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.
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