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The Affair

Helen Solloway has something to say. To a lot of people. Who aren’t going to want to hear it.

During her opening half of this week’s climactic episode (unusually helmed by two separate directors, John Dahl for Helen and Jeffrey Reiner for Noah), she does nothing less than confess her responsibility for the death of Scott Lockhart. She tells her parents and children (sans Whitney, who may need to hear it more than anyone, but who’s off with Furkat, presumably) during a disastrous dinner out in Montauk the day after Vik left her and she and Noah had sex. Her parents had been surprisingly kind to her, in their unctuous and overbearing way — praising Vik (“He has great energy and a very strong core!” says her yoga-loving Mom), taking responsibility for their shit job at parenting her over the years, offering to help her in any way that they can.

But then the topic of Noah’s return to the house comes up, and their rage and hatred toward him is too much for Helen to take. When the ensuing shouting match makes her poor daughter Stacey cry — “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Mommy!” she says through her tears, as if she’d done something she needs to apologize for — Helen says that neither her daughter nor her ex did anything wrong. “I did. It was me. I hit Scotty Lockhart. I was driving.”

To her kids’ stunned horror, her parents immediately physically grab her and drag her down to their panic room in order to prevent her from driving over to Scott and Cole’s mom’s house and telling her everything. “Please listen to me,” she says, “I killed someone!” Her mom’s response is a slap across the face. “It would be truly selfish if you confessed,” she tells her daughter, her voice stern, her words almost surreal in their irony. Fortunately, in the confusion she’s able to lock her folks in their own panic room and escape. (Note to self: Don’t get a panic room that locks from the outside.)

But Helen finds she’s unable to confess to Cherry Lockhart. Instead she drives to a bar to get loaded, which is where we see her version of the run-in with Alison glimpsed from the opposite POV last week. (Separating two takes on the same scene into two different episodes is another unusual move.) Here, it’s Alison who approaches her, not the other way around. Here, Alison is the glib flibbertigibbet she’s always been in Helen’s eyes — at least until Helen unwittingly brings up the death of her son Gabriel, which she legitimately regrets doing within seconds of recognizing what she did.

Alison isn’t mad, though. Rather, she uses this as an occasion to explain the heedless nothing-matters attitude and behavior she feels drew Noah to her in the first place. “He saw my recklessness as some kind of freedom,” she says. “I wasn’t free. That abandon? That was just me not giving a shit.”

But Helen’s own period of recklessness is over. So she tries to confess to Alison, but the other woman stops her short. She knows what really happened to Scott, she says, because she was there. Scott’s attack on her and her self-defensive push was what put him in the road in the first place. Helen laughs, feeling like an idiot for believing Noah went to prison strictly for her sake (and thus settling the long-standing issue of whether she’d seen Alison on the side of the road that night). And when Alison picks up where Helen’s parents left off and encourages her not to confess, she has added ammo: Scott was trying to hurt her, and telling the truth about that night won’t help anyone, least of all his mother. One last crying jag outside the Lockhart house is indeed as close as Helen gets to coming clean.

But she still has to tell Vik, who left her over his inability to understand why on earth she was still so devoted to her ex-husband. Here, her confession is as much about self-perception as vehicular manslaughter. “I’ve had this idea of who I am,” she tells him outside his hospital, “that I’m a good person, that I’m generous, and I put other people before myself.” This zeal to see herself as everyone’s caretaker is her version of Noah’s martyrdom complex, Cole’s Good Guy syndrome, and Alison’s belief in her unique and unmatchable suffering; as with their personality drivers, it’s a highly gendered form of virtue and sacrifice. And letting Noah take the fall, as a sort of punishment-by-proxy for his affair, ruins all this, because when it came time to truly put other people before herself, she was too much of “a coward” to do so. Vik is understanding, even comforting in his self-described “asshole” way, telling her she’ll be able to live with it, offering to get together with her after work. This, hopefully, is where Helen can begin to pick up the pieces.

Then we move to Noah’s half of the episode, where he falls apart.

In Noah’s case, the big revelation that drives his segment is as much a surprise to him as it is to us. It’s been clear for some time that he’s been seeing things that aren’t there. By my recollection this became apparent when he caught a glimpse of John Gunther outside the Block Island hotel where he and Alison were stranded, which was impossible, and then got run off the road by Gunther’s car, which was invisible. In recent episodes the duration and intensity of the hallucinations only increased: wading into the lake to rescue his son Martin from suicide and finding his younger self instead, waging a knife fight with Gunther in the basement of Helen’s house while she and Vik and the kids heard nothing upstairs, picturing Helen as a pill-dispensing seductress during a romantic encounter that went far above and beyond the usual he-said-she-said differences of viewpoint in its disconnect from objective reality.

