The US drama exploring relationships lost its way in the third season – but this first episode of its fourth run offers plenty of humour and potential

I was screaming into the canyon, At the moment of my death, The echo I created, Outlasted my last breath… wails Fiona Apple again, burrowing back into your head, and signifying another season – the fourth – of The Affair. We left it – you may remember if you had stuck with it (and it was easy to become unstuck in the third season) – with Noah Solloway (Dominic West) in Paris with his new French lady, searching for redemption and for his eldest daughter who had run off with an abusive older man. That’s how I remember it anyway. You may remember it differently; memory is a fickle thing, don’t forget – it has less to do with the truth and more to do with who you are and what you’re going through, emotionally.

Now we are back in Montauk, New York. Noah is using a payphone (really?) at a gas station. He hangs up and tells Cole (Joshua Jackson) that “she” has been missing for 72 hours now. She? Alison (Ruth Wilson) presumably … New season, new mystery.

Then we jump back six weeks. Noah is driving in a tunnel, almost certainly a metaphorical one, but also a real one. There is light at the end of it. Loads of light – he emerges into the California sunshine. Here there are actual canyons to scream into. Noah is living in one, Topanga Canyon, which his younger daughter, Stacy, thinks is creepy and is where Charles Manson used to live. That’s why Noah has moved here, not because of the Manson family but to be near the children. Helen (Maura Tierney), The Affair’s best character, has come to LA because her new man, Vic, has got a top surgeon job here. It is perfect: they live in a perfect house with a perfect view, it is always sunny and her awful parents are 3,000 miles away …

And yet she is neither happy nor relaxed; she is feeling earthquakes the whole time. Because of the actual San Andreas fault? Is she terrified of the Big One? Because her younger son, Trevor, is on the point of coming out (or is being pushed into it if you’re looking at it from Noah’s perspective)? Or is Noah the reason for the tremors, aftershocks of a marriage? She has developed a strong – some might say irrational – hatred of the Pacific Ocean. “There’s nothing you can do when you’re around it, except look at it,” she tells the therapist. “It’s so huge and blue and obvious, it’s an attention whore.”

The Affair does do therapy very well. And this dude is hilarious, and hilariously Californian. He keeps on trying to get Helen to scan her body, as if his therapy is some kind of anti-anxiety software. “OK, perhaps there’s your earthquake,” he says, when she says she thinks Trevor is gay. “The earthquake in your life that you so greatly fear.” Mate, you’re ridiculous, 9.4 on the ridic-ter scale.

Noah also ought to be happier. He is nearer to his kids, seems to be actually making an effort not to be entirely self-centred, and has got a job in a Compton public school. Teaching unprivileged kids English, specifically Animal Farm; more specifically still, a passage about individuals making the wrong decisions if they make their own ones (ring any bells, Mr Solloway?). One kid is either brilliant or a brilliant cheat and Noah sees an opportunity for further redemption, perhaps, by making a difference. Not that the boy is interested – he seems to be on a fast track to gangland. And Noah is not happy, he is angry and lonely.

The episode is from their – Noah’s and Helen’s – perspectives, then. And as we saw Cole at the beginning, it seems likely that it is Alison who is missing. There is something to head towards; perhaps with this new mystery The Affair will rediscover the momentum it lost. It is not like a cop drama, where a new season can just mean a new case. When something is about relationships and emotions, deception, perspectives and memories, it is harder to keep up. The best thing to have done would have been to stop after two seasons and The Affair would have been remembered as an intelligent, honest, thoughtful, beautiful piece of work. But television doesn’t work like that, giving up a well-earned audience. It carries on, with the danger that it will become diluted and – ironically – the memory of it may end up being a different one. In the third season, The Affair lost its way.

This is an excellent episode. Perhaps it is too soon to say it is a return to form, but for those who did stick around it offers not just a new coast but new hope. And lots of humour, too – I love the very Californian neighbour, with her basket of avocados and her goat yoga. A potential new affair there perhaps, though for who? Vic, Helen, Noah?

Right, back over to you, Fiona Apple. Sink back into the ocean, Sink back into the ocean … See, she is in there now, she is not coming out.

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