Do I think “The Affair” set out to tell a #MeToo story from the start, before the #MeToo movement existed? No. But the pieces have been there all along. If it took until now for the show to look back and put those pieces together, that doesn’t make the resulting picture any less real.

Noah can be a good father, as Helen insists he has been. He can do his best to be a good man, as he has insisted time and time again — going so far as confessing to a crime he didn’t commit in order to protect Helen. He can even be the victim of opportunists like Sasha, who care only about the accusations insofar as they can be exploited for personal gain.

But Noah has been a bull in the china shop of women’s lives for a long time. All “The Affair” is doing now is surveying the damage.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

From a certain perspective, “The Affair” is the perfect show to explore accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. So much of the #MeToo movement is about re-examining behaviors too long taken for granted or never properly evaluated as the violations of trust and consent that they are. Noah’s alternately amorous and contentious relationships with many women over the course of the series — to say nothing of the many moments his contact with women was fueled by alcohol or extreme emotional distress — is precisely the kind of conduct that can prove worthy of scrutiny.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the show is backfilling a #MeToo payload into a space it was content to leave undeveloped until just now. While individual incidents involving Alison and other women drove the occasional episode or arc, a coherent Noah-as-oblivious-serial-predator narrative is new. Considering how many different vantage points we’ve had into Noah’s life — his own, his ex-wives’, his girlfriends’, his daughter’s, and even that of a guy who once pointed a gun at him in anger — to have these accusations emerge now feels like a narrative cheat.

The alternative explanation — that Noah is right, that these accusations are ginned up and bogus, that the appearance of impropriety is all there is to it — doesn’t seem to hold water, not based on how Noah is portrayed in this episode anyway. The guy keeps stampeding into worse and worse situations of his own making, from denigrating a former student as a publicity hound to tracking his ex-publicist to an award ceremony and grabbing her by the arm in front of dozens of witnesses. Noah might see what he’s doing as only accidentally wrong, but the pattern we in the audience can observe is clear.

So we’re left with a show that has scant hours to go, turning hard against its own co-protagonist. The last time this happened, King’s Landing burned down. Much of the furor that greeted the conclusion of “Game of Thrones” was, I felt, misplaced, given the very clear and unequivocal signs and behavior displayed by Daenerys up to that point. People were upset because they didn’t want to see their hero turn heel. So I find myself asking, is that what’s upsetting me here? Did Noah pull the wool over my eyes all this time? Or is the show spending its final episodes trying to do so now?