It gets worse. When she returns to the airport, Whitney discovers that she has been put on the same flight as Audrey, the ex-student of Noah’s whose new memoir details his emotionally abusive behavior. The two women have an extensive, contentious conversation about Audrey’s accusations.

Whitney focuses on the collateral damage done to her and her siblings by Audrey’s book. Audrey flips the script, saying that men have the real power to damage lives and move on without a second thought. It’s that power, Audrey says, that initially attracted her to Noah, and it’s not hard to extrapolate that it attracted Whitney to Furkat. What would happen without that power differential? Wouldn’t the world be better for women like her and Whitney if they didn’t have to conduct mental gymnastics to put men at ease, tending to their own needs and desires only afterward?

The conversation seems to tip Whitney toward confronting her fiancé, whom she tells about her one-night stand with Furkat. But when she accuses him of wanting to marry her only for a green card, he explains that it’s the other way around: He needs to stay in “this godforsaken country” because he wants to be with Whitney. And unlike Furkat, he treats her as a legitimate artistic subject, revealing a painting that captures her quiet intensity.

The two are in the early moments of makeup sex when Whitney’s entire family shows up at her apartment. Her parents try to convince her that Noah’s conduct was “awkward” and “uncomfortable” but not abusive. Just hours earlier she may have agreed, but her mind has run a gantlet since then.

That’s when she drops the bomb I’ve been waiting for since this story line began: She was an eyewitness to Noah’s conduct toward women way back in Season 2, when in a drunken haze he came within a hair’s breadth of putting the moves on her in a hot tub. “You didn’t recognize me, but I saw the way you look at women,” she hisses. “Like they’re prey.”

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.