The first season of The Newsroom ended tonight and the events of the episode reinvigorated Will and brought an end to his feud with Leona.
The Depths of Despair. Brian’s article about Will and News Night was released, but the episode picks up two weeks later, when MacKenzie arrived at Will’s apartment to find him unconscious on the floor. A trip to the hospital revealed that Will had been depressed about the article and was over-medicating himself, leading to a bleeding ulcer. When Mac encouraged him to move on from the article, Will said he wasn’t sure he was coming back to News Night.
Phone Hacking. Charlie met with Solomon and told him he wasn’t sure he could trust him as an impeccable source. He wanted to have the information about TMI’s phone-hacking practices, but Solomon didn’t want to hand over the info until he released the NSA news first. Later, Jim had to break the bad news to Charlie that Solomon committed suicide.
A Second Source. Nina Howard contacted Mac to say that she heard from a source that Will was high on the air the night the president announced the death of bin Laden. She warned that if she got a second source she would have to run with the story. Mac and Charlie had to break the bad news to Will that this could be the story that brought him down. But after a nurse confronted him about voter registration interference, Will got his second wind and realized that he was actually Nina’s first source. It turns out that he left a message for Mac later that night saying that he was high…a message that TMI listened to because it hacked Mac’s phone and then deleted the message. That was why it needed a second source, because it couldn’t admit to the hacking as a source of information.
A Renewed Purpose. All of this convinced Will that he needed to get back to work, and he did. He was determined to report the voter registration tampering story and broadcast a exposé on radical conservatives who were, in his opinion, perverting the political system.
A New Opportunity. Don confronted Sloan about accepting a new position in venture capital, determined to make her stay with ACN. But it turns out she was frustrated that all of her reporting about the financial crisis wasn’t actually getting through to the viewers. Thinking that she wasn’t making a change, she decided to leave News Night. And she happened to drop a little bombshell on Don: she wanted to date him. In the end, however, Sloan turned down the job and told Don that they should never speak of her confession again.
The Meeting From Hell. Leona and Reese called Will, Charlie and Mac in for a meeting where Leona immediately confronted Will about being high the night he reported on bin Laden’s death. Will readily admitted he was high, at which point Leona fired him. But Mac immediately shot back, insisting that Reese hacked her phone. When Charlie presented documents that Solomon sent him before his death to Leona she was shocked. She had no idea her son had ordered phone hacking to gather stories for TMI. Charlie suggested that Leona allow News Night to do the exposé, not fire Will and shut down TMI. Leona grudgingly accepted the deal in order to keep her son protected. As it turns out, Charlie didn’t hand over any proof at all, but Will and his team put together one hell of a broadcast in the end.
Romantic Entanglements. Once again, the romance storylines were the least interesting part of the episode and, once again, resulted in a few hysterical scenes. Don was determined to ask Maggie to move in with him. Later, a stressful day at work led Maggie to spill the beans to Lisa that Jim was in to her, not Lisa. And an unlucky reenactment of an opening scene from Sex and the City led Maggie to a breakdown on the street…and Jim to hearing her confession of attraction. She met up with Don, determined to break it off with him in order to be with Jim, but Don set a romantic scene and popped his question to Maggie. In the end, both Maggie and Jim didn’t break up with their respective significant others.
The Newsroom will return for its second season next year on HBO.
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