‘The Affair’ Recap: We’re All Kind Of Sluts

The Affair tells the complicated saga of an extramarital affair and the havoc it causes by splitting the narrative into two points of view: HIS & HERS. To wit, Decider will be recapping the show’s second season in a similar way with Sean T. Collins covering the female POV and Meghan O’Keefe responding with her take on the male perspective. Today, we’re discussing the fifth episode of the show’s second season (“Episode 205”).

PART 1: ALISON

“People don’t see me, Cole. They don’t. They just wanna fuck me, or they don’t…see me. They don’t care. Sometimes I worry at night that I’m not a real person, that I’m just a figment of other people’s imaginations.” In this week’s episode of The Affair, Alison (Ruth Wilson) self-diagnosed her core self-esteem issue with a level of insight you’d usually get charged by the hour for. That she offers this analysis not in her own POV segment, but in her estranged husband Cole’s, is largely immaterial. Okay, maybe it’s proof that Cole knows her better than just about anyone, since this entirely accurate appraisal is his memory’s construction of their conversation. But it also demonstrates that Cole sees her as a woman in need of rescue…which is her point exactly. She’s always a character in someone else’s story, while her own gets pushed to the wayside.

This begins early on, when her earnest attempts to be a good assistant to her not-so-humble hostess Yvonne are greeted with barely concealed condescension and contempt. Thus Alison’s ever-growing list of women who are incredibly mean to her adds another member. The high-powered publishing exec has her daughter’s picture-perfect family on the way for a visit, and a Very Important manuscript to devour—Noah’s. The latter, of course, Alison has not been allowed by her fiancé to read; the former is something she’s been doubly denied, first by the death of her son, then by the court order barring her from contact with the Solloway kids. Factor in her killer career and without even trying, Yvonne���s gotten everything Alison ever wanted.

Alison takes something from Yvonne as well, but it’s not something she wanted. It’s her husband Robert’s visible boner.

Called it!

In retrospect, it was perhaps inadvisable of the pair to have one of their apparently semi-regular heart-to-hearts about love, sex, and marriage while Alison had her hands on Robert’s upper thigh. But there they are, exercising his bad leg and discussing their shared history of relationships rooted in marital infidelity. Robert, who cheated on his first wife with Yvonne, her friend, tells Alison not to be ashamed: “You didn’t kill anyone. You’re young, you’re beautiful, and you fell in love. There’s nothing criminal about that.” Alison responds by spilling her guts about the real genesis of her and Noah: the kiss on the beach that “was the first time in my life I couldn’t say no” (she described it last season as “the most perfect, erotic moment of my life”), the sense that she couldn’t stop thinking about “being naked with him,” how she “felt like I’d been asleep for years, in this fog of grief, and then there’s this person that makes me feel alive….” Her description of the allure of adultery is as dead-on as his benediction of it is generous.

But then he goes and ruins it by popping wood and blaming her: “I guess you just have this effect on men.” Ewwwww! It’s this reduction of her to a vamp, a siren, a succubus, that offends Alison far more than the mere fact of his erection—which neither of them made any effort whatsoever to pretend they didn’t notice, the way one normally might were one not in the erection-noticing mood.

And it’s Noah’s apparent agreement with this assessment that drives her completely off the deep end. When Robert hobbles down to her waterfront cabin to deliver the news that her services are no longer required, she responds by running up to the main house to confront Yvonne, as big a “don’t go in there!” moment as anything in any slasher movie.

But she finds something worse than her angry ex-boss: Noah’s manuscript. Now she learns that his big new book is about their affair—about her. And as she sees it, she is nothing in his eyes but the fuck of his life. “She was sex,” the book bluntly puts it, at the start of a torrent of increasingly graphic sex scenes. Alison reads them in wide-eyed horror, like Shelley Duvall in a version of the typewriter scene in The Shining with “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” replaced by a description of how her pussy tastes.

So she flees. First she goes to the city, where she catastrophically confronts Helen, brutal as ever, at the Solloway brownstone…

Then to Montauk, where presumably she’ll encounter Cole, whose sexual and marital misadventures that day play like a comic-relief version of her own. Man, I can’t wait to see her take on their hook-up; given that she tells him that men only want to fuck her, and he does exactly that, my guess is her version will be a lot less romantic than his is.

