Thursday, December 3, 2015

What I’m Watching: The Affair


The Affair: Season 2, Episode 9 (B+)

This episode did something very surprising, and it did it seamlessly, which is especially impressive. This season expanded upon the double-perspective format by opening up the storyline to four points of view, and this episode abandoned all that and just presented facts as they stood with each character experiencing misery of some sort, in some cases of their own making. Helen had a rare chance at happiness with a very flirtatious doctor played by Omar Metwally who happened to have operated on Martin, yet there were important warning signals in his behavior when he didn’t even pretend to be a nice guy while interacting with other people. Cole appears to have ruined his relationship with Luisa by lashing out at her after they had unprotected sex and she revealed that she is infertile, a particularly harsh thing to do that left him feeling awful and drinking the pain away. Alison had a nightmare of a birth with no sign of Noah, ending in a peaceful morning with her new baby that helped her to shut down Noah’s eventual delayed arrival. And then there’s Noah, who is a terrible human being, not bothering to look for his cell phone because he wanted to meet George Clooney and sleep with his publicist, too good to acknowledge his admittedly inappropriate friend Max, and stupid enough to try to drive high in a hurricane even before he knew that Alison was in labor. The most intense part of the episode was when Noah inched closer to two women making out and then made the horrifying discovery that Whitney was one of them. This all can’t possibly end well, yet we know that Alison manages to be on good terms with Noah, who can’t really get any lower than he is now. I’m glad to see that this season will be more than ten episodes, so there’s still some time to sort out all that’s currently wrong in this world and catch up to the future.

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