'The Affair' season 5 episode 6 review: Joanie's resilience mingled with trauma finally allows her to confront her demons
This article contains spoilers for episode 6.
It's not often that there's only a single narrative throughout an entire episode of 'The Affair', but things are changing in the fifth and final season a lot more than expected. Starting with a grown-up Joanie and the intensity of her hurt and resentment towards her mother who died when Joanie was seven leading to a life full of pain is real. And in episode 6 we get deep down and dirty in Joanie's emotions as she comes face to face with the truth of who she really is. Anna Paquin reminds us once again why she was the girl who won an Oscar at just 12 years of age, but due credit should go to Sarah Treem and her incredible team of writers for painting a picture of grief and trauma so turbulent that it puts chaos to shame.
When the episode opens we see Paquin's Joanie still in deserted Montauk, trying to find life amidst the rubble, clinging on to a desperate hope that maybe not all is lost for the future of her children. But it really makes one wonder if her kids are on her mind at this point because putting up in her dad's old house hasn't been the most serene experience. There's a shrine of photos to her mother which she feels necessary to chuck in the trash, and even when she visits her father's grave she isn't at peace. It is clear that Joanie's abandonment issues are bubbling and somewhere along the way lines are getting blurred about whether she feels like she was abandoned, or whether she feels like she was the one doing the abandoning.
At the cemetery, Joanie comes across EJ -- an epigenist who tracks down the course of trauma in family trees as he claims it can be passed on from one generation to another. EJ takes an instant liking to Joanie for her 'resilience' and soon discovers who she is. From that point onwards, it's like a starstruck fan meeting their favorite celebrity for the first time: EJ asks Joanie about her father, their lives, and even takes her to the police precinct where her mother's files are kept after he reveals that the exact shore site she was digging up is where her mother committed suicide. This is the first time Joanie finds out about the specifics of Alison's death: the suicide, the aftermath, and what the police reports say. And even though she had known her mother's history all along, seeing it written in big bold red that her mother suffered from intense depression and trauma only brought back her own recent panic flares.
Feeling suffocated, Joanie asks EJ to take her home, but their little rendezvous isn't over yet. Within hours, he returns, asking her to give him another chance so he acn apologize for bombarding her with questions without offering his condolences for her family's tragic deaths. EJ, the romantic that he is, takes Joanie out to see a supermoon when the high tides draw in and wash away all that's unwanted and unattended. But this being the future, of course, Joanie has special glasses that can do the work of a highly advanced camera with just voice recognition. Joanie is able to track down the day they claimed Alison killed herself, and for some odd reason, the data shows tides barely high enough to have drowned the woman. This is the first time Joanie thinks of the unreal.
Joanie and EJ culminate their day-long whatever-it-was into steamy lovemaking and once again Joanie proceeds to drag EJ's hand to her neck begging to be choked harder. This is where everything goes wrong; EJ breaks into an analysis of Joanie's father's resilience, clashing with her mother's trauma, which forces her to indulge in self-destructive behavior -- aka dangerous sex with strangers. And even though Joanie kicks him out of her house she takes this home when she goes back to her husband Paul and the kids.
Another storm awaits Joanie in Vermont as her stepmom comes to visit. She has aged as one would expect, but her comforting stance even as Joanie complains about how much she hates her real mother, Alison, for tearing their family apart, only urges her to calm down. It is obvious she knows she could never be to Joanie and Cole what Alison was, but it is almost like she has made peace with it; sadly, Joanie is far from there. She has no trouble admitting to even someone like EJ that her life has been much easier without her mother's instability and unhinged demeanor. Less to be worried about, she says. But Joanie has bigger problems gnawing at her from within as is clear when she breaks down in a massive hate-filled rant about how Alison perhaps hated them.
When Joanie tells her stepmom about how she trashed her father's Alison-shrine, she admits she did it because she hates looking at Alison. She blames Alison for ruining the only happy memories of Joanie's childhood, which were of Joanie with Cole and her stepmom. That Joanie has mommy issues isn't a secret at this point, but it is only when she says things like "she (Alison) wanted the rest of us to be in as much pain as she was" and later panics in the nursery where the oxygen levels have dipped enough to cause rot in the strawberries that we get a full picture of it. Joanie has a full blown panic attack: she starts ripping out the strawberry shrubs until Paul comes, and when he doesn't give in to her existential dread-spurred breakdown, she comes clean about cheating on him for years.
Paul, shocked as he is, manages to tell Joanie how "fucking broken" she is and kicks her out for good, and of course she lands up at EJ's with nothing but a backpack. Maybe it's the same field of profession or maybe it is EJ's absolute lack of a conventional charm, but Joanie blends in around the edges when he is present. In her second breakdown of an episode infested with peak Joanie moments, she admits how her entire life has been an active struggle of not ending up like her mother, Alison, but the closer she gets to Alison's age, the less it seems to work anymore. Joanie feels like she is possessed by her mother in a skewed manner, both abandoned Cole in a way, and the fact that he died of a heart attack at 72 -- something that could have been prevented if another person was there, is what is gnawing the life out of her.
When Joanie talks about Cole and how great he was, and the many sacrifices he made to invest all of his time and energy into raising his daughter, there's a clear parallel drawn between how she sees Cole, and how she sees her husband, Paul. When she could finally go away to college, she felt 'relieved'; "I spent so much time with him, his love was suffocating me," Joanie says of Cole and it's not that far-fetched an idea that perhaps this is what the dedicated, blinded in love, Paul's constant presence made her feel too. And when Joanie says that one haunting admission: "I abandoned him, just like my mother did" -- it is almost difficult to decide if she is just talking about Cole anymore; she did abandon her husband by cheating on him, just the way Alison had done, and Joanie feels there is no going back.
Luckily all of this back and forth discussion makes EJ dig out a file of Cole's where he was seemingly looking up one Ben Cruz. At first, the two decide it could be Cole's secret gay lover, but soon Joanie's memories resurface. "Maybe he killed my mother" -- Joanie says finally, and all of that leads to some messed up normal lovemaking between her and EJ where she isn't aching to be choked finally.
'The Affair' airs on Sunday nights at 9pm only on Showtime.