Succession 4.1: The Munsters

Ahh, the Roy Family. How I had missed all you sons-of-bitches and your joyless quest for power!

 

We open the final season with the two Roy factions in different time zones, literally night and day. Logan Roy is uninterested in his own birthday party, walking out of the room as the guests—mostly employees, almost no family—sing happy birthday. As an autumnal night falls, he and those employees, a wall of black clothing, close in on the deal to buy Pierce Global Media like they’re at a funeral, all of them unable to tell the jokes Logan requests to break up the mood. Meanwhile, somewhere sunny and warm, Ken, Shiv, and Roman giddily make and break media deals in breezy villas before finally buying Pierce—although probably overpaying.

 

Once again, the bonds and hurts of family inspire and constrain the Roys to do what they do. The kids weren’t interested in buying Pierce until Tom told them he was meeting with Naomi and they realized their father was a bidder for the company. Logan’s lingering affection for his kids (the three he actually cares about) had to have been the only reason he agreed to that birthday party. He looks around the party like he’s hoping to see them and when they don’t show, he slips out and goes to dinner with his bodyguard.

 

There was a whole lot of bullshit this week—bullshit the characters sold to other people and to themselves. Nan Pierce plays the factions of the Roys against each other and they barely notice until it’s too late and the price for PGM is up to a probably too-high $10 billion. (The sales price is driven entirely by feelings and wanting to beat dad. Nobody actually did any due diligence to estimate what Pierce was worth.) Nan hams it up as much as old money can, swooning at the distastefulness of it all and saying, “It makes me feel like I’m in the middle of a bidding war.” The kids fall for it and she wins. The Roy trio believes their own bullshit that The Hundred, the kind of “prestige” media venture that would go precisely nowhere in the real world, will be “Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker,” then abandon it entirely when they see a shinier object.

 

At chez Roy, Greg has sex with his date in a guest room and Tom bullshits him into believing the tryst was caught on one of the cameras in every room. Logan “watches the tapes every night with a glass of scotch in his hand,” Tom lies. Connor believes his own bullshit that spending another $100 million in the last 10 days of his presidential campaign to get his polling to 1% will be worth it to get him “in the conversation.” Sure, buddy—you and Jill Stein can start a “political influencers” club. Willa, hilariously, relishes telling guests Connor is polling at 1% and is just hoping her fiancé can spare the $100 million and still remain rich.

 

At chez Wambsgans, Shiv and Tom are taking their separation to a divorce (I would love to see the actual fallout after she realized his betrayal in Italy, but they were already on the rocks, so it wasn’t just one thing that caused it). Shiv lays into Tom about what they’ve been through. “Do you really want to get into a full accounting of the pain in our marriage?” Tom says, bereft. Shiv resists, saying she “doesn’t want to bring up a whole lot of bullshit for no profit.” Notice that word profit—this is how the Roys think of the world. Still, even though she said she didn’t love Tom, there is some sadness in the aftermath of their breakup. Tom is in obvious pain and Shiv is in barely-hidden pain, and that final image of the two of them clasping hands on the bed was tragic.

 

How much time do you think has elapsed since Succession began? At first I thought a year, since Logan having another birthday is a good way of marking one year since his birthday in the pilot. But that would be an awfully compressed time period in which to have the entire wedding planning period and marriage of Shiv and Tom. We do know it’s three months following the wedding in Italy, just 10 days before the presidential election.

 

So who is on top now in the Roy family? On paper it’s the kids, who ruined Logan’s deal to buy Pierce but may have overpaid. Logan ends the night like any other senior citizen, watching TV and calling the station to complain about what he sees—except he actually has a hotline to the person who can fire the offending anchor at his orders. But there’s still the matter of the pending sale of Waystar Royco to GoJo. I’m not counting anybody out.

Signs of Spring

Ahh, spring! The signs are everywhere. Daffodils dotting the awakening landscape like little suns. Tulips biding their time and waiting to bloom. The Phillies playing in Clearwater. Birds chirping. Sunsets at 7 p.m. The ceremonial changing the official seasonal tablecloth from winter snowflakes to spring pastel.

 

But nothing says “it’s a new season” like my favorite sign of all: the Christmas wreath, still hanging on front door in mid-March, turning brown.

 

I just know spring is coming when I see this sight! The brown of the evergreen symbolizes the renewal of the land, and the desiccation of the once-verdant leaves symbolizes how the world is drying out after a wet winter and ready for growth. It’s a gorgeous representation of the passage of time.

 

Most people took their wreaths down in January, but not you—you were vigilant. You kept the wreath as a witness to the revolution of the Earth around the sun. You kept the faith while Valentine’s Day hearts and St. Patrick’s Day shamrocks came and went from people’s doors. And now that wheat-like Christmas wreath hangs high, a testament to your faith.

 

Sure, hanging that wreath on your door in December was probably so onerous and technically complicated—and just plain exhausting—that you decided it was easier just to leave it up for three months and deal with it when life got a little less crazy. But I like to think that’s not the case. I like to think you’re just what the neighborhood needs: a watchful sentry for the beautiful season of spring!

Joel did the right thing

This is just a quick note to say that I think Joel did the right thing in The Last of Us when he rescued Ellie from the hospital and did not allow the doctor to take a Cordyceps sample from her brain, which would (supposedly) lead to a vaccine for the infection but would kill Ellie.

 

People talk about the “trolley problem,” an exercise where you basically have to decide if you’ll allow some person or people to die in order to save the lives of some other people. I guess this is an interesting moral quandary that forces people to think about issues like which lives outweigh which other lives. It’s easy to make those decisions when you’re playing this game and no actual person you know is at stake.

 

But once you introduce the life of a loved one into this equation, there is no choice—you save them from being murdered. The whole point of this show is that the two characters had bonded and Joel had begun to think of Ellie as a surrogate daughter. You’d save her brain from being sacrificed for the slight chance of a vaccine, too. Ellie didn’t even consent to that—she wanted to play a part in treating the infected but she certainly didn’t know she’d die on the operating table for it.

 

Plus, the plan to take samples from Ellie’s brain to develop a vaccine for Cordyceps was really dopey and based on shaky science. I had pictured Joel and Ellie making their way to a more advanced medical facility, an island of technology holding out in a devastated world, where top scientists had been working on a cure. But no, it’s just some hospital that barely has electricity. You think some rando surgeon is going to produce a vaccine in that setting? Who was that guy, anyway? Did he have any background in immunology or infectious disease, or was he just available and had an MD after his name?

 

I mean, come on.

 

And how would they produce and distribute this vaccine? What infrastructure is available that would make it available to the masses? There are no cars and no phones. How does this busted hospital even contact anyone about the miracle cure? Think of how much research and manpower it took to get a COVID vaccine, and the months-long rollout, and then try to imagine that in this shattered country. These Fireflies are delusional.

 

But that’s the point. The show was that much better for this ending, where you finally get to the place where they promise a cure and it’s as empty as Al Capone’s vault. It’s depressing but America after Cordyceps needs to focus less on a vaccine and more on adapting to it and rebuilding some sort of society. The infected are less of a threat than fellow humans, and there’s no easy cure for that.

 

So since they’d be sacrificing a loved one for a vaccine that might not even work, I believe Joel was morally and practically correct in rescuing Ellie from the surgeon. The other questions raised by the finale—if Joel rescued Ellie so he could have a companion, the toll massacring the people at the hospital took on Joel’s humanity, if Ellie can trust Joel—can be answered another time. I really liked The Last of Us.