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The Affair

After an affair like last week’s The Affair, what do you do for an encore? The answer is nothing — you do an epilogue instead. The Season Three finale of Showtime’s twisty romance/thriller/psychological drama/what have you has its share of big moments to be sure, but the overall effect is one of quiet aftermath. Its trip way outside the show’s usual New York comfort zone to Paris leaves the sturm und drang of the season that preceded it behind.

It’s a smart move, even if it requires the fallout from the penultimate episode’s startling revelations — Helen telling her parents and children and boyfriend that she killed Scott Lockhart and allowed Noah to take the fall, Noah realizing his torture and stalking at the hands of prison guard John Gunther was a prolonged hallucination brought on by guilt, trauma, and eventually infection and addiction — to happen offscreen.

We pick up the story months later, with Noah and Juliette reunited in a pretty serious way, and the darkness of the past largely put behind them. This rollback of emotional stakes enables the show to gently probe at a less fraught but still complex relationship, and to wrap up certain storylines of very long standing. As it often does, this involves the deft employment of the show’s he-said-she-said structure. The best indication of Noah and Juliette’s compatibility — not just sexually or even emotionally, but soul-deep — comes from a pair of mirrored shots from each character’s POV. When the two meet for coffee during the afternoon date that is eventually interrupted by the phone call alerting Juliette to her husband’s death, there’s a discrepancy between the two perspectives as to who arrives first: In Juliette’s half of the episode, Noah’s already there waiting for her when she arrives, while in Noah’s, it’s the other way around. But in both cases, the late arriver pauses for a moment to quietly observe their partner through the window. They each see the other person, unaware they’re being watched, and smile.

These are unguarded moments of contentment, with no audience to speak of. Whether it’s Juliette or Noah out there looking in, they’re each deeply happy to be in the presence of the other, even when the other has no idea they’re there. I can’t think of another time The Affair has shown the same event playing out in opposite ways but with the exact same emotional result. They may have to leave each other behind to spend Christmas Eve with the daughters who need them, but in that moment at least, they belong together.

That’s right: daughters, plural, as in not only Juliette’s kid Sabine but series MVP Julia Goldani Telles’ Whitney Solloway herself. In the former case, the death of Juliette’s Alzheimer’s-suffering husband Etienne, whose episode of “terminal lucidity” is soured when he starts talking to both women as if they were one of his apparently many, many mistresses, allows Juliette to work through her decades-old feelings of entrapment in the life of a much older and flagrantly unfaithful husband with whom she was still deeply in love nonetheless. It also gives her daughter, Sabine, a chance to lash out with the fury she feels over her mother’s “abandonment” of her ailing father — a storm of emotion that’s beautifully, wordlessly resolved later that night in a shot of Juliette holding her sleeping daughter’s head in her lap.

There’s also a chance for cringey black comedy when the morticians struggle to fit Etienne’s body into an old-fashioned elevator; as a professor of literature, Juliette would no doubt appreciate the metaphorical significance of literally not being able to rid herself of the body. This episode is full of flourishes like that, moments that exist not to advance the story but to evoke an emotion. Juliette spinning around while looking at the dome of the Panthéon above Foucault’s Pendulum, the sleazy good cheer of Whitney’s awful artist boyfriend Furkat when he sees Noah (“I guess I’m having a little bit of a moment at the moment. I’m just feeling really blessed?”), and ambient music that constitutes some of composer Marcelo Zarvos’s best work in the series.

Furkat, whose reappearance Noah greets with a well-deserved “What the fuck?”, brings us back to Whitney, who winds up being central to the episode’s final third. Her estrangement from her father has been near-total ever since he unwittingly almost made a move on her while she made out with another woman in a hot tub at that disastrous party some years ago; as far as we know, she’s the only Solloway left standing who doesn’t know the secret of Scott Lockhart’s death, though that’s never firmly established one way or the other. So she’s no more thrilled to see Noah than he is to see Furkat, or Furkat’s new Whitney-lookalike girlfriend.

But when the latter woman provokes a fight that ends with the artist hitting Whitney full in the face during the opening of his new exhibition, a rapprochement with Noah is all but forced upon her. Whitney’s worshipful submission to Furkat’s physical outbursts is so total it rings somewhat hollow for such a dynamic and headstrong character: “He’s an artist — he can’t just turn his passion on and off,” she explains to Noah, in a speech that doubles as an indictment of her dad’s behavior but which also makes her seem almost terminally naive. Still, perhaps the trauma of her father’s imprisonment, given the last major encounter they’d had prior to it, really has screwed her up that badly. (Can we please get some Whitney POVs next season to settle the issue — and to give Telles the spotlight she deserves?)

But as he does throughout the episode, Noah seems to know exactly how to talk her down. “Love isn’t supposed to be pain,” he tells her. “Love is supposed to make you feel wonderful about yourself.” When she throws his behavior toward her mom back in his face and says he’s no better than Furkat, he agrees, then adds “I think you are.” He apologizes for failing to safeguard her against “men like…like me”; since she has long been able to call him on his bullshit, the connection he draws between himself and Furkat makes it impossible for her to ignore the latter man’s bullshit in turn. “After someone dies, I think we wanna tell ourselves a story of how it was all our fault, because at least that gives us some control,” he says to Juliette later that night when she beats herself up for leaving her husband behind. Perhaps he’s doing the same thing with regards to Whitney’s bad decisions, but if that’s what it takes to help dig her out of them again, they’re both better off.

The episode ends with Noah dropping Whitney off at Helen’s house, where she and the kids and her on-again boyfriend Vik are celebrating Christmas Eve. Both Whitney and her brother Martin treat Noah warmly, tying off the plot threads in which they were hostile to him. He and Helen exchange a wave through the window, indicating that his seeming sexual assault against her a few episodes ago was as much a hallucination as his knife-fight with John Gunther.

The final shot shows him in the taxi, unable to respond to the driver’s question, “Where we goin’, buddy?” It’s actually not as tough to answer as it sounds: Martin invited him to go sledding with the rest of the kids on Christmas Day and Juliette awaits him back in Paris. But as a man who habitually runs into the arms of other people to make himself feel whole, he’ll have to figure out another option for the night.

Thinking back, all four main characters’ stories end in a place of relative equilibrium, so much so that it seems likely this episode was set up to serve as a series finale if need be. Noah has found peace, if not a purpose. Helen has come clean and her family has remained intact despite it all. Cole has decided to remain unhappily married to Luisa. Alison has her daughter and a new career and the self-knowledge, if not necessarily the desire or ability, to make a fresh go of things. The murder mystery and the attempted murder mystery have both been wrapped up. Where we goin’, buddy? I don’t know, but I’ll be there next season to find out.