out the details that have trickled out of this episode about the crime at hand. Who is looking guilty right now? Also, what did everyone think of Oscar’s visit to the Butler house and the ugly way it went down? Is he setting Noah up for blackmail?