The Affair Recap: A Full Hour of Joanie (S5 E6)

After Episode 5 of The Affair’s final season, we were saying that we don’t see what Baby Eddie has to do with anything but in this episode, we find out that he has everything to do with everything! Baby Eddie is destined to grow up and help Joanie unravel the mystery of Alison’s death. If not for him, why, Joanie would never even known about Ben Cruz because she tossed out all of Cole’s stuff. That’s what we think anyhow. Here’s what came up in this episode.

“The whole family is steeped in cyclical tragedy. Murder, drowning, suicide– more murder, more drowning, more suicide”

The man Joanie met in the cemetery is going by the name E.J. He’s an epigeneticist. He has been studying the Lockhart family for years. He studies how trauma gets passed down from generation to generation.

Nobody knew the history of Montauk like he did ~ E.J.

During the course of his studies, E.J. interviewed Cole and found him to be a happy guy. Cole was happy that people were bailing out on Montauk and it was becoming a small fishing town again.

You’re working so calmly in the place where your mother died ~ E.J.

E.J. accompanied Joanie while she conducted some research by the jetty where Alison died but Joanie didn’t even realize it until he pointed it out.

He takes her to the abandoned police station where she looks at the police report and other stuff in Alison’s file. He takes her home and she lets him have the box with Cole’s stuff.

My mother was an irrational, unhinged depressive with a death wish ~ Joanie

As Joanie and E.J. gaze upon the supermoon together, she posits that in some ways, her life was actually easier after Alison died. “More stable, less surprises.” Joanie recalls that there was a supermoon the night Alison died. She uses her equipment to observe the conditions on October 13th, 30 years ago. A negative surge storm pulled the tide out further than normal. Joanie says there’s no way Alison could have drowned herself in water so shallow. It would have been like jumping into a bathtub. Joanie starts hearing Alison’s voice. She turns around, grabs E.J. and kisses him. Of course, they end up in bed.

He wasn’t my dad’s boyfriend. He was my mother’s ~ Joanie

Joanie is a seriously conflicted character. She goes home and tells Paul, her husband, that she’s been cheating on him for years and seems to fully expect things to go on as usual after that bombshell. What? Paul kicked her out so she went back to Montauk and spilled her guts to E.J. She feels so guilty about abandoning Cole but his sole focus on her was “suffocating.” (Oh? Is that why she likes to get choked?) E.J. suggests that Cole may have had a close friend she was unaware of and shows him all these clippings that Cole saved on Ben Cruz. Later, Joanie recovers a memory and realizes that Ben was Alison’s boyfriend.

It looks like Joanie will confront Ben next week, according to the synopsis on IMDB (but the episode won’t be all about her: Noah and Whitney travel to Montauk to begin planning the wedding. Noah gets a concerning call. Armed with new information about her mother’s death, Joanie confronts a stranger.