'The Affair' season 5 uses Sierra's home birth to put a satirical spin on LA's hippie culture
This article contains spoilers for season 5, episode 1.
The fifth and final season of 'The Affair' does a pretty brilliant job at satirically portraying the Coachella zen lifestyle through Sierra's (Emily Browning) home birth and for all the bursts of laughter that the otherwise tense situation offers, we have creator Sarah Treem to thank. Sierra, who had been pregnant with Helen's (Maura Tierney) now-deceased husband Vik's child, can be seen in the flashback going through labor. And of course, it's a natural birth, given the hippie lifestyle she and her friends so ardently follow. But while Helen has little to negligible patience for all that Sierra and her friends' lifestyle stands for, she does show up at her house next door to see how everything is going.
The lack of any kind of faith in Helen's face is too blatant, and for good reason. When she enters Sierra's home, she finds all the women she had met in season 4's Joshua Tree retreat. These women, ready with their potions and tonics, and a Shaman chanting what sounds like a hymn, played very shrilly on a harmonium, have gathered to "manifest Sierra’s daughter from the celestial realm into her corporeal being.” It is to be noted here that Sierra's baby's gender is actually male and as her doula, aka the woman instructing and coaching Sierra through her labor says, it is essential to wrongly gender the baby on purpose for a calmer arrival into the world, or some derivative of whatever cock and bull concept that is. Helen doesn't buy any of this, she tries to reason with the doula and begs Sierra to agree to go to the hospital, and for a minute, Sierra actually sees the light and agrees to go to the hospital. But her doula is relentless and Helen doesn't really have the patience at this moment.
So while she goes and looks for 'hippie' ways to induce labor naturally (herbs are the answer, by the way), we see Treem and her team of writers weave their magic of highlighting the signature Los Angeles hippie culture cliches into one tiny scene while maintaining a tone of lighthearted comedy. There's a fine line that separates satire from caricature and the Treem team knows how to maintain that.
We see a distraught Helen looking up natural processes to induce labor and go for the first trick she can find. But of course, Helen is too practical and cynical to believe in the potency of herbs and oils, so she pulls a very smart move and goes back into Sierra's house and asks the retreat leader, Gaelle, whether she has some Clary Sage. "Of course, I never leave the house without it," Gaelle answers as if it's a cardinal folly to not carry clary sage around for whatever reason it is. However, when Helen goes back to Sierra bedroom, the doula has moved the pregnant lady from the bouncing ball to the shower, where both of them are getting wet under the water as if that's supposed to help. Maybe it does, but a panting and screaming Sierra in intense pain isn't a very convincing affirmation of that.
It is at this point that Helen butts in and rubs some sage against what we can assume is Sierra's ladybits to help ease the labor, and at first, it 'burns', as Sierra claims, but soon she is able to give birth. And in all this commotion, the only lesson Treem's hilarious take on natural birth offers us is to never indulge in it.
'The Affair' season 5 airs on Sundays, at 9 pm, only on Showtime.