‘The Affair’ Recap: Where I End and You Begin

The Affair tells the complicated saga of an extramarital affair and the havoc it causes by splitting the narrative into two points of view: HIS & HERS. To wit, Decider will be recapping the show’s second season in a similar way with Sean T. Collins covering the female POV and Meghan O’Keefe responding with her take on the male perspective.

PART 3: ALISON

There was a line last night that summed up this week’s episode of The Affair, and possibly every episode of The Affair, pretty perfectly; the odd thing is that it came from this week’s episode of The Leftovers.

HBO’s big, bleak, divisive Sunday night drama began its second season at the same time as Showtime’s adultery saga, and like the latter show, the former now appears to be splitting its time between alternating protagonists. “Hard to tell if they’re a part of your story or you’re a part of theirs,” someone says to one such leading player, referring to the others. Like almost every line from that particular Greek chorus of a character it’s too cute by half in context. But excised from Damon Lindelof & Tom Perrotta’s supernatural morality play and transplanted into Sarah Treem & Hagai Levi’s sexual one, it’s a much better fit, as Alison’s side of the story made clear.

That story begins on the morning of Noah’s (Dominic West) big day of publisher and mediator meetings in the city. The couple wake up happy and horny, pretty much the ideal way to get the AM going. It’s what happens after he leaves that’s worth studying. Faced with a series of minor annoyances—the broken toilet that forces her to pop a squat down by the water, the sheepshit and lacerating sandal straps that sabotage her attempt to walk six miles into town—Alison’s (Ruth Wilson) offered a ride by Robert, the kindly older man who owns the palatial estate that includes the guest house she and Noah are staying in. As she blissfully stares at the passing scenery, with the score as wistful and lovely as it’s ever been, he tells her “You must be from a small town.” That this man understands her is as key to her happiness in that moment as the sunlight through the trees. No wonder she jumps at the chance to become his personal assistant (despite the near-certain sex-harassment warning sign about the assistant he fired for being “unprofessional”) when she visits him and his fabulously cultured publisher wife Yvonne later in the day.

Which made me wonder: Are we supposed to see everyone the POV characters encounter as reflections of their needs and fears, their shames and desires? Take Cole (Joshua Jackson), who shows up unannounced and, as Alison is relieved to learn, unarmed. In her version of events, he’s a stalker and a thug, rifling through her and Noah’s things, intimidating her physically, and making shitty “jokes” that make it look like he means it. Clearly, he’s gone to hell in her absence; as we’ll see, his own POV will bear that out. But to Alison, he’s scary, not sad. Does she see him like this to justify leaving him, or to punish herself for what she drove him to by doing so?

And what about Noah? His return from Manhattan is a far cry from the sweet, slow-dancing with no music Nicholas Sparks routine his POV depicted last week. He’s irritable and exhausted at the end of a long and shitty day, nosing around about the money they stand to make from the sale of her house, furious for incoherent reasons that she took a job with Robert and Yvonne. He storms out onto the deck, then — with the camera lingering on Alison’s face until the end to make his reappearance feel all the more sweeping and sudden — returns, all apologies and animal lust. What follows is a stand-up tabletop sex scene that’s hot even by Affair standards, as Noah tells her “I just want you to be happy” over and over: Seriously, my notes include the words (copying and pasting here) “lorrrrrrrrrrrrd have mercy” and “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” I fanned myself like a Southern lady, for real.

Given that this is the kind of sex you gchat your friends about afterwards, something about Noah’s anger and subsequent remorse is clearly clicking with Alison. Is she appreciative of his ability to recognize and admit his mistakes? Is she getting off on keeping Cole’s visit a secret down to the last detail (he rifled through Noah’s manuscript and fixed their toilet, facts she not only hides but actively lies about) even as her boyfriend begs for forgiveness for his comparatively less severe wrongdoing? And how does this fit with the flashforward, in which she discovers she’s the last to know that her husband’s attorney was hired and paid for by his ex-wife?

