Diksha Sundriyal
The fourth season of Apple TV+’s ‘The Morning Show’ concludes with an explosive finale that changes the fate of UBN and the people connected to it. Picking up about a month after the events of the previous episode, the episode shows us Bradley suffering in the torturous conditions of the Belarusian prison. Sharp light and loud music are being used to keep her sleep-deprived. However, despite the pressure, she is refusing to buckle and has not yet given up the name of the whistleblower she was supposed to meet. Meanwhile, Bradley and Chip continue their efforts to save her, which is when things take some very unexpected turns. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Efforts to Free Bradley Pick Pace
One month after Bradley’s detention at the airport in Belarus, Alex and Chip are trying to keep the interest in her story alive. The State Department hasn’t come through yet, which means it falls to them to find something that will prompt UBN and the government to take action. Chip looks into the reports that Bradley sent him before her arrest, and he finds one that proves someone within Martel fabricated new reports to make it appear as though nothing was wrong. The problem is that they don’t have anyone credible who can help prove it. The only person who can help them is Cory, but when Chip approaches him, Cory talks about how Bradley betrayed him, and perhaps this is the punishment she deserves. Before leaving, Chip tells him that Bradley was torn over what she did to him, which makes Cory pause.
Cory has already been having a tough time with the reports that he found in the stuff his mother left for him. After a lot of contemplation, in which he thinks back to the pillow talk he and Bradley had, where she, in so many words, told him she loved him, he decides to use the reports to help her. It doesn’t take him much to know that Celine and her family are behind the State Department’s inaction on the matter. So, he puts all the cards on the table. He asks Celine to use her family’s connections to get things moving and bring Bradley home. When that happens, he will turn over the original reports, and they’ll never have to worry about the Martel debacle again. Celine agrees to the deal, but then, something else from her past comes to light.
At the beginning of the season, Alex was caught in a nightmare with the Feds when an AI-doctored video of her implicated her in the defection of the Iranian athlete and her father. Since it happened while Mia was still in charge, Ben tells her to solve the problem while she is still around. It doesn’t take her much to discover that Bart, a producer on TMS, edited the footage. He points her in Celine’s direction, and Mia promptly passes the info to Alex. The next day, Alex storms into Celine’s office, calls her out on her false words about uplifting women around her when she has been secretly plotting against them all along. She demands Celine’s resignation, but the tables are turned when Celine mentions Alex’s visit to the opera and her attempt to make a deal with the Russian oligarch. This information allows her to request Alex’s resignation, pointing out that her actions could have put the network in a great deal of trouble.
What Happens to Celine?
With Celine having the upper hand in the situation, Alex tries to find someone who can help her. Paul points out that resignation is her only option, and when she goes to Cory, she is surprised but not entirely shocked to discover that he has been having an affair with Celine. The next day, she tenders her resignation and even gets a spot on TMS to talk about it, making the whole thing seem amicable. Later, when her father visits her, she tells him the entire truth. Instead of chiding her for being a failure, which is what he would have done before they had the confrontation in the last episode, he offers to help her. He tells her to sue UBN and Celine for wrongful termination. This would catch them off guard, and because they would be forced to turn over documents as part of the legal proceedings, they might find the smoking gun that brings the whole system down.
After some thought, Alex decides that this is the only course of action. Meanwhile, Miles returns. It seems that his time away from the woods led him to the realisation that he wants to be Celine. But when he returned to his place, he discovered signs that Celine had been with someone else. He knows she’d been having an affair while he was away. When she tells him it’s Cory, he marches off to confront the man. Not only does he ask Cory to stay away from his wife, but he also drops the bombshell that the reports his mother left for him are the ones she helped bury herself. She made the deal to get Cory away from his spiralling life in LA and come to New York. As if his mother’s suicide wasn’t enough to break his heart, this information throws him into another pit of despair. While he is still processing this, he finds out about Alex’s press conference.
He tries to stop her, but when it becomes clear that she won’t, he tells her about the reports and how he plans to give them back to Celine in exchange for Bradley’s freedom. But Alex convinces him to do something else instead. As planned, the press conference takes place, and as expected, it catches Celine off guard. What makes her even more furious is that her own network is covering the news, even though she’d explicitly told Ben not to do it. He, however, is prodded to do it by Mia. This throws her into a fit of anger, which is when Cory calls her and talks about how Alex is doing all this to free Bradley. He assures her that he will convince Alex to stop, which is when Celine tells him to threaten Alex. If she doesn’t stop, Bradley will never come home. She says this a couple of times, but doesn’t hear her own words until they echo from her TV. It turns out that Cory poked her to say these things so Alex could air them for the whole world to hear. Now, everyone knows Celine’s true intentions.
Who Becomes UBN’s Next CEO?
The cat is out of the bag, and there is nothing Celine can do to salvage the situation now. She gets a call from her brother, and by the end of the episode, we see her on a plane headed back to France. She leaves a letter for Miles, telling him she is leaving because she already knows that her father will use her as the scapegoat. She will be forced to take the fall for everything, including Martel. There is a good chance she won’t be returning to UBN, at least not anytime soon. This means that, once again, the CEO’s seat remains empty, and it must be filled quickly if the network is to survive. With Celine gone and Stella out of the picture, there are only limited options when it comes to handing the reins. They could bring in someone new, someone who can clean all the mess that the network has been mired in. However, there is too much history with UBN, and the new person would take too much time to familiarise themselves with the situation to start working on the problems immediately.
This means that they will need someone familiar with the place, its people, and all the ins and outs to know just how to get things moving. Considering everything, Mia appears to be the most suitable candidate for the job. She’d previously presented herself for the position, and she would have gotten the job if it weren’t for Celine. Both Stella and Alex were in Mia’s favour, but Celine’s ambitions to have a complete hold over UBN led her to refuse Mia. For a minute, Mia thought about leaving UBN behind for good, but then Bradley left her a note, telling her that they had already given too much of themselves to the place, which meant that it fell on them to fix it. After Celine is gone, Mia enters the office and takes a look around. The look in her eye suggests that she might jump on the opportunity and get what should have been hers a long time ago.
Is Bradley Rescued?
This season started with Bradley’s return, stirring up more trouble for the network than they’d anticipated. Once again, her search for truth led her down a difficult road, and she ended up in a gulag getting tortured to the point that she’d started to believe she would never go free. However, Alex’s continuous efforts to get the truth out finally bear fruit. With the corruption in Martel exposed and Celine out of UBN, nothing is stopping the State government from hastening the process of getting Bradley home. In the end, they succeed in their efforts, and Alex discovers that her friend will be allowed to walk free. One of the people who helped in getting her out is Paul. Thanks to his connections, he had tried to help Alex before, but their efforts were thwarted by Celine.
Now, he has a seat on the plane that will bring back Bradley, and he offers Alex his seat, so that Bradley sees a friendly face when she is finally freed. Once the plane lands, Alex waits with bated breath for her friend. When Bradley steps out of the car, she looks battered, but not beaten. She is happy to see her friend, grateful that Alex did not let her rot in a foreign prison. Alex, in return, tells her that her fight for truth has borne fruit. Martel and UBN’s corruption is exposed, and once again, Bradley’s dedication to journalism has led her to change everything. Bradley is happy to hear this because she thought that her imprisonment in Belarus meant that she would never get to talk to the whistleblower, and Martel would get away with the crime yet again. It seems that all the torture she endured wasn’t for nothing, and she can finally go home and rest.
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