The Affair Season Three Starts Over with Helen and Alison’s Stories

This week on The Affair, we leap back a year in time. I feel like I need to get in a DeLorean before each episode of this show.

Helen is with Dr. Ullah, and they’re enjoying some early morning grown-up time. It turns out that he’s renting the basement apartment. How convenient! She can be a full time mom upstairs, and girlfriend in the basement. The best part is, she doesn’t even have to put on shoes to go between her two lives.

She’s now gainfully employed as a realtor and is working a deal with a new client. She’s amazing. No word on what happened to her store, but apparently it’s closed at this point.

After showing a house, she goes to see Noah at the prison and we see the result of the scary guard he’s haunted by in the present day. His eye is disgusting, and when Noah tells Helen he wants the kids to visit, it’s not hard to see why she keeps them from him.

At the end of Helen’s work day and visitation, she takes Dr. Ullah along to meet Whitney and her new boyfriend for dinner.

The apartment is full of boobs and lady parts. Not exactly parent friendly—although the boyfriend is the same age as her parents, so maybe this makes sense.

While at dinner, Whitney and Helen get into an argument about Noah being in prison and Helen takes the blame with a new story, but Whitney doesn’t want to forgive her dad.

In order to smooth things over, Dr. Ullah buys one of the artistic nudes and brings it home.

His relationship with Helen is at a crisis point, but in the end they decide to stay together. And I’m happy for her.

Meanwhile, is anyone more tragic than Alison? Her story also begins a year before the present day. This poor woman. She heads to Montauk in disguise and rents a place on the beach.

After scoping out her daughter Joanie’s playground, she goes to find Cole and tells him she was sick and she wants to see Joanie, and he’s understandably mad since she left without a word. But she’s the mother, so he tells her to come by.

Unfortunately, Cole’s wife is not so understanding, and tells Alison she can’t see her daughter because she signed away her rights. I’m not fan of this stepmom. I hate that Cole married her.

Alison heads out and ends up having a drink with Oscar. She tells him she’s been sick for months. Her daughter got sick and she was alone. She was the same age Gabriel was when he died and she just freaked out. Completely understandable.

But instead of saying that to Cole, she just disappeared for 6 months, and it turns out that while she was in treatment, she signed her rights away.

In good news, she claims that she is healed—which is what we want. She should have gotten help as soon as Gabriel passed away. She might have avoided some of this angst. Of course, the affair wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t have a show, so never mind.

She’s so upset she ends up reading all the letters that Noah has written her from prison. He tells her what’s going on with the guard and in the middle of her day, Cole shows up with Joanie. (Cole and Alison should be together. That is my professional opinion.)

He’s still mad at her, but you can tell he wants to do the right thing.

This season is taking a different turn than the previous two, and there’s quite a bit of setup. It’s almost like starting over.

Keri is a professional chatterbox who loves watching TV & movies, reading about pop culture, and gawking at any craziness on the internet. You can follow Keri on Twitter.