Summary
The Morning Show manages to pull all of Season 4’s character arcs and subplots together pretty well for a surprisingly conclusive ending.
Season 4 of The Morning Show has been, let’s face it, pretty all over the place. And while all the disparate character arcs and subplots have yielded some ripe fruit, they’ve also felt frantic and scattershot and haven’t always cohered into a consistent story. With that in mind, Episode 10, “Knowing Violation”, provides a surprisingly conclusive ending, folding in a bunch of different parallel strands in a pretty effective way. Sure, some stuff is left unresolved — what’s going to happen to Senator Bro Hartman? — but the bulk is dealt with rather satisfyingly.
Of course, Apple TV+ already renewed the show for a fifth season ahead of this season’s premiere, so there’s plenty of mileage to address things like Bro’s career shift, Bradley’s deal with the FBI, and who’s going to actually run UBN after the events of this finale. We can cross those bridges when we come to them. In the meantime, there’s plenty to go over, so we might as well do that.
Bradley’s Predicament Provides the Stakes
When the finale picks up, Bradley has been an esteemed guest of the Belarusian government for 28 days. The highlights of her stay include trying to sleep on a metal cot while the guards torment her with bright lights that never turn off and screaming metal music at an absurd volume. The Belarusians want the name of her contact, still under the assumption that she’s some kind of spy, but Bradley isn’t willing to give up her source. The primary tension is whether she’ll lose it before her escape can be facilitated.
Alex and Chip are working pretty hard in that regard, but it’s easier said than done. Their only viable option is to break the Martel Chemical story themselves, which will create enough attention around Bradley’s detention, which the public is starting to forget about despite TMS reminding them of it every day. Given that the EPA report doesn’t match the internal data, it stands to reason that someone was bribed to falsify it, which would constitute front-page news. But how to prove it?
As we know, thanks to the ending of the previous episode, Cory has the real EPA report, bequeathed to him by his mother before she took her own life. But Cory is also now in a relationship with Celine, and is still smarting about Bradley’s betrayal. The key question is whether his innate morality will win out over his own short-term happiness and convenience. At first, it doesn’t seem likely to, since when he looks into the scandal, he realises Celine’s family paid people off to bury it, and instead of threatening to report her, he offers to give her the authentic EPA report if she agrees to talk her family into getting Bradley released.
Celine’s Corruption Runs Deeper Than Anyone Realised
Under some nudging from Ben, Mia starts looking into who on the TMS production staff meddled with Alex’s AI avatar around the time of the deepfake controversy. This turns out to be Bart, one of the producers, but he was, of course, acting on Celine’s instructions. She was trying to push out the other senior staffers from the very beginning, clearing his path to acting CEO.
Armed with this information, Alex angrily confronts Celine and demands her resignation, but Celine plays her own trump card — she knows about Alex doing private business with a Russian oligarch. The tables have turned. If Alex doesn’t resign, Celine will ruin her.
Alex immediately heads to Paul for advice, and he advises her to dig up as much dirt on Celine as he can. But for that, she needs Cory, and as soon as she turns up at his place, Celine isn’t far behind. Disgusted at the revelation that they’re sleeping together — thus closing off her one viable angle for compromising information — Alex storms out, and the next we see of her, she’s publicly resigning on TMS.
Marion Cotillard in The Morning Show Season 4 | Image via Apple TV+
Dad to the Rescue
One of the stronger elements of The Morning Show Season 4’s ending is how it utilises the relationship between Alex and her father, Martin, which hasn’t been touched on since that excellent episode where they aired out their respective grievances. But Martin recognises when someone has been forced out of the door, and since their recent unemployment has left them with a lot of time on their hands, he helps her brainstorm how to respond, eventually advising that she sue Celine for wrongful dismissal.
Ordinarily, this probably wouldn’t work, but circumstances conspire. The unexpected return of Miles throws Celine for a loop, and because he’s so angry to learn that she has been filling his side of the bed with Cory, he confronts Cory with a truth that ends up bringing about Celine’s downfall. Martha herself brokered the Wolf River cover-up deal in exchange for getting Cory, who was floundering in New York, a high-power job. On some level, she provided him with the EPA report to absolve herself of the guilt and to give him the opportunity to do the right thing. And he finally does.
Alex and her father go live from the courthouse to announce their intentions to sue Celine, and make public their very serious accusations about what she has been up to as acting CEO of UBN. The Morning Show broadcast it live. And when Celine calls Cory to try and interrupt the circus, she doesn’t realise that he has betrayed her until her self-incriminating screaming is being broadcast to the entire world. Cory set her up, and has given Alex the original EPA report.
The Morning Show Season 4 ends with Bradley finally being released by the Belarusian government, and Alex is there to greet her in a surprisingly emotional reunion. Celine is completely ruined and leaves the country, with UBN being left in the capable hands of Ben and Mia (and presumably Alex and Bradley, when they get back). There’s no word on what Celine’s departure will mean for Bro’s political push, but it probably won’t be good news. Still, he has a flourishing podcast and comedy career to fall back on.
