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The Affair

Hey, remember when The Affair wasn’t The Noah Solloway Show? Believe it or not, there was such a time not so long ago. Noah’s story — his stint in prison, his torment at the hands of sadistic guard John Gunther, his post-release trysts with Alison and Helen and (sorta) his new romantic interest Irène, his attempted murder, his infection and addiction, his hallucinations, his secret origin as his mother’s euthanasia provider — have come to dominate the show so totally that I’d all but forgotten what it was like to truly see things through other eyes. Not just his own, I mean, but those people who have something other than Noah Solloway on their minds.

This week, that’s what we got. If episode seven was a return to The Affair’s old format — two tightly overlapping points of view on the same events — episode eight is a return to The Affair’s old setting, both physically and psychologically. Taking place almost entirely in Montauk, as beautifully shot as ever, this Alison/Cole installment focuses squarely on the issues that drove their stories since the show’s inception: grief, loss, infidelity, and the sense of being connected by something deeper than love — tragedy.

On Alison’s side of the ledger, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. An unexpected change of heart by Cole’s wife Luisa sets Alison on the road to shared custody of her and Cole’s daughter — and her ex is none too happy with Luisa for calling that particular audible on the stand in family court. When she brings Cole breakfast as a peace offering, he takes the food but blows off her attempt to make nice: “You’re still you,” he fumes regarding her fitness for parenting and penchant for bad decisions. His contempt for her is truly a portrait in chutzpah: Last I checked, it takes two to tango, or to cheat on your wife with your ex, whichever you prefer.

Cole is no happier with her announcement that she’s found a job as a grief counselor for bereaved parents at the mental hospital where she herself stayed — and this shocked me as much as it shocked her. Instead of being happy for her newfound vocation, her attempt to derive something good from their son’s death, or even the mere fact of her gainful employment, he writes the whole thing off as more drama, another case of Alison pushing and pushing until whatever solid ground she’s managed to build for herself collapses. What will her daughter do, after all, when Mommy has a job that’s four hours away? “I thought you’d be happy for me,” Alison says. “Of course you did, Alison,” Cole replies, “because it’s about you. Everything’s always about you.”

But it’s Helen Solloway, of all people, who has Cole’s number: “I think people see what they want to see in other people.” She’s talking about her and Alison’s wildly different perceptions of Noah Solloway, during an oh-so-coincidental meet-up the two women have in a Montauk bar, but she might as well be delivering The Affair’s thesis statement. It applies not only to how the show is structured, but to how it views the titular relationship. At varying times, Cole and Alison, Alison and Noah, and Noah and Helen have all projected on to their counterparts the things they most desire and most loathe. In Cole’s case, as he’s done multiple times this season, he lays all the emotional turmoil he feels when Alison is around at her feet, treating her like a sort of human tornado. Of course, if the atmospheric conditions inside of him were less favorable, she’d have no power to turn his life upside down.

At any rate, Cole’s diagnosis of Alison as a narcissist had been proven false just once scene before, during her first outing as a grief counselor. Her attempts to console a much younger mother who’d lost a daughter are thoughtful, humane, and as successful as such a thing could ever really be. She encourages the young woman to hang on to the memories of her child, physically so: “His sheets still had his smell, and I used to wrap them around a pillow and pretend I was holding him,” she says of her late son, an image that’s crushing in its need for contact. She encourages her patient to stand up to her mother’s attempts to make her “be myself again”: “You won’t ever be the same. She has to understand that.” She even gets a laugh out of the woman by revealing her One Weird Trick for not killing herself: “I, uh, I had an affair.” Compared to their shared knowledge “that breath can end,” in Alison’s words, it really is pretty funny.

When we shift to Cole’s POV, he seems no more interested in this potentially life-saving work than he was through Alison’s eyes. For that matter, he’s only slightly less resistant to shared custody, and even harsher when she tries to give him breakfast as a thank-you. But it turns out he has his reasons: His building project is in danger of being shut down (apparently he belongs to the Carmela Soprano Association of Highly Symbolic Home Builders), and more importantly he’s realized he’s still in love with Alison. This comes out in dribs and drabs: when he first dodges Luisa’s suggestion that they have a kid of their own, then seizes on it like a lifeline; when he confides in Oscar Hodges, apparently his genuine BFF at this point, that he’s slept with Alison and still carrying a torch for her; and finally when Alison comes to see him in jail, where he’s been tossed for getting rough with the detectives investigating Noah’s assault.

Turns out Cole was in New Jersey the night Noah was stabbed and did keep it a secret (except from Big Brother EZ-Pass, of course; did he not watch The Night Of?), but for a whole different reason: He went to that mental hospital to try and get info on Alison out of her doctor. He tells Luisa it was for ammo in the custody dispute, but really it was an attempt to figure out if he could get back together with her. “I need you and I want you and I miss you and I love you and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t,” he says, laying it all on the line.

And yet he doesn’t act on it. “I’m not Noah Solloway. I am a good man.” There it is: The Affair’s candidate for the source of male anxiety, the driver of male martyrdom, and the apex of male virtue, socially speaking. Sleep with Alison on several occasions? Sure. Leave his wife for her? Uh-uh, because Cole Lockhart Is a Good Man.

Alison gets it, but she also gets that on some level it’s less morality than vanity. “If you leave Luisa now,” she tells Cole on the boardwalk after he’s released, goes home, then gets back up in the middle of the night to see her again, “you can’t play the good guy anymore. Then you’re an asshole, just like me. But maybe you’re a happy asshole, instead of a miserable hero.” Damn — that’s a surgical-precision dissection of the thought process involved in ending a marriage, and now it’s Cole’s turn to make that choice.

So make it he does. He stays with Luisa. “This is my home. Our home. If you’ll still have me.” She welcomes him back into her arms, and he hugs her with eyes open and radiating misery. He won’t be the happy asshole. But Alison should have warned him that he may become an unhappy asshole instead. It’s a powerful suite of scenes, and a reminder of the intimate insights that put The Affair on the map to begin with.