Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affairs (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

Sometimes… Dads Can Be Wrong?

Life affords us plenty of opportunities to reflect upon the wispy and elusive nature of memory. Who among us hasn’t forgotten our on-line passwords, even though all of our passwords are ‘password’? Who hasn’t found themselves standing in a car-park panicking that their car has been stolen, only to remember that they don’t actually own a car? Who hasn’t found themselves jamming a sausage in their eye because they’ve forgotten how to eat?

When two people are asked to recount a shared experience the opportunities for conflict and confusion multiply exponentially. Showtime’s ‘The Affair’ – a show about truth, deception and perception, starring McNulty from The Wire and that crazy chick Alice from Luther – deftly highlights how a person’s emotions, traumas, delusions, neuroses and agendas can disrupt their sense of the linear, mould their memories and in some cases re-write history.

Sometimes ‘The Affair’ will show two versions of the same event through two different character’s eyes, and the only difference will be an emphasis here, a piece of clothing there, an outburst here. Sometimes, the differences will be almost laughably extreme. The wife will remember sitting with her ex-husband in a cafe enduring a tense conversation about alimony as they both sip coffee; the husband will remember the wife charging into the cafe on horseback, slicing off a waitress’s head with a scimitar, and angrily shouting the Swedish national anthem at a frightened old man as the horse shits into a child’s sundae. I’ll often find myself rolling my eyes and scoffing: “This is bloody ridiculous. No two people could arrive at such seismically different interpretations of one reasonably mundane afternoon. Codswallop, I tells you, codswallop.” And yet… a recent experience has given me a renewed appreciation of The Affair’s perspective on perspective.

A few weeks ago, our eldest boy, Jack, staggered through to our bedroom in the early hours of the morning, and clambered in next to me. He felt hot to the touch, especially his forehead. I’d been concerned about him. He’d been coughing, sluggish, glassy-eyed and subdued, and generally not acting like his normal, bright-eyed, bonkers little self.

‘He needs medicine,’ I croaked to my partner, my hand wrapped over Jack’s forehead. ‘He’s got a temperature.’

My partner rolled over to face us, opening a blood-shot eye. ‘He’s hot, he doesn’t have a temperature.’

‘That’s what having a temperature is, being hot! I’m going to get him some medicine.’

‘No you’re not, he’s fine. He’s just warm.’

‘He’s not warm, he’s hot, and it’s not ‘hot hot’, it’s ‘ill hot’. I know ‘hot hot’. This isn’t ‘hot hot’.’

‘He doesn’t need medicine.’

‘I’m going to get him some medicine.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘Yes I am.’

‘NO!’

And that was the end of it. There I lay in the room’s murky half-light, nursing both my little boy and a massive grievance against my partner. What a cruel witch. She’d just repealed my son’s health-care for reasons that were at best arbitrary, and at worst directly linked to her crankiness at being woken up. I seem to remember getting Jack a cool drink of water, and then mumbling something suitably melodramatic, probably about him exploding at some point through the night, and THEN HOW WAS SHE GOING TO FEEL?

The next day at work I recounted the story to a work colleague, eliciting the expected response of ‘Oh, you can’t take chances, he should’ve got some medicine if he had a temperature’. Towards the end of the working day, I texted my partner to ask how Jack was doing, making sure to mention the medicine debacle and the furnace his forehead had become the night before. Twisting the knife, you know. My speciality. Here’s a little excerpt from the exchange, in medias res:

CHELS: “We miss you too. Jack is a bit weird this morning, maybe he is ill.”

ME: “I told you, darling. He’d peed himself and he was roasting hot for the whole other hour I was awake next to him. Hope he’s okay.”

CHELS: “I never disputed he was weird I just said he never had a temperature, which he never. He still says he feels great and nothing hurts. He’s just quiet. I told him that we had to come home and get some medicine and he just said okay and went to get his hat, it’s usually a fight.”

And then, a sharpened point of memory whistled its way towards my skull, smashing through bone and embedding itself in the spongy yuck of my brain. I had an unsettling moment of revelation, similar to the one the cop experiences at the end of The Usual Suspects when the whole horrible truth of Kaiser Soze hits him like a shovel. ‘I just said he never had a temperature, which he never…’ I replayed my partner’s words again and again in my thoughts. ‘…which he never…’ But how could she be so sure that he definitely hadn’t had a temperature last night, unless she’d actually taken his temperatu… Oh my. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Suddenly I remembered. It was like fireworks had been set off in my thoughts. We’d taken his temperature. Not we: me. I’d taken his temperature. A course of action, a compromise, that had actually been suggested by my partner.

‘If you think he’s got a temperature, Jamie, then go downstairs and get the thermometer and test him. If he’s got a temperature, then give him some medicine.’

If you’d given me a lie-detector test earlier that morning and asked me to give a truthful account of my hot-headed son’s entrance into our bedroom, I would have passed it with flying colours. It begs the question: how could I have hidden this crucial piece of information from myself? I hadn’t willfully constructed the version of events I’d carried into work with me that morning. There was no premeditation. No deceit. I’d simply mis-remembered. But why? Does the brain have its own version of predictive text? Has a lifetime of self-righteous anger re-written my neural network, and taught my brain how to process and store real-time events in accordance with my expectations and personality? That’s absolutely bloody terrifying. There’s so much plausible deniability swimming around in my head that my brain’s basically a mob boss. There are so many locked doors that I’m close to becoming Elliott from Mr Robot.

Perhaps our poo-pooing of The Affair’s central conceit is an act of self defence; we shut ourselves off from a truth that’s simply too terrifying to absorb. The linear reality we perceive around us is an artificial construct in a state of permanent flux; the by-product of our sensory organs sending billions of signals to an endlessly intricate yet endlessly fallible organic super-computer. Our memories are inextricably linked to our identities, and so if we can’t trust our memories, then who the hell are we? And who are we once our memories fail altogether?

Stranger still, as you’ll see from the reproduced text-thread above, our little boy had peed his bed prior to arriving in ours, and I’d washed him, changed him and put his sheets in the wash, something I’d ALSO forgotten until I reviewed those texts in the process of writing this very blog-post.

This blog-post is a sequel to this one I wrote a few weeks ago, also on the subject of our son’s physical well-being. My partner wasn’t too happy with it. She said it was funny and well-written (I’ve no trouble remembering things like that), but disputed its veracity. She agreed that the sequence of events was correct, but maintained that an emphasis here and an omission there had rendered her unfairly villainous. Apparently, it was our son’s distress and not her own stern words that had prevented me from taking him for a pee. She also claims that she’d said: ‘I’d rather he went to bed calm and happy and risk a wet bed, than put him through any more distress.’

Am I right? Is she right? Did any of it even happen? Was there a horse and a scimitar involved? I… just don’t know anymore.