The final episode of “The Affair” begins and ends with different versions of the same song. In its opening minutes, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Irish folk-rock band the Waterboys blares forth while Noah Solloway drills friends and family in a dance routine for his daughter Whitney’s wedding. As sung by the vocalist Mike Scott, the lyrics regard a loved one with awe that borders on pagan devotion: “I saw the crescent,” he joyfully yelps. “You saw the whole of the moon.”
By the time the episode ends, Noah is an old man, alone with his memories on the shores of Montauk. This time, Fiona Apple, who provided the show’s opening theme, performs the song. In her ragged voice, the lyrics sound less like praise and more like accusations: When she sings “I sighed, but you swooned,” the words catch and drag in her throat like a curse.
Yet the sense that Apple is in love, deeply, with the person to whom she is singing is no less palpable here than it is in Scott’s original. Rather, her performance reflects the way the people we love can confound, even infuriate us while at their best as well as at their worst. Sometimes, loving someone who feels bigger and better than we are can be an enormous burden. Sometimes we want to see only a sliver of the sky rather than the whole thing, and to hell with those who would force us out of ourselves to do otherwise.
If you’ve watched all five seasons of “The Affair,” you can see where this is going. To Helen Solloway, her ex-husband, Noah, is maddeningly impulsive and self-pitying but also patient and sweet. To Noah, his ex-wife Helen is infuriatingly Type A and judgmental but also caring and almost impossibly together. Sometimes their virtues are nearly as difficult to tolerate as their vices. But that’s love, isn’t it?
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