Summary
The Morning Show Season 4 raises the stakes in “Un Bel Di”, leaving a key character’s fate hanging in the balance and positioning Celine as the show’s true villain.
The Morning Show has had its fair share of villains, but Season 4 has sorely lacked in this regard. Sure, there have been plenty of people doing bad things, or questionable things for the right reasons, but nobody has really loomed over the events as a kind of proper string-pulling bad guy, at least until it became clear that Celine was behind the cover-up of the Martel Chemical scandal. Even that, though, was clarified in the margins of an episode about Alex’s relationship with her father and Cory’s relationship with his mother. It’s only in Episode 9, “Un Bel Di”, that the extent of Celine’s ongoing villainy is properly clarified, and it sets up a high-stakes finale in which Bradley may well remain a guest of the Belarusian government indefinitely.
Bradley’s arrest at the Minsk airport on trumped-up espionage charges is very much the nexus of this much more focused outing, which puts all hands on deck in dealing with the crisis of a UBN anchor being illegally detained in a hostile nation. The extent to which Celine is involved is deliberately obscured until the end, but with the late revelations, reviewing the episode in hindsight gives it a much more calculated contour. Marion Cotillard has been great throughout, even as a horrible boss archetype, but the glint in her eye that’s visible when she thinks she has gotten her own way is a neat explanation for why an actor of her calibre has been cast in what seemed, for a while, like a functional but largely unimportant role.
According to the Belarusians, Bradley is carrying a suspect hard drive and might be carrying out espionage — she isn’t, obviously, but that’s not really the point in these kinds of things, and thus she’s detained without charge until someone figures out what to do with her. She’s able to record a brief video and send some of the Wolf River documents to Chip before she’s dragged away, but that’s the extent of her involvement in the entire episode. From there, it becomes the responsibility of everyone else to free her, to catastrophically poor effect.
Alex takes the matter to Ben and Celine, but in so doing has to explain what Bradley was doing in Belarus, which clues Celine in that she’s close to exposing what happened at Wolf River and how UBN covered it up. Like Bradley, though, Celine spends most of “Un Bel Di” out of the way (we’ll discuss her more in a minute), leaving Alex to shoulder most of the burden. For that, she needs to turn to someone who can interface with the true power brokers in the region. In other words, she needs to turn, albeit reluctantly, to Paul.
Paul is cosy with Russian oligarch Dmitri Ivanov, so Alex asks him to pull a few strings. He initially refuses, claiming it isn’t as easy as she’s making it sound, which is a fair point. But he later calls back to say that he has invited Ivanov to be his guest at the opera, and that his mistress, Nadzeya, is an actress whose series has been put on indefinite hiatus due to the crisis in Ukraine. In other words, if Alex can do something to get Nadzeya a gig, Paul’s confident that Ivanov will press the necessary flesh to secure Bradley’s release.
Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard in The Morning Show Season 4 | Image via Apple TV+
Alex takes a date to the opera — Mia. In one of the weakest turns in The Morning Show Season 4, Episode 9, Mia catches Chip snooping around in Bradley’s dressing room and immediately intuits that something is amiss, forcing Chip to reveal everything that’s going on and fold her into the scheme. This is perhaps just as well, since she turns out to be pretty integral. Andre is on the ground in Minsk to retrieve Bradley as soon as her release is secured, and since she’s a producer at UBN, she can pull the necessary strings to make some big promises to Nadzeya. It all seems to be going well — at least until it doesn’t.
Ivanov isn’t willing to play ball. Or, at least, not solely in exchange for Nadzeya receiving career opportunities. Since Mia, rather fortunately, speaks Russian, she overhears Ivanov telling Nadzeya that he needs more out of the deal, which refers to some AI software that Paul is working on. Naturally, he can’t be seen to provide that software to a sanctioned oligarch, so Alex offers to license it through UBN, a scheme with hefty Federal implications were it ever to come to light. Nonetheless, Paul, presumably out of lingering fondness — if that’s a strong enough word — for Alex, calls his chief of staff, Amanda, and instructs her to make the necessary phone calls. The deal is on.
Until, again, it isn’t. The trade falls through, for reasons that nobody on either side seems to understand, and Bradley remains indefinitely detained in Belarus. So, what happened? Well, it becomes clear later that Amanda tipped off Celine, ostensibly to protect Paul’s business interests, and Celine’s family put the kibosh on the trade. Bradley’s freedom is a price she’s willing to pay to protect her family’s name.
All hope seems lost, but the unlikely salvation might come from Cory, of all people. Still reeling from his mother’s death, he spends most of the episode hooking up with Celine, though his late mother’s florist calling is a bit of a mood killer. Of course, even though it isn’t immediately clear, Celine is there to fish through his mother’s personal effects to look for any evidence about Wolf River, though she doesn’t find any. That’s because, as we learn at the very end of “Un Bel Di”, it’s in Cory’s jacket pocket. He has the Wolf River Contamination Sampling report. The big question now, though, is whether he’ll do the right thing with it.
