'The Affair' season 5 episode 3 review: Helen's healing, Noah's tantrums, and Joanie's kinks weave a messed up fantasy
This article contains spoilers for season 5, episode 3.
Finally, 'The Affair' has given us the Helen (Maura Tierney) narrative-centric episode we deserve and it was a long time coming. Moving on from a partner's death, after watching him decay away with a terminal illness for months, is a difficult thing and Helen Solloway takes her time with it, only to come out so much healthier, and sorted. Of course, healthy and sorted are words too heavy and extreme to say in the context of any of the characters on the Showtime drama, but Helen is quite close to being there. Months after Dr. Vik's funeral, she finally seems to have found the space to open up about her grief, while simultaneously looking into a budding romance with the charismatic Sasha Mann (Claes Bang); being a cool mom to her son, Trevor, taking care of Sierra's (Emily Browning) baby while she sleep, and most importantly, shutting Noah's (Dominic West) manic, territorial screams out like she should have done long ago. That Joanie's (Anna Paquin) very active asphyxiation kink was sidelined by Helen's healing is totally justified, too.
The episode begins with Noah's narrative, where he is getting interviewed by Vanity Fair for his semi-biographical book being turned into a movie. The journalist seems very keen on establishing a coming-full-circle arc for Noah, which he somehow has a hard time grasping. But that has always been Noah Solloway, the man who can't see what's actually there because he is too busy grabbing on to the fantasies he can fathom. There really is no reason why a character like him deserves to be a protagonist because all he does is scream to establish his territory and disappoint the women in his life, so all of this redemption and path to forgiveness isn't really registering well for him in the show's final season. Especially with his behavior around his kids.
For someone who wants his ex-wife to call off their oldest, albeit very young daughter's wedding because he knows their kids are more likely to respect her authority, Noah can really be overly ambitious. After leaving their mom twenty years later into their marriage, Noah tries telling his daughter that she should leave her struggling fiance too. Granted, what Noah is saying makes sense. The fiance doesn't have a visa, neither does he have an established career to make him suitable for marriage. But Noah's daughter, Whitney, despite the cushy life she has led so far, can make her own decisions, and more than that, she doesn't need an absentee father walking into her life years later to lecture her on marriage. No matter how stupid and irrational what she's doing, is.
Also for all the parental authority, Noah tries to establish with his kids in this episode, he is nothing more than a petulant child needing answers 'right now' when he speaks with his now ex-girlfriend, Janelle. After the disaster that was Vik's funeral, where Helen's dementia-addled father asked Janelle to get him a drink, and Whitney totally labeled the woman an African-American 'cool' trophy girlfriend for her father, Janelle went back to her ex and seemingly blocked Noah out for three months. And as always, Noah screams at her demanding an explanation, while he had been too distracted with Helen to even pay Janelle any attention in the first place. The man really needs to get his priorities right.
From barging into Sasha's on-set filming of sex scenes, to directly yelling at Helen for seeing him, Noah is pretty darn stupid in this episode, and the real satisfaction comes from watching Helen shut him down every time. In the second half of the narrative, we focus on Helen, who, after having found a partner in grief in Sasha, is accepting herself more and more in her process of healing. Sure, Sierra pops by with her and Vik's newborn baby, Eddie, every now and then, and Tierney and Helen are both a natural fit in those situations. Helen has raised four kids, no doubt, but the love and affection she shows the baby, despite knowing it is her ex-boyfriend's with another woman, is touching. Helen even tells the baby he "looks like his dad" and everything about her journey is all kinds of beautiful.
In all this, however, her bond with Sasha only gets stronger. From seeing each other in impromptu dates inside the actor's trailer to going out drinking and losing their sh*t at karaoke, the two - at this very point at least - are meant for each other. It also slowly comes out that while Helen had to watch the love of her life decay away in a hospice bed inside their home, Sasha had to watch his fiancee waste away from substance abuse, until she overdosed. But despite how much Noah would like to get hammered and stalk Helen and Sasha's individual chambers to spot them together, his earnest (and way out of the line) attempts at convincing Helen that Sasha is "using her to get to" Noah all fall apart simply because Helen is having none of it. And we couldn't be more thankful for this arc.
Of course, Helen and Sasha have sex and for all the awkwardness it carries, everything is completely natural about it. And when Helen is not busy romancing the intriguing actor with a thick English accent, she is being a cool mom to her newly out son, Trevor, both by dating a movie star and by allowing him and his (prospective?) boyfriend to spend nights together. But speaking of cool moms, in the last five minutes we see a Joanie quickie (literally), where she finds out why the power is always out late at night in the hurricane struck Montauk of the future.
She goes to a local pub and comes home with the bartender to display all of her choking kinks, and while it's not clear whether she was forced against her will, or she was just aching to be choked, flashbacks of her mother Alison in the middle of the scene is more scarring. Infidelity aside, it looks like Joanie can't have sex without being haunted by memories of her parents, and the fact that this time it was her mother's face resurfacing, knowing that Alison had died from domestic violence, everything was more scarring than Joanie telling her husband she misses her dad, right after having sex with him.
'The affair' episode 3 airs on Sunday, September 9, at 9p.m, only on Showtime.