“I just think you fill your life with other people’s problems in order to avoid addressing your own,” Sasha tells Helen. He also suggests that her affection for Sierra is her way of covering up the hate she ought to feel for a woman who slept with her boyfriend. (That Sierra slept with Helen, too, never seems to come up in these discussions.)

It’s Sierra herself who goes to bat on Helen’s behalf. In a confrontation with Adeline, she literally shouts the praises of Helen’s unconditional love for her children, a kind of love she never received herself. (Sierra: “I stopped eating because you told me, ‘I’d rather have a dead daughter than a fat one.’” Adeline: “I was kidding!”) Maybe there’s something to Sasha’s theories, but if the end result is being a better person, is that so bad?

No one musters a Sierra-style defense of Noah, that’s for sure. Although his segment starts with a pleasant walk with his old friend Ariel (Janel Moloney) and ends with a warm reception at Helen’s, the intervening scenes are a portrait of a man spiraling downward in the face of accusations of misogyny and misconduct from several minor characters spread across the series’s history. The reporter gathering these charges goes so far as to suggest, in one pointed question, that Noah’s hypersexualized portrayal of Alison in his fictionalized account of their affair might have led to her suicide. The more frantically Noah tries to put out these fires, the more he fans the flames.

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.