It’s pointless to write a traditional recap of this episode, because it would just be a lot of “they talk” and “they talk again,” so let’s sum it up this way: It turns out that Alex, who’s been AWOL from work, was on her way to Italy to see Mitch, because she wants him to deny that they ever had sex, even though they did.
There’s some more fighting, but then they make up, because fundamentally neither one of them really cares about consequences of anything for anyone except themselves.
But just when things are going better, they see on television that Maggie’s book alleges that Mitch targeted Black women for harassment.
It’s remarkable that there are only 10 episodes in this season, and they devoted an entire episode solely to the relationship between Alex and Mitch, two of the least emotionally interesting characters on the show.
Alex is a person in a position of power and privilege who was friends with someone who didn’t hurt her but hurt a lot of other people, and when that came out, she felt more concerned about how it was going to reflect on her and inconvenience her than anything else.
Structurally, The Morning Show has always wanted to treat this friendship as a tricky kind of love, built over many years and now weighted down with feelings of betrayal and sadness.
He and Alex are navigating the damage to their relationship as a question not of how Alex is to reckon with what Mitch did to other people, which is a very real and complicated question for someone who has been close to him, in favor of treating it as a question of how Alex is to reckon with what Mitch did to her — the inconvenience and reputational damage he inflicted.
Honestly, what are we meant to take away from the fact that Mitch’s reaction to the allegation that he targeted Black women is to complain about how unfairly he’s being treated? Mitch actually allows these words to come out of his mouth about Black women: “I’m attracted to them.
Understand: it’s fine for Mitch to be inconsistent — to be a nice guy at times, but still fundamentally a messed-up harasser whose ideas about Black women are riddled with unexamined racism; that’s probably more realistic than if that were all undone! But from a narrative perspective, the show has invested deeply in a fairly rote story of Mitch’s guilt and his path to rebirth: his relationship with Paola, his relationship with Alex, how unfair Instagram is to him, and the hard work he’s done to try to be a better person, which we’re given every reason to believe is genuine.
If most of the events here were the same, but the style and the music and the performances and the lighting and the staging suggested menace instead of warmth — that Mitch is a self-pitying man who will never see past the end of his own nose, that Paola is a traumatized woman inadvertently enabling a man to evade responsibility for his awfulness, that Alex is a responsibility-dodging jerk who just wants not to be inconvenienced, and that all of them are toxic together for those reasons — it might make sense.
It plays as if she just retreats to her initial position: She can’t have people thinking she’s attached to him if he’s going to be seen as a racist as well as a harasser.
The suggestion is clear that Mitch swerves to avoid the other car, but that when he sees he’s headed for the cliff, rather than try to correct, he simply takes his hands off the wheel and lets himself go.
The suggestion, but not quite the declaration, that Mitch is attempting suicide feels like it’s just an extension of the martyrdom they’ve extended to him all season, and it’s positively bizarre.