Watching Margaret and Bruce squabble with Gottlief is painful stuff as Helen loses more of her mind by the minute. This season of The Affair has reflected parallel affairs and situations going on in peripheral characters’ lives fairly aggressively, but it’s never been more of the case than in this scene as Margaret’s collapsed marriage spills over into the crumbling remains of Helen’s. Thank God she’s saved by the terrible news about her son!

The ticking time bomb of Martin’s recurring ailment finally comes to its boiling point when Noah takes his children out to a Yankees game (doesn’t he know that the Mets are all the rage right now??). It’s not too long when all of a sudden Martin’s crippling over in pain and being rushed to the emergency room while vomiting out bile that looks like it should be out of a cartoon. As Martin is going under the knife it’s illuminating to realize that there is obviously something very real wrong with him and this hasn’t just been psychosomatic grief over his fractured family. Surely the trauma of all of that didn’t help things any (it can’t be ignored that his symptoms did seem to increase when he’d be with Noah), but Martin’s condition ends up being crucial in a wholly different way.

His diagnosis seems to be one that almost begs for Noah and Helen to get back together, with them needing to have a watchful, caring eye over him now more than ever. Just as Alison and Cole grew closer last week, it’s fascinating to see their binary couple heading much in the same direction. Noah and Helen’s bonding here is in an entirely different way, but it still represents a togetherness of sorts. While I do not see the show heading in this direction, it’d kind of be amazing if after three or four seasons here, the show ended up with Noah and Helen, and Alison and Cole being paired back together again, with all of this craziness ultimately bringing them back to where they started. We’re still far from being at that point, but as variations on that theme are being played with, it does highlight not only the fluidity of relationships, but also the fluidity of breakups.

Martin’s diagnosis more than anything though acts as an underscoring of how much of a poison Margaret’s been on everything (and even adds some more poignancy to Helen’s drug hallucination of her literally becoming her mother). There’s some wonderful wish fulfillment at a near fan fiction level in the form of Helen bitching out Margaret, and in spite of how much it seems to take out of Helen, she’s absolutely stronger by the end of it. This entire ordeal may have arguably been more traumatic for her than what she went through two episodes ago, but the difference here is that she’s actually in a better place by the end of this. Finally she’s figured out what is good for her life and what is venomous, and even though she might be battered from the discovery, she’s finally ready to move on.

I can’t wait to see what’s next for Helen—and especially how this newly independent version of herself syncs up with the version of her we’re seeing in the flash-forwards—and these final few episodes should provide the most interesting version of the character that we’ve seen yet. Noah’s half of the episode doesn’t do much to disabuse the notion that he and Helen are being much more civil to each other, and I’m curious to see how this develops in the coming weeks, too.