Rachel leaves MC to join the breakaway agency

Rachel Elliot’s departure from MC is both a career move and a refusal to remain under a management that failed to support her after Cliff Weybourne’s attempted assault. She helps prepare a breakaway agency in secrecy, then resigns with immediate effect and tells Alan Jarvis plainly why she is leaving. The new venture’s commercial promise soon becomes concrete when Frank Alder gives it a large part of Mallarmé’s new product development programme.

Preparing the Breakaway

The move takes shape through hurried, secret meetings between Rachel, Jimmy Chartsworth, and a small group of colleagues. By the time she is weighing whether to join, premises have been found and several clients have been warned. A high-powered creative duo has verbally agreed to come across, and three media buyers have expressed interest. The operation is not yet fully launched, but the preparations have advanced far enough for the participants to treat departure as imminent.

Rachel hopes to bring at least some of the Mallarmé account to the new agency. At MC she is still trying to cooperate with Frank Alder over an American press campaign for skin-tinted moisturiser, a product presented in a deliberately jaunty mock-up: the tube wears sunglasses and a lilac bikini and reclines in a deck chair. The campaign is regarded as somewhat naff, and Frank is under pressure to test it in the UK. Rachel can manage the work, but finds it hard to care about the product while her professional future is being decided elsewhere. Her divided attention makes the campaign a small, concrete measure of how thoroughly her commitment to MC has weakened.

She also asks Jimmy whether the new agency might accommodate her part-time. He says they would do anything to have her with them. The exchange indicates that her participation is wanted, while leaving room for her to negotiate the form it will take. She is not simply abandoning a job for an already settled position: the agency is still being assembled, and her place in it remains part of the arrangement under discussion.

Personal Uncertainty and a New Job

The career decision unfolds alongside uncertainty in Rachel’s relationship with Robbie Dexter. After a difficult weekend, the two have talked through the episode involving Polly Drayton. Robbie explains that an envelope contained an old photograph of himself and Polly, which he has burned; Rachel, in turn, tells him that Jimmy’s offer is advanced. Although he sounds disappointed, he supports her decision and says they will work things out. Their supportive conversation does not resolve the strain Rachel is carrying privately: she has not told Robbie that she wants to become pregnant or that they have been having unprotected sex. She is unsure of her motives and recognizes that imagining a pregnancy will make everything fall into place is not a sound basis for the choice.

When Naomi Fullerton asks why she is leaving, Rachel gives a careful, limited account. She says that she fell out badly with a colleague over his behaviour just before Christmas and that it made life difficult. She does not want to recount the Cliff Weybourne story. By then, the incident has ended in a satisfactory practical outcome: after the Valentine’s Day debacle, Weybourne was visibly deflated and handed in his notice a few weeks later, following a strong suggestion that he leave. People at work know this, and some believe he will have difficulty finding another top job. Rachel also gives other reasons for moving on, including the desire for new challenges, but keeps the new agency’s plans confidential. She hopes Melissa will join as well, though she does not want the news shared yet.

Resignation and Confrontation

Rachel’s departure from MC is not merely an intention announced during the agency’s preparations. She resigns and asks for the resignation to take effect immediately. Alan Jarvis accepts with a clenched expression and resentful grunts. Only as Rachel, using crutches, gathers herself to leave does he blurt out that he is sorry she is going and ask whether anything could persuade her to stay. The crutches mark her physical vulnerability in the encounter, but she does not soften her answer: she is certain she is leaving.

She then identifies the decision he had made, and the support he had withheld, as central to her departure. She tells Alan he should have supported her when she came to him about Cliff. Had she not wanted more than anything to move on with her life, she says, she would have shouted louder, gone to the police, and accused Alan of covering up for a creep and a criminal. She adds that he is fortunate she has chosen not to do so, while warning that she may change her mind and that he could then have questions to answer. The exchange turns her resignation into a direct challenge to the workplace response to the assault: the employer’s failure is no longer a private grievance but a reason she is willing to state to his face.

The Move’s Consequences

Alan pales and says nothing. Later that day, the news breaks that Frank Alder will entrust Rachel and the new agency with a large slice of Mallarmé’s new product development programme. This award gives the breakaway venture more than an anticipated foothold in an account: it confirms that Rachel’s hoped-for transition has acquired substantial commercial backing. Her departure has immediate professional consequences for MC as well, since a significant part of the work is going to the agency she has joined.

Rachel expects a month off before starting the new job. That interval makes the departure a transition rather than an instantaneous transfer, even though she has insisted that her MC resignation take effect at once. The event consequently holds two outcomes together: she leaves a compromised workplace on her own terms, but does so while other parts of her life—including her relationship with Robbie and her concealed desire for motherhood—remain unsettled. Her new agency offers a different professional direction; it does not make those private uncertainties disappear.