The Affair: 3 Months After Vik’s Death, Helen Takes up with Sasha

In the third installment of The Affair’s 5th season, we picked up 3 months after Vik’s funeral. Noah finished a new book, “The Autobiography of Jack Hunter,” that will likely be published around the same time the movie of his first book “Descent” comes out. In an interview for Vanity Fair, he says he is not seeing anyone. And he’s not because Janelle dumped him and wouldn’t answer his calls after Vik’s funeral.

After leaving, he suddenly got a call from Janelle asking him to come over to her place to talk. There he learned that she is running for the school board and she is back with her ex-husband, Carl. Janelle wants Noah to keep his mouth shut about their relationship because Carl doesn’t like the optics. She was his boss when that was going on. Noah got all huffy about it, even though it was really over but agreed to her request. So, we presume we won’t see Janelle and Carl anymore. Noah also went to the set of the movie where he learned that Helen and Sasha were becoming close and that sent him into a frenzy. He was also in a dither over Whitney’s impending wedding but we don’t really care about that.

The only thing we can say about Noah is that he’s probably right that Sasha is using Helen to better understand the Noah character he is playing in “Descent.” We don’t think Sasha wants to “be” Noah (as Noah said). Sasha really doesn’t think Noah is all that. How shocked Noah was when Sasha told him he doesn’t understand the Noah character in his own book: “Noah, you can’t see yourself, and you never could, and that’s why you never get what you want.” Sasha thinks the wife based on Helen in the book is a far more interesting person than the Alison character and wants to rewrite the script so that the Noah and Helen characters get back together. Noah’s overreactions about this and Sasha’s interest in Helen ended up getting him kicked off the set.

In Helen’s part, she’s got her hands full with her mother trying to convince her to move back east now that her father has dementia. On top of that, Noah has enlisted her aid in getting Whitney to cancel her wedding and Sierra has turned to Helen for help with Vik’s baby Eddie. Helen doesn’t understand Sasha’s attraction to her and can’t see how she’s his type but she still decides to go with the flow and has him come over and spend the night.

For the third episode in a row, only 5 minutes was devoted to Joanie. In Montauk, she shows up at the local bar and brings the bartender back to Cole’s old house for a roll in the hay. The bartender says she is “one sick chick” but accommodates her request to choke the daylights out of her.

I don’t know why but I get the feeling that somehow Helen (if not Noah, too) will end up back on the east coast and we will get the story of what happened in the intervening years between their story and Joanie’s that way.