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The Inquirer may have picked up on a recent Yahoo news report that for some reason reposted an old Hollywood Reporter article that was reporting on the initial pickup of Agent Carter season 1.

I think it was the only way she could get both magnification of what she's trying to see and flash the light for Morse Code at the same time. She'd need the magnification to make sure that the doctor is looking at her and that Dooley isn't lingering somewhere and could see her signals. If I'm not mistaken, she pulled the trigger to activate the lights, so I'm not sure it was even capable of firing shots.

Sure, he wouldn't, but NBC would seemingly take whatever opportunity it could to crow about the fact that they have Josh Elliott and ABC doesn't. I don't watch Today very much anymore, so I don't know for sure how often Elliott's on the show, but it seemed to me that he's not on the show all that often for someone who NBC would seemingly want to inundate Today viewers with if he is indeed Lauer's annointed successor. That's not to say Elliott's not in line for it; it just doesn't seem like it's a sure thing right now. According to Wiki, Vieira announced in April 2006 that she was taking over for Couric, she officially started in September 2006, Today announced in January 2007 that they were creating a 4th hour, and the 4th hour officially began September 2007. So, your initial timeline recollection is pretty close. I think it was more Curry than Morales who they were trying to appease- Morales was pretty new to Today, having just come over to Today fulltime in 2006 from MSNBC. You may be right about the co-host thing; I may just be recalling what you say, that they had constantly rotating co-hosts because of frequent absences by Curry or Morales. It was almost always at least 3 co-hosts, I think, and I recall that Amy Robach and Peter Alexander were on a lot, so they might merely have been filling in. It was definitely a literal roundtable though, at least at the beginning, as this clip from the debut of the 4th hour shows.

As I recall, this is how the 4th hour kind of started out before they hired Kathie Lee Gifford- I think it was Ann Curry, Natalie Morales, Hoda Kotb, and a 4th guest host sitting around the table chatting about various news pieces. It wasn't working, so they eventually recruited Kathie Lee to work with Hoda, which was seen as a kind of desperation move because the prior format wasn't working. So it's really weird that they're essentially going back to that format.

Those were the rampant rumors, but they were steadfastly denied by NBC and Elliott. Here's just one example. All throughout, he maintained that he wanted to get back into sports and especially to do the Olympics. The rumors never stopped about his eventually replacing Lauer, but I think they may actually be grooming him to be Bob Costas's eventual replacement, even if Costas never seems to age. You really don't see too much of Elliott on Today- he has a much bigger presence on NBC Sports- so if they're grooming him to replace Lauer, they're doing it in a strange way. I thought this was spot on. One wonders if the Today producers will take note.