The Affair 4x01 Episode 1

 

As far as I’m concerned, season 4 of The Affair only has one job: get back to the roots of what made the show so great and memorable in the first place. Okay, that’s probably more than one job. After all, there are several reasons why season 3 failed to live up to its predecessors. The clear absence of an overarching mystery (like ’Who killed Scotty Lockhart?” was in the first two seasons), the minimal emphasis on (and significance of) the differences between the characters’ memories, and some truly bewildering narrative choices alll contributed to season 3 being, well, less than satisfactory.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate the season. There were many elements that made it likable and interesting for me, including Helen’s determination to help Noah through his troubles, as well as Alison breaking down their relationship to its essentials and finally saying what some of us were thinking all along – namely the fact that they never really loved each other in the way they claimed they did, and instead their feelings were mostly just a weird jumble of lust, boredom, and a need for change. Noah might not agree with that but I do, and it was nice to hear the show acknowledge it.

Other than that, the season mostly left me baffled and frustrated. I could only discern two storylines that could be constituted as mysterious – the question of whether Noah’s stalker is real or just a figment of his imagination, and in either case what really happened between them inside the prison… and more importantly, what was it that drove such a wedge between Noah and Allison that she didn’t even want to hear from him when he finally got out. The first of these questions was answered in a somewhat predictable and rather unsatisfactory way, and the second, well, we still don’t know. Unless I misunderstand something and Alison asking him to stay away because she can’t be seen with him if she wants to get custody of her daughter back is all there is to it, in which case I’m still not satisfied because that particular interaction was already way too strained and cold, so something must have gone down during the first two years of Noah’s incarceration, but unfortunately, the way the season ended didn’t leave me with much hope that we’ll ever find out what, exactly.

And then there was Juliette. Honestly, I don’t even know what the writers were thinking when they came up with her character, let alone when they decided to give her her own POV sections. She added literally nothing to the plot. Sure, she fitted right in with all the other cheating bastards in the story, but she had no depth, no reason to symphatize with her, and literally no storylines in which her presence was essential. Essentially she was only there to be a love interest to Noah, which in itself is not a bad thing – Helen has Vik, Cole has Luisa, Noah can have Juliette… except the writers desperately wanted us to care more about her than about the other two. They never got to show their own memories of certain events, even though the opportunities were there this season. We could have seen Allison’s attempts to parent Joanie through Luisa’s eyes, or Noah’s addiction-fueled breakdown through Vik’s… but instead we got Juliette masturbating, fucking a student, and skyping with her sick husband, none of which had any impact whatsoever on the main story. I honestly can’t even wrap my head around the reasoning behind these choices, and I can only hope that she stays in Paris where she belongs and we never have to see her terrible old lady haircut ever again.

Right. Now that all that’s out of the way, how did The Affair’s season 4 premiere fare in terms of meeting my wishes and expectations? Well… not all that great, unfortunately. Sure, a new mystery was teased in the very beginnnig of the episode when, six weeks after the present day storyline, Cole and Noah discussed how ’she’ (Alison, presumably) hasn’t been seen for three days and the police is ready to treat her as a mssing person, which is definitely interesting… but it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened, would it? It was only last season (albeit offscreen and resolved by the time we checked in with her) that she disappeard without a word for six months then came back like „I’m all better now, can I have my child back please?” So they really have to make this mystery interesting if they want me to accept that this is anything but Alison being Alison.

Apart from this bit, though, the rest of the episode was more infuriating than anything else. It was a simple Noah-Helen piece, showing us our first glimpses into their new lives in Los Angeles. Noah seems comfotable enough at his new job as a high school English teacher, or at least his situation is much less stressful than it was the last time he got into teaching, fresh out of jail. There was a segment about this student who is currently repeating class because he got caught plagiarizing in his last year, which promps Noah to question him about his latest essay which he proves to have written himself. I don’t yet understand the significance of this bit, it might be a setup for a later mentor-student relationship beteen the two of them, or maybe a conflict with the principal when it turns out that there wasn’t any plagiarism in the first place? Could go either way.

As for Helen, she’s decidedly NOT comfortable with her changed circumstances. It’s weird because now she only has her least stressful two children to look after, and they’re living in this huge, beautiful house in Los Angeles… and yet she spends her days stressing about the too-hot weather, and imaginary earthquakes. It’s not simple homesickness, either. By the end of the episode she comes to the conclusion that it’s Noah that makes her feel so anxious. His sheer presence and the knowledge that they have to spend time together makes her physically sick, which, wow. That is NOT how we left things at the end of season 3, so I have to wonder if this is simply about her stressing that being with Noah will make Vik jealous again, or if something happened between the two of them during the time jump. Which I don’t even know how much time it was, a few months, maybe a year? If there was a title card explaining it, I missed it.

In any case, Noah and Helen are in a terrible place, which only escalates further by the revelation of their second son Trevor’s apparent gayness… or rather, it escalates because Helen thinks he might be gay and she’s worried about how Noah will react. The whole plot is so contrived and stupid, I mean it all stems from the fact that Trevor’s been spending a lot of time with a boy in his class. Literally that’s it. They text each other a lot so they have to be gay, right? It gets a bit better when he tells the family about this school project he’s doing with his buddy, about a musical dealing with homosexuality, and in Helen’s version of the night it really looks like he’s about to come out to his family… but her reaction to everything that has to do with this is eerily reminiscent of all those „If I have a gay child I’m SO gonna ship them with their same-sex classmates!!!” kinda Tumblr posts we all cringed about years ago. She even tells her therapist that she always wanted a gay son because her other son, Martin, turned out to be a bit of a womanizer. Noah seems supportive as well, despite Helen’s worries, and he even tells her not to pressure Trevor into feeling like he has to come out, he will tell them on his own time eventually. A far healthier reaction, all things considered.

But that’s it for the whole episode, I’m afraid. An awkward family dinner is pretty much all it had to offer, in which the most substantial difference between the two parents’ point of views was which one of them took a piss while the other argued from the outside, and that’s not even an exaggeration. I can only hope next week’s – potentially – Cole and Alison episode offers a bit more meat to chew on.