The Honourable Woman Is A Prestige Cable Drama, So Of Course Its Male Lead Is Cheating On His Wife

The tropes of prestige-drama antiheroes are so well established that last year saw the publication of a book all about them. But identifying the characteristics that seem to recur among some of these characters apparently hasn't prevented creators and producers from giving them to new characters. If Tony Soprano cheats on his wife, and Don Draper cheats on his wives, then Marco Ruiz has to cheat on his wife and Bill Masters has to cheat on his wife and Nicholas Brody has to cheat on his wife and Kevin Garvey has to have cheated on his wife and even a nerd like Frank Winter has to cheat on his wife. (And at least Manhattan mixed things up in the latest episode by making it seem like yet another husband was going to cheat on his wife but then having her cheat on him first.) The Honourable Woman doesn't quite conform to the model -- for starters, the morally complicated, compromised character at its centre isn't even a man!!! -- and that's why even though it has a cheating husband, he doesn't get away as clean as his brethren.

The cheating husband we're concerned with is Ephra Stein. As far as the public knows, Ephra is an upstanding citizen and professional philanthropist whose commitment to Israeli-Palestinian peace is so great that not only is he committing some of the profits of his family's lucrative arms business to West Bank development: his Palestinian nanny and her young son live with him full-time. What the public doesn't know is that, of course, they're fucking, and have been for long enough that until recently he wasn't sure if her seven-year-old child was his. (Short answer: no. Long answer: super-no.)

Challenged by Atika, his mistress, to shit or get off the pot, Ephra goes with shit: they hatch a plan to slip away from both his on-site security detail and his enormously pregnant wife to Ephra's country house. She makes sure the phone is unplugged before they get down to it, which is how the first he hears of an attempt, in Hebron, on Nessa's life -- possibly a successful one, for all he knows -- is when a report about it pops up on the news. But don't be too sad for Ephra about the possible loss of his last living blood relative: he barely has a chance to register the news before he's killed by a sniper.

Turns out there are long cons, and there are long cons: Atika and the Palestinians have been working on this for at least the better part of a decade -- compromising Stein, the company, through a sketchy payment Ephra made to free some Israeli hostages; making sure Nessa found out the funds had gone astray; convincing Nessa to pursue the matter in Gaza, then kidnapping her; and keeping Ephra on the hook (with sex) so that Atika could manipulate him into going with her to this remote location so that he could get all shot up and killed.

As with all matters Middle East, there's a lot of blame to go around for the series of events that lead directly to Ephra's death -- many of which date back to before he was even born. And granted, Ephra's not even the episode's worst/least sexually-rectitudinous husband to get his comeuppance in this episode: that title belongs to Nessa's rapist, or I should say her latest rapist (this poor woman, you guys), whose wife gets a surprise visit from Baroness Stein to learn what her husband does when he's out on the town alone. Still, that dude just ends up ruined; Ephra ends up in a considerably worse situation.