“The Affair”

Another Unlikely Ethics Problem From “The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This one isn’t an ethics quiz; I know the answer. Maybe you’ll disagree.

In the final, 5th season of Showtime’s Chaos Theory and ethics series “The Affair,” the ethics carnage radiating from the now over-and-done-marriage-destroying tryst between Alison and Noah is still powerful. Alison is dead (murdered); Noah is out for prison, and teaching at a charter school in LA. His first wife and kids are also in LA, having followed her new, reliable, loving partner Vik, a surgeon, to a new post at a prestigious hospital.

But Vik is diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He knows it’s incurable, and stubbornly refuses treatment. Asked by Helen, Noah’s wife before “The Affair,” what she can do, he answers, “Have my baby.” (That’s a selfish request, but it’s a different issue). Overwhelmed by self-pity, the prospect of impending death, and a “why me?” mood, plus being drunk and depressed after learning that Helen can’t have any more children at 50, Vik falls into bed with Sierra (above), a New Age, moon-ring, crystal-loving, 20-year-old woman-child hippie idiot next door. SHE gets pregnant as a result, and decides to keep the baby.

Helen learns about this as her crypto-husband (they never formally wed) is on his death bed. Later, after promising Vik, Helen tells Sierra that she will do what she can to help her with her now deceased sort-of husband’s offspring, because he so wanted to have a piece of himself live on, or something.

Now it’s nine months later. Sierra, an aspiring actress with IQ of a sponge, has invited about 20 New Age friends into her home to witness the birth of her child, “naturally,” in her living room. They romp around chanting, toking and dancing with funny things on their heads. Meanwhile, Sierra has been in labor for 24 hours, and a woman who may or may not be a trained midwife is telling her that her “negative energy” is keeping the baby from feeling welcome and other nonsense.

Sierra is exhausted and in pain. Helen shows up and Sierra shouts out that she can’t stand the pain and wants to go to the hospital. The acting midwife says that this is typical of first-time mothers under the influence of “negative energy,” and that Sierra doesn’t mean it. Helen is worried about the baby and Sierra.

What should she do?

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From Showtime’s Series “The Affair,” An Ethics Zugzwang “What Would You Do?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As I noted in this post, I am slogging through Showtime’s ethics series “The Affair ” (2016-2021) again after catching much of it pre-streaming. One of the issues raised during an episode was discussed here. At the climax of the second season, a wildly contrived scenario that determined the course of the whole thing occurred. I write ethics hypothetical for a living, and I could not come up with one filled with more ethics conflicts, dilemmas and rationalizations.

Here’s the set-up: The four parties involved in “the affair” are Noah, a late forties, insecure, narcissist writer; Helen, his wife of 25 years with whom he has had four children; Alison, a young, clinically depressed former nurse whom Noah encountered in a chance meeting at Montauk restaurant, The Lobster Roll,” while his family was vacationing, and who subsequently engaged in a mad, impetuous affair with him that broke up his marriage and hers; and Cole, her ex-husband, who ran the family ranch and dealt drugs on the side.

At the point when the incident in question occurs, Noah and Helen are divorced, as are Cole and Alison. Alison and Noah are now married but estranged because Alison just informed Noah that what he thought was their infant daughter is in fact the result of an impulsive post-divorce one-time-only moment of passion with Cole when they were both drunk and depressed. (Everyone drinks a lot in “The Affair.”) Helen and Noah have finally agreed to share care of their kids, especially after Helen having a DUI with her youngest daughter in the car made her case for full custody untenable.

Stipulated: all members of the shattered couples have lingering intense feelings for each other.

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“The Affair” Smears An American War Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

The General and friend.

                             The General and friend.

“The Affair,” Showtime’s much lauded soap opera, wrapped up its season yesterday, without me. There are some things I won’t forgive, and sliming the legacy and reputation of long dead individuals of character and accomplishment is one of them.”The Affair” was guilty of that the previous week. It is dead to me.

The background: General Omar Bradley is increasingly accorded credit for planning D-Day, and thus is owed a large share of the world’s gratitude for winning World War II. He was not flamboyant like Patton or MacArthur, and had no political aspirations, so despite his remarkable life in service of the United States, Omar Bradley is an undeservedly obscure historical figure. He is, also, beyond any controversy, an American hero.

He also was an especially ethical one, as indicated by three of his better known quotes:

“It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.”

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

“Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him. Soldiers must have confidence in their leader.”

Why the writers of “The Affair” decided smear Bradley, I cannot fathom. Nonetheless, any viewers of the show that watched the penultimate episode and who didn’t know who Bradley was, and many who did, left it with the belief that Bradley, a who by all accounts was faithfully and lovingly married to the his first wife throughout the war and until her death, had an affair with actress Marlene Dietrich, who traveled with the U.S. Army for nearly two years at the end of the war. “The Affair’s” self-obsessed and perpetually horny protagonist, a successful novelist, told his therapist—and boy, does he need one–that his new book would be a historical novel about Omar Bradley. Then he said that he was tempted to skip the affair with Marlene Dietrich, but then that was the most interesting thing about Bradley to him. Continue reading →