The Affair 4.2: Meanwhile, Back on the Island

Episode 4.2 of The Affair last night, was a pretty good, even excellent, standalone episode, though it had little to do with the central themes which animated the three previous seasons.   If an overall series is a book, and each season a chapter, Cole and Alison's half hours felt like chapters in a new book, a sequel, published some years later.

The two different takes on the same story still worked well, though actually there weren't too many scenes in which Cole and Alison were together, making 4.2 almost two half-hour standalone stories.  But my favorite was Alison saying "fuck" in her rendition, with the expletive absent in Cole's.

Alison's story was the more compelling and unusual.  In her half hour, which came second, we see her at work in a center that offers peer-to-peer counseling for parents who lost a child.  She meets a guy who saves her from a father suffering from a kind of PTSD - literally saves her life, from the guy who is choking her - and this proves to be the beginning of a longterm romance (also literally longterm, since the guy is in a program, too, which won't let him have romantic erotic relationships for another five months and x number of days and hours).   Hey, were it me, I'd have left the program to go out with Alison - but, then, I wouldn't have joined such a program in the first place.  Not drinking is one thing.  Not being allowed to have relationships is ... well, I'd say counterproductive at best.

It's gratifying to see Alison in such good shape - the best she's been in the entire series, I'd say, and much better than Cole, who seemed more pathetic than usual last night.  I'm with his wife - what's he so unhappy about?  I know, he was a harrowing backstory, too.  But, hey, man, get over it - you have a good life now, including on the verge of being a millionaire.  Does he love and unconsciously miss being with Alison that much?  Maybe.

Very well acted as always by Ruth Wilson as Alison and Joshua Jackson as Cole, and I forgot to say the same for Dominic West as Noah and Maura Tierney as Helen last week, because that was true, too.  The Affair was always a unique series, and I think I'm going to like the new turn it's taken this year.

See also The Affair 4.1: Quakes and Propaganda
And see also The Affair 3.1: Sneak Preview Review ... The Affair 3.2: Sneak Preview Review: Right Minds ... The Affair 3.3: Who Attached Noah? ... The Affair 3.4: The Same Endings in Montauk ... The Affair 3.5: Blocked Love ... The Affair 3.6: The Wound ... The Affair 3.7: The White Shirt ... The Affair 3.8: The "Miserable Hero" ... The Affair 3.9: A Sliver of Clarity ... The Affair 3.10: Taking Paris

And see also The Affair 2.1: Advances ... The Affair 2.2: Loving a Writer ... The Affair 2.3: The Half-Wolf ... The Affair 2.4: Helen at Distraction ... The Affair 2.5: Golden Cole ... The Affair 2.6: The End (of Noah's Novel) ... The Affair 2.7: Stunner ... The Affair 2.8: The Reading, the Review, the Prize ...And see also The Affair Premiere: Sneak Preview Review ... The Affair 1.2: Time Travel! ... The Affair 1.3: The Agent and the Sleepers ... The Affair 1.4: Come Together ... The Affair 1.5: Alison's Episode ... The Affair 1.6: Drugs and Vision ... The Affair 1.7: True Confessions ... The Affair 1.8: "I Love You / I Love You, Too" ... The Affair 1.9: Who Else on the Train? ... The Affair Season 1 Finale: The Arrest and the Rest

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