Summary
The Morning Show Season 4 provides more intimate, character-focused side stories in “The Parent Trap”, with Jennifer Aniston and Billy Crudup being stand-outs.
The Morning Show Season 4 has been a predictably mixed bag, but if it’s really good at one thing, it’s those very tight and intimate character-driven episodes that allow individual performers to stand out and steal the show. We get this twice in Episode 8, aptly titled “The Parent Trap”, in two parallel but inverted stories of parents and their children with similarly sad conclusions. Jennifer Aniston and Billy Crudup are clear stand-outs, but Jeremy Irons is wonderful too, and Lindsay Duncan is understated but memorable and quietly powerful. You could easily forget there was anything else going on in this episode, but while we’re on the subject, Bradley might have been kidnapped in Belarus. Oops.
We might as well start there, since “The Parent Trap” is picking up right after the major scandal of the FBI raiding UBN and arresting Claire Conway. Alex is furious, since not only has Bradley brought the network into disrepute when she’s on the cusp of securing a sit-down interview with President Joe Biden, but she has also torched her only source in the Martel Chemical cover-up. Alex is ready to pull the plug, and Bradley’s claims that she has a whistleblower in Belarus ready to talk to her fall on deaf ears. The paperwork that Alex has to sign off on remains untouched. We’ll return to this later.
In the meantime, Alex has other things to focus on, that Biden interview chief among them. This only makes it more frustrating for her when she receives a call in the middle of the night telling her that her father has been arrested for public intoxication, and a video of him urinating on a statue has gone viral. She picks him up and takes him home, but when she wakes up a couple of hours later for her big day, he’s missing. He later turns up at UBN asking for airtime on Alex’s show to share his side of the story regarding the plagiarism allegations, and when she refuses, he finds the next best outlet — Bro’s.
Naturally, some of the lingering animosity from Alex ghosting Bro after their one-night stand comes to the fore here, when Alex, having managed to secure the Biden interview, pulls Martin off the air and accuses Bro of lacking respect and decency in not clearing it with her first. Bro, still smarting about her conduct, basically outs their tryst in front of everyone, which I’m sure will come up again. But not yet. There are other matters to attend to, including the standout sequence of The Morning Show Season 4, Episode 8, when Alex and Martin get back to her place and finally have their knock-down-drag-out, anything-goes argument.
Martin’s public comments on Bro’s show end up getting the Biden interview cancelled for, hilariously, “going against the ageist narrative”. She blames him for ruining her big moment, he blames her for his academic disgrace, she blames him for allowing her to essentially raise herself outside of periodic quizzes that he claims were to “train her brain to think” and she claims were designed to humiliate her. I’m tempted to agree with Alex here, given Martin’s incredibly patronising justification that “in those days, you were not exceptionally incisive”. And then the haymaker.
Jeremy Irons in The Morning Show Season 4 | Image via Apple TV+
When Alex asks Martin to list what he has ever sacrificed for her, he says her mother. From his perspective, he lost his wife, who suffered from post-partum depression, because he had a child that he never wanted in the first place. He has resented Alex her entire life for that; in this moment, she finally realises it. She never knew her mother struggled; that one day she got up and left because she couldn’t cope. She never knew how Martin really felt about her. Now she does, and she’ll probably never be the same again.
This whole thing is counterbalanced by what Cory is experiencing with his own mother, Martha. It was teased during his previous visit, but when she calls him on the set of his movie in “The Parent Trap”, she reminds him that she really does intend to take her own life. She’s losing her mind, putting things in the wrong place, and forgetting details, and she doesn’t want to live so long that she’ll lack the rationality to end things on her own terms. She has planned everything out. It’s happening today.
Cory, carrying a wig from the movie set and still believing that she’s being dramatic, races to her side. This conversation is equally as heartbreaking as the one between Alex and Martin, but for totally different reasons. Martha loves Cory and isn’t afraid to tell him so; he loves her back and can’t accept her point of view that now’s the time. So, she takes the decision out of his hands. She sends him to fetch the wig and slips the tablet into her mouth when he’s gone. While he regales her with the plot of his movie, she slips away. She even sets an alarm on her watch and leaves a note to remind Cory to leave before the coroner gets there, so he isn’t implicated. It’s a deeply sad scene, but also an oddly warm one.
Cory, predictably, doesn’t take it well. He takes solace in Celine, who isn’t doing especially well either. Her family wants her to ditch Miles and return to France, since the scandal around Stella’s departure is drawing too much attention and controversy, when her earlier purpose in being installed at UBN was to cover up the Martel Chemical issue. She did that well enough, but then she stuck around to secure even more control, and she isn’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon. To prove her value, she uses Bro’s show to promote the family’s very highly-publicised and lucrative project to clean up the Seine in time for the Olympics, justifying her remaining in situ for the time being. She spends the night with Cory, getting drunk and doing coke in Miles’s otherwise-empty studio. Whatever works.
The Morning Show Season 4, Episode 8 ends with a newly contemplative Alex deciding to greenlight Bradley’s trip to Belarus after all. But when she calls her, she doesn’t answer. And when she turns up at her apartment, she isn’t there. Chip is, though, and helpfully informs Alex that Bradley decided to go to Belarus anyway. And since she hasn’t checked in for several hours, chances are she has been detained in a country that doesn’t have a stellar record of being nice to journalists.
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