After a couple of weeks when we seesawed from a very bad episode to a very good episode, now we’re comfortably back in the middle, where some things work and other things seem like they were written on Mars.
As you’ll remember, we left Bradley feeling pretty miserable about Hal having shown up at the office, clearly under the influence and/or suffering mental health setbacks, making a scene.
Alex goes to UBA with her guy Doug , and the network will support her.
Elsewhere in the building, Alex also gets another glimpse at Paige, who’s come to the office to ask people to come to Mitch’s memorial, in spite of, you know, everything.
Later, Alex goes to Laura’s dressing room and starts asking if she remembers a night when they were out together with old colleagues to see some theater.
Alex sort of tosses off that it would have been fun to be friends and “I’m really sorry I screwed that up” over her shoulder as she’s opening the door to leave.
Yanko has mostly been relegated to his silly cancellation plot this season, but he runs into Claire on the street , and she can’t believe he would go to the memorial service of a person who sexually assaulted Hannah.
Hey, remember Peter Bullard, the jerk Dave Foley was playing? The guy with the UBA+ talk show who once called Daniel “mincing”? Cory is appearing on his talk show to talk up the streaming service.
Cory tells Bradley on the phone that he wants her to interview Maggie, so Bradley says she’ll do it, and that means Bradley gets to actually read it.
He goes into a whole thing about “cancel culture,” and it’s just the most tiresome garbage, but to be honest, it’s not all that different from what was implied by the Poor Mitch gelato scene early this season and, in fact, by the whole Poor Mitch arc.
Alex is trying to make good on her promise to Mitch to introduce Paola around to important people, and she warns Paola that they should probably do that sooner rather than later, since she may be persona non grata around the news business soon.
Alex continues to believe that talking more is a good idea for her, so she interrupts everyone in the middle of drinks.
Maggie starts to talk about how Alex tried very hard to make herself look like what Maggie calls a “paragon of feminism.” Bradley — and I think this is meant to call back to how Bradley behaved in the first-ever episode of the series, in the confrontation that went viral — decides to throw her full weight behind Alex.
And it’s even harder to understand why Bradley, a journalist, implies that Maggie, also a journalist, should have removed truthful and relevant information from her book because a powerful person who didn’t want to be embarrassed asked her to.
She just got through trying to get Mitch to lie about choices she now says were freely made that she does not regret, because she thought they would make her look bad.
She’s canceled again! And why? Because someone surreptitiously videotaped her speech at Mitch’s memorial service and shared it, and the fact that she was there talking about how much she loved him and how she took a trip to a viral hot zone to hang out with him has made people suspect Bradley’s “new Alex Levy” narrative might be wildly oversimplified.
The things that made the show sing last week — Cory’s weirdness, Stella, Mia, Chip’s frustration — are all drained out of this episode so we can go back to fussing over Alex and Mitch’s relationship and how bad everything is for Alex.