‘The Affair’ Recap, Season 3, Episode 6: This Old House

Maybe this makes me a lousy viewer of a show that prides itself on presenting divergent perspectives on the same events, but I make it a point never to try and see The Affair through the eyes of people who don’t like The Affair. From where I’m standing, this show’s nuanced, empathetic, unsparing work on heavy-hitter topics like grief, decades-long relationships, self-injury, self-medication, divorce, the psychology of wealth and poverty, and of course love, lust, and infidelity are almost without peer. People who treat it like a soap or let their disgust for this or that character’s destructive or impulsive behavior color their take on the show as a whole can make like Noah Solloway and go jump in a lake.

But after this week’s episode I feel like I’m a bit closer to understanding the naysayers. It’s not that I agree with them, mind you. Nor is it that this installment featured a few of the season’s clunkiest bits — Noah’s factory-worker townie acquaintance berating him like Jon Voight did to Ben Stiller in Zoolander, Noah’s hands shaking so badly his son has to open his pills just like Noah had to do for his mom!!!!!, etc.

It’s more that, well, this show is doing an awful lot, isn’t it? To the above topics we can now officially add opioid addiction, hallucinations, attempted murder, covering up a murder, more cases of people sleeping with their exes than you can count, troubled teens, assisted suicide, attempted suicide, BDSM, Noah keeping key parts of his life hidden from everyone for decades (and more to the point, for two and a half seasons of The Affair), and on and on and on. If you feel like the show’s grasp on any of its core four characters or their central conflicts is shaky, I can’t imagine how you feel when it heads off on any of these tangents.

The irony is that Noah’s now vastly more complicated backstory feels as though it were developed to answer complaints about the character. Without knowing how long ago showrunner Sarah Treem planned these plot elements this is all sheer speculation, but for viewers who wondered why Noah would destroy his seemingly happy family for a shot at spontaneity, or why he’d sacrifice himself and go to jail to protect Helen and Alison when it was quite possible all of them could have gotten away with it, or why his relationships with women seem both sincerely intense and self-sabotaging, or why he swung from the supremely self-possessed Helen to the deeply damaged Alison — well, Noah convincing himself he’s somehow culpable for killing his mother after being the only person left to take care of her and then failing to kill himself in turn threads the needle quite nicely.

Is it all a bit radioactive-spider origin story for a behavior pattern that’s not really that difficult to contextualize? Perhaps. But then again anyone who’s been in therapy for long enough can attest to those “holy shit, it was because of what happened at my cousin’s confirmation when I was in fourth grade!!!!” moments. Giving Noah these dark secrets doesn’t take away his agency or explain away his good and bad qualities, nor do they singlehandedly make those things possible. They’re simply the building blocks out of which he constructed the rest of his life.

And in the meantime, it’s worth considering that much of what The Affair has going on is actually quite good, in all kinds of ways! Helen’s point of view continues to provide cringe-comedy gold, like when her reunited parents no sooner finish telling her how happy they are together than her dad chokes and her mom wallops him in the chest to dislodge the obstruction, or the smash cut from Helen and her ex-flame Max making passionate, reckless love in his near-empty apartment to the regretful aftermath.

Meanwhile, on Noah’s side of the story, if you dig deeper than the big plot twists you’ll note a theme emerging: the way writing fiction shapes readers’ perception of you as a real person. Obviously this has played a prominent role in the show before, with various cops and townsfolk combing Noah’s book Descent for clues about both his affair and Scotty Lockhart’s death, and prison guard John Gunther taking offense both at that book and Noah’s subsequent manuscript. But in this episode there’s an example less directly tied to his big life-and-death struggles: Basically, everyone thinks he’s a sexual superfreak. Just seconds after telling Noah her husband has Alzheimer’s, following Noah’s return home from getting in a car accident, Juliet drops trou and asks Noah to tie her up — after all, he wrote about that in his book, didn’t he? As if he’s some kind of sexual on-demand service. Noah’s old friends back in Pennyslvania give him a hard time about this too, calling his book 50 Shades of Solloway. The work he presumably created to transcend his personal experience now defines it.

Finally, the show just looks really good. Observe:

The set dressing and design in Noah’s dad’s neglected old house in particular is so dead on you can practically feel the weight of the air.

So, Affair skeptics, I see where you’re coming from. But I’ve got only one thing to do and that’s like The Affair and then sink back into the ocean.
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.

Where to Stream 'The Affair'