Disaster

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “If Then,” the sixth episode of “The Morning Show” Season 4, now streaming on Apple TV.

Ladies and gentleman, Stella Bak has left the building. And the country. And the show.

In the sixth episode of the” fourth season of “The Morning Show,” the tech genius turned news division leader at UBN played by Greta Lee saw the carefully curated and swiftly ascendant life she built for herself come crashing down on top of her –– in front of 200 journalists, her boss Celine (Marion Cotillard) and the rest of the world.

“For me, this was that moment before an explosion,” Lee tells Variety. “It’s all of the centrifugal force that’s been piling up after years and years of having to operate a certain way. She has gotten quite savvy since the day she first arrived, but I think that it’s clear — or it was clear to me — that it’s not sustainable.”

It’s been one stumble after another this season for the woman who was first introduced to audiences in Season 2 as an intimidating problem-solver who’d sold her tech business and carved out a place for herself at a leading news network where women didn’t often find themselves in the C-Suite. But this season, Stella put everything on the line for her supposedly groundbreaking AI program (mind you, this is taking place in spring 2024) that can translate UBN’s popular anchors into any language ahead of the network’s global coverage of the Paris Olympics. But in the sixth episode, Stella’s crisis of conscious over her decision to not promote her friend Mia (Karen Pittman) because of pressures to elevate her male counterpart; Mia’s defiant return in which she declares Stella to be an enemy of the very progress she has long championed; and her ongoing affair with Miles (Aaron Pierre), Celine’s husband, leave Stella adrift.

In her voiceover across the episode, she laments that she has given in to the toxic pull of her “inner straight white guy” by doing what he would do –– “I fell into bed with the one person who could blow up his life.” While Miles isn’t the only thing putting pressure on the detonator, it doesn’t help the situation when she and Celine take the stage to present their ambitious Olympics coverage plan to the media. Hoping to distract the headline-hungry press from the network’s various other scandals, Stella rolls out a demonstration of her AI program, using her own manufactured image, despite telling Celine it isn’t ready. Unfortunately, her worst fear comes true when it not only malfunctions on stage, but regurgitates all the hurtful, racist and damning things Stella had spoken into it (aka herself) the night before in a digital-age version of taking a look at the mirror and asking if you like what you see.

The PR nightmare leaves Stella no choice but to resign. She initially retreats into the arms of Miles, and they resolve to run away to Naples together. But when she arrives at the airport with a hopeful smile and more time on her hands than usual, he texts her a simple “I’m sorry.” She gets on the plane anyway, and even Lee doesn’t know what awaits her on the other side.

“This is the end for her, as far as I know,” Lee says, confirming her exit, at least from Season 4. “But of course, since the show is so prescient and a direct commentary on what’s happening, I would love to see what kind of world would exist where she comes back, and what she might have to say.”

Stella’s undoing wasn’t a spiral contained to Season 4, though. Lee is of the camp that her downfall (at least professionally) started last season when she endured an excruciating lunch with a pair of slimy corporate investors. In order to gain their support and money, they forced her to command a waitress (also a woman of color) to lick a spilled drink off the table to prove she was one of the boys. Lee says Stella never recovered from compromising her ideals so irreversibly in that moment.

“But I’m hoping she will now get a chance to,” she adds. “I think that’s part of the problem for her. It’s like she hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to reflect or to forgive or even, in a lot of ways, acknowledge in a bigger way some of the things she’s endured and done in order to get to where she is. So I’m hoping she’s doing that on a beach somewhere.”

The implosion of Stella’s image, literally thanks to her own AI, is two-fold. It exposed her own deep concerns about the ways she has contributed to the company’s stunted progress for people and women of color at the network (Mia scolds her earlier for this, saying, “You’re not one of us — you never were.”). But her AI also talks about her affair with Miles –– right in front of Celine. The French CEO uses it to immediately take Stella out, corporately speaking.

The AI version of Stella presented in the series wasn’t quite the leap forward in technology that Hollywood fears and reviles, but rather just another task handed to Lee this season.

“Initially, I had to read opposite myself,” she says of the filming process. “The reality of what we’re doing is we’re showing tech that is developing as we speak. You see all the pitfalls of it, and how dangerous it can be if these guardrails aren’t put into place. So when I was doing it, it was a mess. I was doing a combination of reading with someone on script, and then also an image of myself that was like not quite the final product. Then going back and seeing what they generated and being totally weirded out by it — because trying to have any sort of the timing, comedic or dramatic, with a non-sentient representation of yourself is very weird.”