But what this episode reveals — what I never would have guessed — is that Gunther has been a hallucination all along. Oh, sure, there’s a real prison guard named John Gunther, but he’s a much less imposing figure, with thinning hair and wire-frame glasses and an autistic son he clearly loves and who just as clearly loves him back. This is what Noah discovers when he stalks Gunther’s wife back to their house and forces a confrontation. Initially it seems like this is just a humanizing detail — the sadist in the prison is a doting dad at home, that kind of thing; It’d hardly be the first time a man has shown two faces to the world. But by the time Gunther allows Noah to leave, and even encourages him to get help for his mental condition, rather than beating the shit out of him and calling the cops, we realize something is very, very off here. The lack of wounds from their “knife fight” the night before is just the icing on the cake.

So Noah flees the scene, and faces the truth on the train ride home. He flashes back to his time in solitary, during another taunting visit from Gunther. Begging for water, which he says he hasn’t had in two days despite Gunther’s bemused offers of evidence to the contrary (eg. he’d be dead by now), Noah is instead treated to a dramatic reading of Gunther’s “favorite part” of Noah’s stolen manuscript, The Autobiography of Jack Hunter. It centers on the teenaged Noah stand-in’s conflicted feelings about his dying mother, the one thing holding him back from his ticket out of town. In the manuscript, Noah doesn’t merely help her end her life — he actively encourages it, in an effort to kill her and be rid of the burden. Distraught, Noah insists he never wrote this, that Gunther added it, which the guard swats aside as flattering but impossible given his limited education.

Slowly, Noah begins to give in, debating not the veracity of the passage but its interpretation. He would never deliberately kill his own mother, he argues, because “It ended his childhood. It ruined his life.”

Then Gunther drops one of The Affair’s trademark meta-arguments, one that applies both to the issue at hand and the approach of the show overall. “We both agree about what happened, but we disagree about the meaning of the act,” Gunther says. “Now, if we go with your interpretation of the truth, it’s mercy. If we go with my believe, it’s murder.”

“It’s not open to interpretation,” Noah argues.

“Memory can be very faulty, Noah,” Gunther replies. “We all know that.”

“You weren’t there — I was,” Noah insists.

“Wasn’t I?” asks Gunther. “Wasn’t I. Wasn’t I.”

And there you have it. The Gunther who tormented and tortured Noah was never there at all. He’s a sort of dark muse, a creation of Noah’s guilt over aiding in his mother’s euthanasia years ago. This was the start of it all: He ran to Helen to escape, he found himself locked in, he had the affair with Alison because he “thought he could save her,” and he took the fall for Scotty Lockhart’s death as penance for it all.” The un-Gunther walks him through the whole process like Hannibal Lecter picking apart Will Graham or Clarice Starling, then disappears and reappears like a will o’ the wisp.

So Noah heads back to his crappy student apartment, which he finds unlocked behind the police tape. He sees that his manuscript is blank. And most importantly, in a straight-up surprise twist, he realizes he stabbed himself.

We end with the image of him collapsed on the floor, sobbing, at a rock bottom he hasn’t reached since the disastrous night his serial philandering led him to miss Alison’s childbirth and drunkenly lust after a woman who turned out to be his own daughter. Both involve him seeing the terrible truth about what he has inside.

It goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway, that this is the most eventful episode of The Affair…quite possibly ever. Helen’s actions alone are a gigantic, life-altering change; Noah’s upend the entire season. It will almost certainly be too much for some viewers, their patience already tasked by the outlandish nature of the prison story and its aftermath. But oddly, this split-personality twist (which, couched in either memories or obvious hallucinations as so much of it has been, feels much less ostentatious than the many examples of men talking to manifestations of themselves across prestige TV in the past few years) brings Noah’s storyline closer to the show’s roots.

Noah and Helen’s kid may have described Wuthering Heights as a romance that reveals itself to have been a thriller all along, but The Affair’s thriller elements have always served its psychological-drama side, not the other way around. You don’t need to have been tortured and stalked by a prison guard while doing time for a crime you didn’t commit to look back in anguish over a decision that shaped your life for the worse. The desire to create an alternate history to convince yourself you’re better off, as Noah did with go-nowhere John Gunther and his alter ego Jack Hunter, can easily rebound as an even more profound guilt, manifested in the abuse he suffers at Gunther’s hands. On a plot level, this episode, this season, of The Affair ask a lot of us. As an expressionistic tour of the adult mind in all its dead ends and deceits and regrets, it gives a lot back.