The Morning Show took us down a memory lane from the pandemic to the January 6 insurrection that was, at times, hard to watch. I was flashing back to moments during 2020, and I remembered watching January 6 unfold as it happened in front of my TV. In some ways, it may feel too soon to relive what we went through, but as a society, we tend to forget. We move on and dust everything under the rug, so to speak. The pandemic was hard on all of us in different ways. Let’s not forget how many people died, how isolated we all were, and how we knew nothing about this virus. And January 6 was a dark day in this country. One that people still need to answer for, so it never happens again.
Warning: Spoilers
In some ways, this was a simple episode tying everything together. We now know what the fight was between Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) and Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies). It makes a lot more sense now that we know what happened and that Bradley was grieving for her mother. We now know how exactly Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman) ended up living in the office. Yes, it was to raise the ratings, but it was deeper than that. We know how Bradley ended up on the evening news, and most importantly, we finally know Bradley and Corey Ellison’s (Billy Crudup) secret.
It doesn’t surprise me that Hal (Joe Tippett) was at the Capitol on January 6. Bradley has made no secret of who her family is. She loves them, but she doesn’t always condone what they do. So many people would have done the same thing in her shoes. And with everything else going on around her, it was an intense situation. Corey’s not releasing all of Bradley’s footage to the FBI was as much about protecting her as it was about protecting the network. It’s lucky this didn’t come out in the hack, but that doesn’t mean it still couldn’t. I’ve read that the Capitol riot plays a big part in the rest of the season. So the secret could still come out.
While The Morning Show season three, episode five, “Love Island,” did weave together everything nicely, it also made us remember this horrific time in our history. We were all isolated in our homes while the doctors and nurses were fighting hard to keep people alive, and protests were happening about George Floyd’s death. Let’s take Floyd’s death, for instance. How often do we hear his name now? I know there are a lot of other African Americans who have died, too, but none of them are at the top of the conversation anymore. We’ve also forgotten about applauding the doctors and nurses and what they went through. And that’s not to mention what everyone was going through separately. And another pandemic could happen again. Covid cases are already on an uptick. We have vacancies now, so it’s easier to manage, but what about the next virus? We haven’t even come to terms with the last one.
As for January 6, Donald Trump and other people associated with that day have only recently been indicted or convicted for their actions that day. It’s not even a certainty that Trump or his associates will be convicted for what they did. It was only a small part of The Morning Show, but it put Bradley in the middle of everything. We knew this already, given she won an award for it, but seeing it up close brought us into it, and not just watching at home from our TVs, computers or phones. Though, even all the way from NYC, watching from my apartment, I still felt pretty close to it as I watched it unfold in disbelief. We can’t even have a civil transfer of power. And we are in the middle of another presidential election now. It was a good reminder while Trump and President Joe Biden are both campaigning.
While there should have been a trigger warning for an episode like this, it was a harsh reminder of this time we experienced as a country. We shouldn’t just forget and wash our hands of it. That is how history repeats itself. The polarization still exists in this country, and I don’t think anyone knows how to handle it. Laura and Bradley’s fight was a good example of that.
