The most noticeable thing during the opening Helen chapter was how she treated her ex-husband like a child — walking in on him in the shower, trying to dry him, reading his texts. (And this was from her point of view.) He was her errant boy, who just needed to be shown the right path. Eventually, at the end of the day, that path led back into her bed, where Helen and Noah had sex for the first time since — when? If you remember, let us know.

In the meantime, the episode played out like a farce, or a horror thriller, with people gradually discovering there was a monster in the basement. First Helen brought Vic in on the secret, using him for medical advice, which consisted of telling Noah to stop taking Vicodin because he was already addicted. Then Whitney found out, when Noah encountered Furkat on the sidewalk and the conversation — including Furkat’s great line, “I’m her lover. And her boss. Her lover-boss” — ended in blows.

Luckily for Helen, Noah kept falling asleep, so she could get back upstairs and put dinner on the table. There, we saw a tense but functioning family unit — Martin was silent, which was an improvement, and Trevor chattered about a school-musical version of “Jane Eyre,” which allowed for some amusing references to crazy people in the attic. (Though who’s crazier — the dad in the basement or the mom at the table?) Then there was a crashing noise, which Helen explained away as plumbers at work — at night? In Brooklyn? — and Vic was out of there. “Are you still in love with him?” the doctor asked, and she said no. Vic was bewildered, but then he doesn’t know the truth about Scotty Lockhart’s death and all the guilt Helen’s carrying around. No one was harmed during Vic’s departure except for the poor cactus, which ended up on the floor, just another victim.

We saw a lot of the same events from Noah’s perspective, playing out basically the same way but with differences of shading. In Helen’s telling, Noah reacted in clichéd angry-addict fashion to Vic’s refusal to prescribe more Vicodin; in Noah’s account, he was humble (“Would you mind writing me a prescription?”) and it was Vic who was angry and threatening. Noah also gave himself a glimmer of self-awareness, asking Vic whether the painkillers could cause hallucinations.

Noah’s story also included a stop at Gunther’s Hunting and Fishing in Pennsylvania, where at least the existence of Gunther appeared to be proved — Noah talked to the prison guard’s mother, played by Lois Smith (Grandma Stackhouse on “True Blood”) — and where Noah bought a knife, which didn’t seem like a good idea at all. We also got a couple of prison flashbacks, in which Gunther was more sadistic than we had seen him before, promising to haunt Noah after he left prison and giving him 90 more days in solitary. And finally there was a full-on hallucination (or so we assume) in which Gunther appeared in the basement. They “wrestled,” which explained the noise that led to Vic’s departure.