It's amazing how a meandering, aimless final season of a show can be redeemed almost entirely by a strong finale. I used to love The Affair; it was a top ten show for me in its debut season and it didn't slip out of my top 20 in its second. Unfortunately, the wheels came flying off at the outset of Season 3, when this show - which had previously been about a family-destroying affair and the subtle inconsistencies between different people's perceptions of the same event - was suddenly about, shit, I dunno, a mental breakdown? An exploration of white man guilt in 2017? Season 4 righted the ship a bit but, in doing so, fully cut ties with what it had been in its first season and what had made it charming. It took place largely in LA and not Montauk, and dealt with new relationships for all four of the adults caught up in the first season's titular affair. So now it was just a show about four separate relationships, all strained and complicated and crumbling for their own reasons, and gone entirely was the initial gimmicky hook where we'd see the same events unfold from two different perspectives. (And that was a real shame, what with "fake news" and #MeToo on everyone's mind in 2018.)
Going into its fifth and final season, The Affair had very visibly run out of story to tell. It had killed off one of its two initial main characters and a third major character revealed he wouldn't be coming back. I very nearly bailed. I'm glad I didn't!
What unfolded for most of Season 5 was this strange and aimless and messy sequence of episodes - and even scenes within episodes - that bordered on incoherent. The first episode contains a death and a funeral. The second episode is a break-up. Interspersed throughout the season are scenes from thirty years into the future, where climate change has rendered Montauk borderline uninhabitable. We get half an episode from the point of view of a neighbor in LA struggling to raise her baby as a single mother. The only apparent arc features a growing #MeToo scandal and the show seems to say, if it's saying anything at all about #MeToo, that it sucks to be a man accused of misconduct. The whole thing feels pointless and meandering!
And yet... it ends on this weirdly perfect note. It re-unites the Solloway family - kids, parents, grandparents - that made the first two seasons a family melodrama, and it puts them all back in Montauk where the show really thrived. It was the finale I had no idea I wanted - the show totally abandoned the #MeToo arc and also provided mostly happy endings for its characters, even if many of them were bittersweet (keep in mind that the season has a thirty-year flash-forward arc, and most of the adults are in their fifties in the present day - you do the math).
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can look back on what felt like a messy season and realize that the season brought back something else I'd loved - the "same event from multiple viewpoints" gimmick. Which is a very satisfying answer to the question, "Why on earth do we need to spend half an episode with the single mom neighbor or this immediate ex-girlfriend?"
In the end - and really, only very literally at the very end - The Affair was about finding solace and happiness in simple familial love. Life is short, so why not spend it - the end of it, in particular - with the people who make you feel happiest and most comfortable? That's a message we can all get behind!
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