When we last saw Noah, our beleaguered protagonist/antagonist of "The Affair," he was taking the rap for Scotty's death. As Season 3 opens, we see Noah grappling with his father's passing.
Clearly observing No-Shave November, he sits in the back row of the funeral as Helen and their three youngest children enter. Martin strides right past his old man, ignoring his existence. Glancing out the window, Noah sees a familiar figure striding past, but he is snapped back into the present when he is called on to eulogize his dad.
"I never really knew him," he says. "I always wanted to ask more questions. You always think there's gonna be more time, but..." he trails off.
After the awkward ceremony ends, Helen confronts Noah for not returning any of her phone calls. We learn that three years have passed since Noah last saw his kids, likely due to a prison sentence. Noah is living with his sister Nina, and seems hesitant to take steps to re-establish a life, or a relationship with his children. "What about us?" Helen asks. "What ABOUT us?" Noah answers. So, I guess any chance of them rekindling what they were attempting to rekindle when Season 2 ended is done. For now.
Nina saves Noah from a verbal attack at the reception after the funeral service, and sister and brother share a smoke. Nina tries to get Noah to open up about his new teaching gig — or anything, really — but he isn't interested in letting her in.
After some more consolation, Noah softens a bit. "You know, you're the only one who's ever forgiven me, Nin," he says. She says that he forgave her for something awful once, and besides, she thinks he's innocent. "I'm not," he says.
We see Noah having a nightmare about his time in prison, which we are led to believe was responsible for the shoulder injury that has him popping muscle relaxers like candy. After waking up, he shaves off his prison beard, perhaps finally ready to get on with life.
But it's hard to make a new life when his old one keeps coming back to cause trouble. He overhears an argument between Nina and her husband, about him, and the fact that their father left his only material wealth, his house, to his prodigal son.
"He hated you. He could barely talk about you," Nina's husband spits. "We needed that house, Nina," he says, telling Noah of all the expenses they paid for care for their father at the end of his life.
As Nina drops Noah off at work, he tells her that she can have the house. Nina protests, and says that their dad was trying to apologize to him by leaving him the home. "It's way too late for that," Noah says, and curses his father.
In Noah's creative writing class, a student named Audrey (Sarah Ramos) reads her work, while Noah is distracted. Looking out the window, he again sees the same familiar man in the baseball cap whom he saw at his father's service.
When Audrey is done reading, Noah tears her writing apart and sends her out of the room crying. Puzzled as to why she is so upset, Noah offers some sage advice to his class. "Listen, kids. If you want to be a writer, you better get used to people hating your work." I know, dude. I assume that most of you are hate-reading this right now. Charlotte, another student, fires back at him, offering that his novels were hardly rich with diversity.
Still in his malaise, Noah goes off to find a cheap place to live and then wanders into a church, where he curls up for a nap, drifting off to provide us with a flashback to his time in jail. Helen visits, and can't believe that he took the rap for her. Noah tells her that jail isn't half bad, and that he can use the experience for his next book.
"This isn't a writers retreat, Noah. You're incarcerated," she says. I'm so glad that Maura Tierney is back in our lives. Noah tells her that this is his way of wiping the slate clean for what he did to her, and to wait for him until he gets out.
He told her to wait for him, then once he was free, he pushed her away — just another awful thing in a series of excruciatingly awful things that this man has done.
Noah wakes up to the sounds of a literature class taking place in the church, taught by a French woman, Professor Le Gall, who asks him to introduce himself. After their awkward meet cute, the professor goes on teaching about Merlin, talking about the struggle the character faced between his darkness and his light, and how in some Merlin tales, the light was completely overtaken by the darkness. Sound familiar, Noah?
After class, the professor seeks Noah out. "I feel that you and I are kindred spirits," she says. Uh-oh. She lets on that she knows exactly who he is and what he's done, but they end up at a coffee shop together anyway. They are having a conversation about these darn kids these days, when Noah is again distracted by the man in the baseball cap outside the window.
