For its part, The Affair was all about nostalgia last night, tugging my college-loving heartstrings with Noah and Helen's impromptu reunion on the campus where they met. (Helen brought Whitney for a tour; Noah had a reading at a shop nearby.) As they got hammered at one of their old haunts, the conversation took a bittersweet turn: "Remember the fight we had in that booth over there?" Noah asked. Then, The Affair did what it does best: communicated an extraordinary amount of information and emotion in just a few words. Noah apologized for "wanting [Helen] to... you know," then went on to imply he had long felt regret over their "decision," especially once he "met the other four... and they were so beautiful." Helen shrugged it off, citing that "we were 19," and seemed surprised that Noah still thought about the abortion.
I was, too. We're used to seeing women haunted by long-ago abortions—and to versions of those stories in which the men are figments, long-gone or not mentioned at all. (Think about Sex and the City's famous scene in which the women exchange abortion war stories.) But in this relationship, Noah is the one who never quite moved on, while Helen—who, hours earlier, snapped at Whitney that at her age she "knows nothing"—seems to have moved on in relative peace.
Suffice to say that it's been a major week for talk of choice on mainstream television. There's a feeling of solidarity rising from the conversations Scandal, The Good Wife and The Affair are pushing out there simultaneously. And you should feel it no matter where your beliefs fall, because no matter which way abortion plots twist, their real agenda is changing choice from a taboo women's issue to a conversation everyone's responsible for.