But she couldn’t just play herself. Lee and the creative team worked to find ways to make the AI present as technologically perfect, but also make sure the imperfections of AI were still on full display.

“We talked at length about how many blinks we were gonna do and blinking in the wrong place and how funny that is, because there are limits to the avatars,” she says. “That is what is so uncanny about them and why, arguably, they will never be good humans. There are certain qualities that are impossible to nail. So, yeah, we did get to play with a lot of that, and we had a lot of laughs.”

When she is betrayed by her own likeness, Stella can only look out onto a shocked audience, and happens to find a familiar –– albeit, not friendly –– face among them. Mia is watching from the nosebleed seats, and Stella has to process that moment through her as well. The two have been apprehensive advocates for each other over the past two seasons, and this season Stella vowed to go to bat for Mia’s bid for news director. But when she recanted on that to further her own ambition with AI and the network, Mia became the embodiment of Stella’s failings, one that haunts this scene like a ghost of what might have been.

“That moment was so fully loaded because she knows that there’s a betrayal between them, the kind that you can’t come back from,” Lee says. “For each of them and for so long, the option to fail was something that just never existed. Like, it just wasn’t possible. So to experience the pinnacle of failure in such a public way and have Mia be a witness to that, is almost too much to bear. That exchange, that wordless exchange across that room, is like a hundred words being said between the two of them.”

During the entire episode, Mia, Miles and Celine have all told Stella in one way or another why her decisions have set herself up for failure. With Miles especially, he admonishes her for choosing a man she could never truly have, despite their impassioned pleas to choose each other over his comfortable life and her career. However, his rejection of her at the airport in the execution of said plan may be the deepest cut in Stella’s no good, very bad day. She is left broken, unsure if she should still get on the plane or try to mend the wreckage in her wake.

In the final scene, Lee hesitates for a moment before letting Stella choose. 

“I think it’s a whole new sensation that she has literally never experienced before,” she says. “It’s a lot to process within a few moments. When she realizes Miles isn’t coming, she is taking stock and realizing she has nothing. But the surprising thing for her and someone like her is in that moment of realizing she’s got nothing, it sort of means she’s got everything. That’s the gift of the horrible circumstances that have fallen on her. She really is free. I think, arguably, that step toward the plane is the scariest thing she’s probably ever done in her life.”

Don’t cry for Stella too much. Let’s not forget she sold her tech company for hundreds of millions, and had plenty of zeros on her paycheck before exiting stage left at UBN. So her next chapter will be very well-funded, even if her personal and professional lives are in shambles. But Stella has proven she is nothing if not resilient. The big question now is whether she will return to the show, as so many (maybe too many?) of UBN’s former execs have. Lee says she loves working with “The Morning Show” ensemble, and is always excited to spar with them over media jargon. But conversely, she’s also very protective of Stella and her journey, and she doesn’t think she should come back any time soon.

“When I think about her and what I want for her, I don’t know if there’s a place for her that exists quite yet,” Lee says. “I think the world has to shift a little bit more to make room for her in the way that I would want to see her. Otherwise, we’ll just see her being a slave to this corporation. Being a slave to unfulfilled desires, and I don’t want that for her.”

Given that “The Morning Show” exists about a year and change behind our own timeline, audiences may be waiting a long time for our current world to be worthy of Stella Bak’s resurrection. Until then, Lee hopes she is spending some of those millions somewhere far from the 24-hour news cycle.

“I want her to be completely taken by surprise by what’s out there for her,” Lee says. “If she ever comes back, I want her to be sort of like Matthew McConaughey as the beach bum, with bongos and the hair. I want her to really be roughed up a little bit by real-world living. Just to feed her soul a little bit, and become a person. Because I really do think it’s from that place that maybe she would have something ingenious to offer.”

But for those who watched the episode and momentarily thought Stella had suddenly died off screen, you weren’t alone. When Alex (Jennifer Aniston) announces Stella’s resignation on air, the reflective script on her career at UBN sounded an awful lot like a eulogy, so much so that some people even mentioned it to Lee.

“Jen was crying when she came to set on my last day,” Lee says. “It was so sweet, and Mimi [Leder] had such beautiful words that day. We are a family, so it was really moving. But you’re not alone if you thought that was a eulogy. Some other people on our crew were like: ‘This is a eulogy. What’s happening?’”