Noah dashes off to a meeting with an official from the state, Officer Santos, checking up on his job and living situations. She makes it clear that he needs to maintain employment and that she will be checking up on him when he least expects it. As he walks the officer out of the school building, he sees Audrey walking into the dean's office, which seems likely to complicate the whole employment thing.
Later, in a liquor store, Noah sees the mystery man again. Startled, he drops an expensive bottle of wine and crashes into a display with dozens of others. The man leaves the store and Noah gives chase, but loses sight of him.
That evening, Noah attends a dinner party at Professor Le Gall's home. Audrey answers the door, much to his shock and horror. Professor Le Gall is her adviser, she explains. Audrey and a nameless female student, and two male students, round out the guest list.
The topics of love, consent, rape and sexual assault come up over dinner and wine. The female students make sane, logical defenses of women, while the male students make wild arguments against getting consent from a woman before making sexual advances.
I feared that things would unravel here, especially when Audrey brought up a passage from Noah's book where he had sex with his wife and her consent to the act was unclear. This, of course, mirrors a scene from Season 2 of this show in which Noah had sex with Alison, and a large portion of the internet conversation about the episode surrounded whether it was rape.
I am concerned when a topic of such weight and importance is tackled in a one-hour television show, as it just isn't possible to give it due attention. However, I am very much in favor of seeing whatever the showrunner's vision is — hearing their voice and listening to what they have to say. And if the writer wants to take a scene of her show to explain a confusing scene in an earlier episode, who am I to judge?
Audrey tells Noah that she would feel more comfortable in his class if she knew his attitude toward women in general, and specifically his thoughts on consent. He says that his character did not consent to the sex, but that he didn't consider it a rape, much to Audrey's horror. Sex, Noah man-splains, can be about wanting and not wanting, "a war between the intellect and instinct."
Audrey protests and calls him a rape apologist, to which the professor reacts with an attempt to find some nuance. She calls his book the story of a courageous man who falls in love and risks everything to be with a woman who isn't his wife. "But perhaps I misunderstood," she finishes.
After dinner, Noah approaches Audrey and apologizes to her. He offers that perhaps if she doesn't feel safe in his class, that feeling could propel her to greater heights as a writer. What? Who is this man? What is this man?
"Professor Solloway, what you don't seem to understand about women in general is that we feel unsafe all the time," Audrey explains. "I don't need you to push me outside my comfort zone. I've never been inside one," she says. "I've forgotten how to talk to people," Noah stammers.
Professor Le Gall steps in and offers Noah a tour of her home. They stop in her bedroom, and she tells him that she loved his book, and not to be offended by the strong young people with whom they spent the evening conversing. She asks if he'll write another book about the same characters, and he says that he won't, because he doesn't recognize the person who wrote that book. "People change," she says. Do they?
They start to make out, but Noah hears a train rumbling past and backs away, offers an excuse about not feeling well, and runs out of the house.
As he leaves, popping more pills, we flash back to his jail experience. We see the face of his prison guard, and recognize him as the man who's been stalking him throughout the episode. In present time, Noah stumbles down the street and fumbles for his phone. He calls Alison, and leaves her a voicemail. "I know you told me not to contact you, but I just needed to hear your voice," he mumbles.
He reaches his new home, still shaken, looking over his shoulder at every turn. He starts washing dishes in his sink, then hears his door open. He hears footsteps approaching, and we see a shadowy figure behind him.
Noah ends up stabbed in the neck, and the episode ends with him bleeding out on the floor.
Final Thoughts
Was Noah attacked, or did he stab himself? Was the shadowy figure a figment of his imagination, or a real attacker?
I enjoyed Sarah Ramos' work on "Parenthood," and was happy to see her turn up here.
Brendan Fraser as the prison guard? I'm intrigued.
I appreciate that the creative team behind "The Affair" is willing to take risks and experiment with anything and everything in an effort to find greatness. In Season 2, they did exactly that. I hope this was another step on that path, but I need some answers before I can draw any conclusions.