‘The Affair’ has satisfying, hopeful finish

Note: This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Showtime’s “The Affair.”

Who knew “The Affair,” Showtime’s brooding drama about the many lives upended by an extramarital relationship would end with a one-man rendition of a flash mob?

In that regard, the show’s final episode had a few surprises in store even as it veered toward a resolution many fans saw coming: Helen (Maura Tierney) and Noah Solloway (Dominic West) would end up back together in the end. Though it ended on a profound note, the fifth season itself was an uneven final bow, too often interrupted by new or previously tangential characters the show didn’t have time to fully explore, and attempts — some more ham-fisted than others — to address larger social issues that went virtually ignored in the show’s early seasons.

At its heart, “The Affair” was always about the truth, elusive and open to the interpretation of the show’s various perspectives. It was also about the Solloways’ marriage — how and why they never saw coming the affair that tore apart their lives. Last week’s episode brought everything full circle in a superb installment that found Helen and Noah confronting what had gone wrong in their marriage as they fought to escape a deadly wildfire in Los Angeles. The mission found them hiking across perilous terrain, only for Helen to be bitten by a rattlesnake. As showrunner Sarah Treem later hinted on Twitter, the episode ended with the first words the pair said to each other in the show’s pilot episode: “Hello, friend.”

The series finale likewise brought us full circle as Noah and Helen reconciled their feelings — their love — for one another as they prepared for the Montauk wedding of their eldest daughter, Whitney (Julia Goldani Telles). The event, almost singlehandedly planned by Noah in an effort to regain Whitney’s trust after years of passive betrayal, is essentially a survey of what they built together. But like the entire fifth season, the finale was marred by the absence of two central characters — Alison (Ruth Wilson), the grieving mother Noah fell for in the first season, and her ex-husband, Cole (Joshua Jackson). Alison was killed off as in the Season 4 finale, which aired just before the show announced Wilson’s abrupt and unexplained departure; a year later, it was reported that Jackson would leave the show ahead of its final season.

Both Alison and Cole were referenced throughout Season 5, which jumped years ahead to a bleak future: climate change had eroded the coastline, leaving Montauk — the nucleus of Noah and Alison’s affair and its ripple effects — barren and deserted. The time-jump reunited us with Alison and Cole’s daughter, Joanie (Anna Paquin), who sought the truth behind her mother’s purported suicide as she reached the age her mother was when she died. But Joanie, easily by design, felt like a stranger even as the show attempted to explore her irrepressible sadness, which seemed to be as much related to the earth’s impending demise as it was about her childhood trauma.

In the finale, Joanie ended up at a restored Lobster Roll, where we encountered the episode’s most shocking reveal: that Noah now owns the restaurant where he and her mother met all those years ago. There, she confirmed the one thing no autopsy report could tell her — that her mother loved her deeply. It still stings that Alison herself has no voice in the finale. It’s Noah, wise with age, who tells Joanie what Cole had not: that Alison would have never chosen to leave her, that she sought mental health treatment to be a better mother, that she had gone up against Cole and his second wife, Luisa (Catalina Sandino Moreno) while fighting to get her daughter back. The scene is somewhat bewildering; several episodes removed from the horrific confirmation that Alison was killed by her colleague and love interest, Ben (played in Season 5 by Jose Antonio Plana), there are few necessary revelations here. It’s certainly not news to us that Alison was a resilient woman and a dedicated mother.

Among its other final season missteps, the show worked in a flicker of a #MeToo storyline, as Noah faced accusations of sexual misconduct from several women. (The fallout appeared short-lived; the finale even outlasted his estrangement from Whitney.) And the show furthered the trope of using characters of color to briefly explore hot topics with its intermittent, and ultimately abandoned, focus on Noah’s former boss and ex-girlfriend, Janelle (Sanaa Lathan), whose struggles as a professional woman of color were all but lost on Noah. The finale at least offered an explanation for EJ, the annoying epigeneticist Joanie slept with after returning to Montauk. Turns out EJ is Eddie James Ullah, as in Vic and Sierra’s son. He assures a horrified Joanie they are not related and that Helen was “like a second mother” to him.

Helen — long the drama’s most reliably captivating presence, to Tierney’s credit — is, for a moment, given her due in the finale. As told from her perspective, she abruptly leaves her daughter’s wedding and goes to see Noah at the not-so-subtly named Memory Motel. After evading Noah’s inquires as to why, exactly, she’s there, Helen confesses that she still loves him. And it’s in the most Helen way possible, during a monologue about how, to her detriment, she’s “never present in anything” and hesitates to make decisions: “I mean if we both die and you never find out that I still love you, what, do I win a prize or something?”

Noah suggests that love doesn’t preclude them from deciding they might not be good for each other. Yes, there are certainly couples who have hurt each other less, Helen allows, but there are also couples who love each other less. If being together makes them happy in a fleeting lifetime, what is so wrong with giving into that feeling in spite of what has happened in their past? Noah asks Helen to dance with him, which ends with them passionately kissing before sleeping together. Multiple perspectives confirm the implication that Noah and Helen reunite permanently including Whitney’s, who heads to her father’s motel in hopes of reconciling, and finds her parents in bed together (Noah, predictably, leaves his curtains wide open). Instead of interrupting them, Whitney sits outside the room, sharing her wedding cake with her new husband and siblings — marking a decidedly sweet moment for the characteristically bratty brood.

The show’s final scenes could be considered the ultimate truth, told through the perspective of an omniscient observer who watches as Joanie takes Noah’s advice and goes home to her family and, in yet another full-circle moment, Noah sits against Helen’s gravestone, reading a novel by their daughter Stacey. The scene somewhat helps us navigate the show’s advanced timeline as we learn that Helen died in 2051. In a twisted reveal, we learn that her feisty mother, Margaret (Kathleen Chalfant), died that same year at 100 years old.

In the finale, Helen and Noah are, perhaps for the first time, honest with themselves. For Helen, part of that is admitting that she still loves Noah and that her desire to be with him outweighs anyone else’s opinion. “Maybe I just want to be with you,” she tells him. Still, a flashback reveals that Helen tries to talk herself out of it. “You know this doesn’t change anything” she tells Noah, who points out that she’s crying. “You want to try this again?” he asks her.

It’s disappointing to not see Helen in her final years, but the finale offers one quirky final twist. Enter the unmistakably voice of Fiona Apple — who sings the show’s ominous theme song — taking on “The Whole of the Moon,’ the oft-covered Waterboys song that guided the flash mob at Whitney’s wedding. Noah, having hiked to a cliff reminiscent of the one he and his wife climbed down while fleeing the wildfire, reflects on everything he and Helen built together while practicing the dance steps.