“Do you believe me?”
Gah. We think that’s the best way we can sum up our immediate reaction after watching The Affair’s season finale. (Warning, spoilers ahead!) We didn’t get to see how Scotty’s (Colin Donnell) murder went down, but an arrest was made: in the final scene, set in the present-day, Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson) are in their NYC apartment (yes, they’re together!), getting ready for a night in after putting their (?) daughter to bed, when Detective Jeffries comes in and arrests Noah. “I’ll get you out of this,” Alison promises. “Do you believe me?”
This. Freakin’. Show. But worry not, as a definitive answer to who murdered Scotty and how it went down is coming…eventually. Also on the way? Point-of-views other than Noah and Alison’s. (Can we get an amen?!)
Here, creator Sarah Treem answers (as best she can) burning finale questions and previews what’s ahead for season two:
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Will we see Cole and Helen’s point-of-views in season two? Get excited because, as of right now, that’s the plan. “I hope we’ll be seeing Helen and Cole’s [narratives],” Treem says. “It’s all still very much theoretical, but that’s the idea in my head at this point.”
Aside from varying narratives, will the objective truth ever be seen? Treem reveals that she has a plan to reveal the objective truth behind one of The Affair‘s biggest mysteries.
“In my mind, in terms of what the truth of the crime itself is at the end, I think we need to and we are going to see that and understand what happened there objectively,” she says. “In instances like that, where there is crime or something, where it’s not basically the emotional interaction between two people…that to me is the one moment where I actually want to know the truth. That’s the moment I’m pretty sure we will see objectively, but I think the way that we get there is going to be a bit of a puzzle, so when the audience arrives at it, they will discover it for themselves.”
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So when will season two pick up? “Season two in the past will pick up very quickly after season one ends,” Treem reveals. “We have more to go in terms of the story before the past catches up to the present.”
Will Noah be put on trial for Scotty’s murder? Viewers will soon learn that Detective Jeffries (who was revealed to be gay in a phone call at the end of the episode, proving even he was lying to both Noah and Alison, and us, all-season long).
“If you think about the evidence the detective is arresting Noah on, he doesn’t actually have that much to go on. So he needs more. It’s circumstantial, what he’s arresting Noah on right now. It’s not conclusive. We’re going to watch that detective do more work to figure out what actually happened.”
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Why did the writers decide to have Helen reconcile with Noah? We were a little sad to see Helen, whom we adore despite how some fans feel, say she didn’t want to divorce Noah after their four-month separation. Why oh why, we asked?! Well, it’s complicated, just like it is in rea-life, Treem reasons.
“She has four kids with him, they’ve lived their whole lives together…I think people are not as quick as we’d like to think they are to break up their marriages over an affair. I think that when you find yourself in that position, there’s a lot of, ‘OK, does this really have to be the end?’ And I think she does miss him and she does love him, and for me, that’s what’s going to be really interesting about Helen’s arc in the second season, is that this man has really betrayed her and yet she still loves him. What do you do with that?”
Was that always going to be the finale’s ending, even if the show wasn’t renewed? When we spoke with castmember Colin Donnell before a second season was ordered, he hinted that we would be satisfied by the finale. However, after watching it, we would’ve been frustrated if it acted as the series finale. There were too many questions, too many dangling threads.
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“There was a point in the middle of the season where everyone’s like, ‘I don’t want this show to have a second season,'” Treem says. “I thought was odd actually because I always conceived of it as at least a three season show, so I was like, ‘We’re not even close to done yet with this story.’ But it surprised me that people could not conceive of how this could possibly keep going. To me, that sort of tells you more about what the expectation of an affair is in people’s mind because everybody thought they kind of knew how it would resolve itself.”
What did you think of The Affair’s finale? Were you satisfied? Do you think Noah actually killed Scotty? Weigh in in the comments below.
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