But if that’s true, she wonders, why didn’t Noah make the decision to stay with his family? Weren’t they happy together? Wasn’t he a great dad and husband? “If that wasn’t real, and if that wasn’t good,” she says, “then maybe nothing is.”

To the show’s credit, Noah has no easy explanation for why he left Helen and the kids for Alison. In fact, he has no explanation at all. Watching the face of Dominic West as Noah’s mind works overtime to put what moved him into words, and then fails to deliver, is a study in the almost physical effort required to articulate complex emotions.

This seems to be the spirt of Joanie’s segment at first. She travels to a post-traumatic stress clinic run by Ben Cruz (now played by Tony Plana), her mother’s murderer, looking for answers. After seeing through the false identity she comes up with as a ruse, he does the most unexpected thing imaginable in that moment: He confesses.

He walks her through his version of the events of the evening, which differ in some important ways from what we saw from Alison’s perspective. He explains that he has spent his life trying to make amends for that moment, waiting for Joanie to come looking for him all the while. He even places himself at her mercy, allowing her to report him to the police, leave him be, or even kill him. Staggered, she runs off to think things through.

Eventually, she returns with the cops in tow. And that’s when things get goofy.

Suddenly, Ben is transformed from a repentant murderer to a comic-book supervillain. He has prepared a raft of forged documents with Joanie’s signature on them to make it look as if she were one of his patients. He has a whole story cooked up in which she suffers from delusions and makes violent threats, backed up by a selectively edited recording he made when she was venting during their conversation.

After the cops leave (Ben waves them off, seemingly so he can continue to taunt Joanie on his own), Joanie cracks. She attacks Ben, but he promptly gets the upper hand and begins to choke her. It’s a fate she seems to welcome; realizing this, he stops, refusing to end her misery.