Succession 4.5: Kill List

The Roy brothers are still under the influence of their father; they still love him and hate him and are afraid of him, like the Soviet Union after Stalin died. The brothers want to carve out ATN from the sale to GoJo for slightly different reasons: Roman wants to honor his father’s last wishes, while Ken wants to tell people to fuck off like his father.

 

Ken doesn’t want to let go of the CEO position he’s held for exactly a day, even though he was installed due to Schrödinger’s pencil mark on a piece of paper, and only long enough to complete the deal. This even though he hasn’t actually done much with his time at the company. Matsson accurately calls Ken “Vaulter guy” and says the kids are a “tribute band” in their father’s absence. He notes the Waystar stock dropped 20 percent when Logan died. Ken replies it rose 10 percent the next day (still a net drop of 10 percent, so it’s not the comeback Ken thinks it is).

 

Something breaks further in Roman when he sees Connor’s texted photo of his father’s embalmed body. It is his father but it isn’t, he says, perfectly summing up the experience of seeing a loved one after a mortician has worked on him. Understandably, this rattles Roman. In Kieran Culkin’s future Emmy nomination clip, he lays out Matsson as the billionaire buyer pisses on the Murderhorn. Matsson didn’t have the decency to wait more than two days to call the Roy family out to Norway to do the deal and calls Logan a prick before the man is even buried. It’s a compliment to Succession and actors like Culkin that I can feel such empathy for these bankrupt people.

 

The Roy sons are incompetent in their confrontation and tanking of the deal, but the Roy daughter has much more success. Siobhan has been cut out of the inner circle by her brothers but she uses a more subtle touch and gets Matsson to offer much more money, and suggests who is worth keeping at the company. Always a savvy political operator, with a much better sense of people than her brothers, she has some real success in getting to know Matsson, and finding out he sent large quantities of his frozen blood to woo his employee Ebba. (Something is way, way off with this man, more so than just the usual billionaire dysfunction.)

 

“They think they’re Vikings,” Gerri scoffs at the soft European buyers, piling on the bullshit to motivate her team. “We’ve been raised by wolves, exposed to a pathogen that goes by the name Logan Roy.” In the end, though, everyone but Gerri, Karolina and maybe Tom will be offered golden parachutes. The Roys will get their money but Ken and Roman are still dejected, their ashen faces a tonic for Matsson, who just wanted to win at any cost. By calling Frank to make the offer of $192 per share, the boys are caught flatfooted and can’t refuse the deal in front of everyone.

 

Back at the Norwegian retreat, Shiv kicks dust onto Tom’s shoes. It’s sort of playful and she’s right that he looks like a poser with new white sneakers, but the gesture takes on a nasty edge since there is so much heartbreak between them. Tom’s tugging on her earlobe is just nasty. She still asks him out to dinner. Are they reconciling back into their mindgame of a marriage? What about the pregnancy? They’ve shown Shiv with booze and cocaine but you never see her do the coke and I think she’s just been tactfully sloshing around the drinks without really drinking.

 

ATN may be heading into a huge scandal of its own. Shiv mentions the network is including the presidential candidate on its morning meetings, a major breach of ethics. She worries that ATN’s credibility will be shot, which was amusing coming a week after Fox News settled in the Dominion case.

 

The Norway setting just emphasized how these people don’t appreciate or enjoy what they’ve achieved. They’re on a cable car through the mountains and ignore the incredible vista to talk business. They scoff at the objectively beautiful mountainside glass house. Then when they actually climb to the top of the mountain, all they can do is piss and trash talk.

Succession 4.4: Honeymoon States

Always get it in writing. A written agreement can really be to your benefit when someone dies. Look at Kerry—she’s reduced to tears in Logan’s palatial apartment, prohibited by Marcia from going upstairs to collect her things, her affair with Logan reduced to a sad little bag of belongings that she spills all over the foyer floor in front of everyone. Before she’s escorted out the back door, she quietly asks Roman to check if Logan provided for her. The inner circle surely can hear her quiet desperation and humiliation. Greg gloats at Kerry’s fall like an asshole while Roman shows a little kindness and helps her pick up her things—what a turnaround from how the cousins were introduced in the beginning.