But let’s go back to the thing that made her run to Cole in the first place. Was what Noah wrote about Alison really that different from what Alison had just told Robert about Noah? The overpowering desire, the all-consuming obsession, the almost metaphysical feeling of resurrection: Noah’s book may have been a little more Penthouse Letters about it all, but they’re describing the same essential phenomenon. The main distinction is a gendered one: Men are not faulted for lust; women are. How the pair each characterize their initial falling-in-love can’t help but have been shaped by this dynamic.

Which gets us to The Affair’s powerful portrayal of the different kinds of virtue men and women are allowed to embody. As this episode amply demonstrates, in Alison’s eyes, no one suffers like she does. No one’s anguish is so profound, no one’s isolation so total, no one’s inability, and desperation, to be truly understood by others so crushing. Ain’t that the patriarchy for you? What, after all, is “femininity” but the sexualized, societally mandated performance of vulnerability? Contrast this with Noah’s point of view, an ongoing study in the masculine martyrdom of a self-proclaimed mensch. He’s a Good Guy; she’s a Bad Girl. This is what the world has allowed them to be. This is what they’ve self-destructively embraced. “I didn’t try to steal your husband,” Alison tells Helen lamely at her front door. “I’m not that kind of person.” And yet! If The Affair is about anything, it’s about where the rubber of the kind of person we think ourselves to be meets the road of the kind of person we really are. Somewhere on that road stands Scotty Lockhart.

PART 2: COLE

Alison knocked on a door to confront the sins of her past, but her estranged ex Cole (Joshua Jackson) is standing on a doorstep eager to misbehave. Yes, he took the bait and went to that drunk woman’s home for a “discreet” sex romp. His downward spiral, though, is interrupted when the door opens and it’s the same friendly, beautiful girl he ran into — when he almost ran over a kid — weeks ago.
For a moment, you feel as though this is the stuff of Cole’s dreams. He’s transfixed by the beautiful home, the beautiful face, and the beautiful boy. But this lovely moment leads directly into a nightmare sex scene. The two have zero chemistry and their athletic sex veers immediately into a satire of middlebrow sex fantasies. It’s not erotic, but monsterous.

Of course, before he can come, the woman’s angry husband storms in. He punches Cole and scurries him out. He’s been literally caught with his pants down and the comely maid knows it. Soon, though, the tables turn. Cole catches her — who happens to be named Luisa (Catalina Sandino Moreno) — leaving Scotty’s boat. While Cole drives her to her job at The End, the two fess up to the fact that what they were both doing was pure “fucking.”

Luisa is a reverse exposure image of Alison. Everything that Alison pushed away from —waitressing, Montauk, Cole — is what Luisa wants. They also stand at moral opposites. While Alison succumbed to Oscar’s lecherous advances and helped out in the Lockhart drug ring, Luisa wants to sue Scotty for taking advantage of her and is furious to discover that he is drug dealer. Alison is horrified to discover that Noah has documented every sordid detail about their love affair, and Luisa has to admit that she is literally “undocumented.” Later Alison frets that everyone thinks she’s a slut; Luisa understands we’re all kind of sluts.

Not to mention the fact that Alison was the beginning of Cole’s story and he’s pursuing Luisa at “The End.” It’s tidy, right? Almost too much so.
Yeah, The Affair might be getting a little too caught up in its metaphors, puns, and conceits. Scotty declares, “Look, Montauk is over, man! The old Montauk — it’s gone. If we don’t put our money into the future, we might as well just lay down in the middle of the road and let the summer people drive all over us!” The show soars when it’s dealing in nuance, but this moment had all the subtlety of the Kool-Aid man bursting through a wall.

Both Cole and Alison are at a crossroads. She is on the verge of deciding for once and for all if she wants to go back to Cole or stay with Noah. For now, she’s crawled back home and cuddled up next to her ex. Cole might have sparkled to life after meeting Luisa, but he succumbs to his old ways. But as Scotty himself said, “The old Montauk – it’s gone.” Cole and Alison and Noah and Helen might be swirling around each other like driftwood, but we know where this is headed.
What we don’t know is what happens to finally split Alison and Cole up for good or if that cooing baby we’ve seen in court is Noah’s child. Just like the final scene gave us a convincing argument for why Noah is being blamed for Cole’s crime, we finally have proof that the baby could be a Lockhart and not a Solloway.

[Watch The Affair on Showtime] or [Watch The Affair on Hulu]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.
[Gifs by Jaclyn Kessel, copyright Showtime]