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The Affair

Well. Just when I thought I’d seen everything.

Wait—who? Exactly. Far from the one-POV-per-episode model it adopted for its Season Three premiere, The Affair isn’t even content to limit its perspective to the core quartet of Noah, Alison, Helen, and Cole who’ve anchored the show since the beginning. Shit, it’s even bypassing Vik and Luisa, the significant others introduced for the jilted-spouse half of that equation last season. We spend the first half of this week’s episode in the company of Juliette, the glamorous but world-weary French professor — ah, but I repeat myself — who kindled the first few sparks of a romance with Noah in the premiere, only for them to be seemingly doused by the blood gushing out of his slashed neck. Turns out their business with each other, not to mention Noah’s time on earth, is far from over. So too is The Affair’s capacity to surprise, shock, delight, and fascinate.

Juliette’s POV, you see, is notable for far more than its novelty. Her interaction with Noah — first as the author of Descent, the book she surreptitiously reads and languidly masturbates to, then as an impromptu dinner guest and would-be lover, finally as his quite literal savior — goes a long way to smoothing out his rough edges, dulling our perception of him as a self-centered, self-pitying, entitled cad. This of course was always a bogus way of looking at the character, even when he was all those things and more; If this show is about anything it’s about how people are kaleidoscopically complex and impossible to peg only to their best or worst moments. But his perspective on the day he met Juliette was such a litany of macho-writer moments, from his overeager ex Helen to his estranged ex Alison to his furiously feminist student Audrey to the human come-on who was Juliette herself, that it’s hard to believe his behavior was anything but abominable in other people’s eyes at least as much as his own.

For Juliette, however, this is not so. She may be embarrassed by her interest and engrossment in Noah’s book, pretending it’s a dull medieval text behind a plain brown wrapper, but that interest and engrossment is, uh…palpable.

During the dinner party’s contentious debate over rape, sex, and consent, it’s Juliette, not Noah, who defends the role of uncertainty and mystery in desire and eroticism, to Audrey’s visible and vocal chagrin. “There’s a lot about what I want that I don’t understand, and that I don’t expect a lover to understand,” she says as her student draws her into the argument. Eventually she comes out against campus verbal-consent regulations as a matter of, for lack of a better phrase, erotic principle. “The articulate is the enemy of the erotic,” she says. “Isn’t the whole point that you don’t know what your lover will do next, that you give yourself over to a sensory experience that you don’t understand and can’t control? The reason I like sex is because I can finally, for a moment, turn off my neurotic mind and just be consumed.” This is extremely treacherous territory, and the show gives all sides a respectful hearing; that they all, at times, seem parodic as well indicates the level of innate “I know it when I see it” at work in everyone involved.

The point in terms of Noah, though, is that he keeps quiet throughout the entire discussion, contributing only that he doesn’t think Juliette seems crazy. When Audrey confesses to Juliette out of the blue that her loathing for Noah goes hand-in-hand with the overpowering desire to fuck him, there’s no sense, here or in the premiere for that matter, that he’s at all aware of her interest, much less that he’s exploiting it. Most of the particulars of his and Juliette’s day together go unchallenged by her perspective: Their entire afternoon meeting is passed by without revision, and their brief clinch before he cuts things off in a panic and runs home proceeds pretty much as it did the first time we saw it. In other words, Compared to how he came across in his own POV, Noah Solloway is practically a saint in Juliette’s eyes, or at the very least a knightly representation of the courtly love she studies. (Arthurians out there will note that he’s maimed before he reenters her chamber, just like Lancelot and Guinevere in “The Knight of the Cart.”)

But Juliette’s romantic misadventures don’t stop challenging our preconceptions there. Much of her clandestine courtship with Noah is juxtaposed with the comparatively sordid sexual interest their students have in them: Audrey’s hate-lust for Noah and her grotesque sparring partner and former sex partner Mike’s hot-for-teacher routine for Juliette. Madame Professor is in fact in the process of fighting off the kid’s won’t-take-no-for-an-answer advances when Audrey interrupts to spill her guts about her feelings for Professor Solloway. When Noah flees Juliette’s bedroom, the older woman first discourages Audrey from pursuing him by saying she’d never know what he really thought of her work in class, then breaks her own advice and has some pretty one-sided-looking sex with Mike in the kitchen.

No wonder this kind of behavior is usually forbidden in the university code of conduct.

Mixed in with all this, importantly, is Juliette’s revelation to Noah that she’s a) married to a b) older man whom she met when she was his student. The cycle of sleaze perpetuates itself, right? Ah, but things are never that simple on this show. When Juliette facetimes with her cuckolded husband back in France, we discover he’s not just older but elderly, and suffering from Alzheimer’s-induced memory loss and dementia. Suddenly the skeevy, predatory student-teacher sexual relationship the past several scenes have conjured in our minds is complicated by this picture of how such a romance can evolve through the years into something not merely mature but shot through with devastating sadness and loss. Juliette’s tears during her “conversation” with her husband and his nurse come laden with any number of possible regrets: mourning the man she used to know, remembering the heat of the forbidden they once shared but which is now barely recognizable, grieving over how much he’s suffering, regretting her infidelity, regretting that her ongoing marriage forces any sexual component of her life to be infidelity, wishing she’d slept with Noah and not Mike as part of that infidelity, wishing that her husband could still experience those same pleasures and desires…not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s more that’s of genuine human interest and experience going on in this single scene than Westworld can muster in any five-episode stretch.

It’s dense enough that Noah’s half of the episode feels like a breeze by comparison. Traveling to Noah’s apartment to return his jacket and, presumably, take another crack at getting in his pants, Juliette discovers him bleeding out and saves his life. He has no memory of the attack and no idea who saved him or, once he finds out her identity, what the hell she was doing there. He rather brusquely blows off Helen’s attempts to comfort and care for him, though this being a Noah POV she comes across like a martinet despite her good intentions.

Between his rescue and his later return to Juliette’s house to stay rather than return to his unsafe apartment, Noah has a series of key conversations and flashbacks. We get another glimpse from what seems like his childhood, as he runs through a forest to a boat on a lake as his father (?) calls his name. His sister Nina (Jennifer Esposito, working wonders in a small role; their “Nina, what are you doing?” “I’m crying, you asshole!” exchange is the night’s big laugh) insists that he keep their father’s house, apparently as penance for something that happened between the two siblings thirty years ago. Finally, we see the roots of the abuse he suffered at the hands of prison guard John Gunther (Brendan Fraser, clearly exploding with glee at the chance to play a James Gumb–style mumble-mouthed maniac): A forgotten acquaintance from Pennsylvania during Noah’s years as a high-school swim-team star, Gunther at first befriends the writer, “looking out for him” and giving him a typewriter to craft his next book with until, after reading Descent, he takes an unhealthy interest in Noah’s photo of Alison and nearly dislocates Noah’s shoulder in a terrifyingly sudden power-trip attack to acquire it. (Solloway’s memory of this last bit is so biting he that he actually rats the guard out to the detectives working on his stabbing; here’s hoping the thin blue line is a dotted one in this case.) There’s also a brief glimpse of a caged bird, though whether that’s memory or metaphor is unknown.

Does Gunther’s swim-team memory, which apparently the sadistic screw carried with him for years as he followed Noah’s career, have anything to do with the Nina incident, or with the running/boat flashback, or with the omnipresent water/drowning imagery that’s dogged the show since the first time the opening credits rolled? It seems likely, but two weeks ago a POV from Juliette seemed impossible. Like the relationship its title references, The Affair comes out of nowhere, and is all the more irresistible for it.

[Where to Stream The Affair]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.