I don’t have the answers, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Maybe it was the weird symmetry between Alison’s POV and Cole’s later in the episode—car rides with older men, seemingly superfluous conversations with a cafe waitress, camerawork in which a character approaches and embraces them suddenly from outside the frame — but the deeper we go into this show, the more I suspect the dueling POVs are more like the opposite sides of a Rorschach blot. The shape is there for all to see, but the meaning’s what we make of it.

PART 4: COLE

Yes, The Affair delights in foisting hazy narratives and shifting (and shifty) perspectives upon us gentle viewers, but it’s also a show deeply interested in how our sense of time affects our understanding of the truth.
In Alison’s POV, she’s trying desperately to move forward, but the ghost of her past pulls her down like an anchor. Whether it’s recalling that she used to be a nurse, meeting Cole, or seeing the specter of her dead boy everywhere, Alison can’t escape what she left behind. Strangely, Cole’s POV is consumed with trying to reclaim the past. As he drives Helen’s philandering father — the celebrity author Bruce Butler — home, the older man rambles on and on about the poetic past of Montauk. But his most brilliant turn of phrase is this line:
“You never get to go back, no matter how badly you miss it.”
It’s a line that certainly doesn’t define The Affair as a whole, but it looms over Cole’s entire existence. When we first enter his POV, we see the once robust rancher laid low. He’s seated in the driver’s seat of a parked taxi staring at a crossword puzzle. This is a man who once wrangled horses and screwed his wife from behind against a pick up truck. Now, he can’t even drive his own life forward. His life is an all-too-on-point metaphor for failure.

As soon as he drops Bruce off at his palatial home, Cole literally drives backwards and almost kills a small boy. While the kid’s babysitter shrugs it off, Cole is rattled. Cole is going backwards. He’s going forwards. He refuses to sleep and keeps driving and driving until he has to snort cocaine to jolt him out of his nightmare of a life. He exists outside of time.

And where exactly are we in this story? We’re finally starting to see what connects Noah and Alison’s destructive summer tryst with Scotty’s murder-by-speeding-car. While Noah may be the primary suspect in all the flash forwards, Cole’s POV teases a different story. Cole is annoyed by his flaky and greedy little brother and threatens to mow him over if he doesn’t step away from his car. Cole is also seen veering in and out of lanes. The Affair is constantly forcing us to question our own takes on narrative, but this is the first time it’s foreshadowed that Cole might have killed his brother and is pinning it all on the man who ruined his life.

What still makes Cole’s life worthwhile? Alison. It’s always Alison. He thinks he sees her shadow in their old home and when he bursts in on her Cold Spring retreat, he recalls the scene entirely differently. While she remembers being covered in sweat and terrified that he’s going to hurt her, Cole sees her in a cozy sweater welcoming into the lush and comfy love nest. She mothers him with breakfast, frets over him, and tells him all about a perfect day they shared so many years ago. Cole’s warped vision of his Montauk angel is crowned with a memory that never happened in Alison’s POV. She rushes to him and engulfs him in a hug.

When we toggle to the future, we see a cleaned up Cole descending to where Alison is struggling with her fussy baby Joanie. Cole’s presence calms the little girl and as the two of them sit in the courthouse, listening to the judge charge Noah with Scotty’s murder, the camera closes in on Cole. There’s a glint in his eye and a sense of hope on his face as he fixates on Alison.
Maybe in the real world, we can’t ever go back. We’re too stuck on our own personal narratives. We bide our time fixed on a linear track shuffling towards death. But The Affair doesn’t play by these rules. Alison can’t move forward without seeing the ghosts of her past and Cole’s past is what is doomed to consume his future. As we travel back and forth, between perspective and time, aren’t we just seeing different rolling waves of the same emotional sea? Sing it, Fiona.
[Watch The Affair on Showtime] or [Watch The Affair on Hulu]
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[Gifs by Jaclyn Kessel, copyright Showtime]