 

Who knows if Logan ever made any provisions for Kerry. As the mistress, she never had anything on paper so she’s entitled to nothing but the kindness of strangers. Marcia has been estranged from Logan and shopping forever in Milan, but she’s still his wife. Their agreement is legal and on paper and she holds all the power. (This is why it annoys me when people scoff at marriage and say, “It’s just a piece of paper.” So is the deed to your house.) Marcia dons a mantilla, claims she talked to Logan every night, and makes an appropriate show of grief but she sure can’t wait to unload that apartment. With a spit-on handshake, she sells it to Connor for $63 million without a second thought or any sentiment. Willa is already measuring the drapes and seems to want to turn that amazing New York apartment into an open floor plan.

 

For Waystar Royco, it very much matters what’s on paper when it comes to who will be the next CEO. Tom—mourning in his own way by scarfing down a fish taco—tries for the job until Karl tells him, accurately, that he’s a clumsy interloper whom nobody trusts, that the only person who supported him is dead, and that he’s married to the boss’ daughter but she doesn’t even like him. Gerri responds to Karl’s play for CEO with a deeply backhanded compliment that Karl was a legend in the ‘90s for what he did with cable.

 

But Ken’s name is the one on that paper and it appears that Logan wanted him to take over. No matter what we know about how Ken spurred the DOJ investigation into the cruise deaths, or that Logan was trusting Roman more right before his death, the written evidence is that Ken is the intended heir.

 

Or is it? It looks like Logan underlined Ken’s name on that piece of paper but as Shiv notes, it kind of looks like his name is crossed out. So Succession becomes Game of Thrones, where Robert Baratheon died with conflicting, half-assed plans in place for who would inherit his kingdom. It is hilarious to me that the leadership of this multibillion-dollar company could hinge on the exact latitude of a pencil mark. It’s also pretty dark since Ken will harbor a little doubt for the rest of his life that his dad really wanted him to succeed.

 

None of this has the force of a will. (I’m kind of also wondering if this is a setup since Frank just pulled that piece of paper out of a folder on Logan’s desk. We didn’t see him get it from the safe and have only his word that nobody altered it. But if it’s a setup, I don’t know to what end this would be.) However, the board votes in Ken and Roman as interim CEO and COO and that has more force than anybody’s feelings about who was closest to Logan.

 

Ken and Roman say they won’t screw over Shiv, but yeah, she got screwed. She feels like the only person who lost something she really wanted. I liked the moment when she chastised mourners for laughing—not every moment at a wake is tearful, but it can seem offensive to some people when they see levity. And it was just funny when she told the stroked-out Sandy Furness to stop smiling. Shiv is still working her way through her complex feelings over her father’s death. She notes the hagiographic obituaries in the newspapers (some undoubtedly owned by Waystar) and says “Dad sounds amazing. I’d like to have met Dad.” Shiv does get good news that she’s pregnant but then worryingly trips and falls at the wake. So not a great day for her on several fronts.

 

Even for a wake, that was depressing. No real friends show up, just employees who walk around the apartment like they own it and plot to replace the boss before his body is cold. The Roys are grieving but can’t really express it. It’s all “sorry for your loss” in the most impersonal tones possible. It makes me never want to be in those heartless circles, not for any amount of money.

 

Ken and Roman shoot down Karolina and Hugo’s plans to spread rumors about Logan’s treatment of his first wife and other unsavory dealings to soften people up to embrace the new leadership. Privately, Ken takes Hugo aside and tells him to start spreading those rumors. Ken knows he has Hugo over a barrel because of his daughter’s inside trading of Waystar stock. This defaming of a dead man’s memory is what Dad would have wanted, Kendall says. This is the twisted way this family honors the wishes of the dead.

 

 

The Trail

It’s a beautiful day. I’m headed out for my daily lunchtime walk at the trail near our office. It’s beautiful but that beauty has its own hidden hazards. On the trail, it’s easier to walk when everyone is walking at the same pace, roughly in sync, so everybody has a buffer in front of and behind them. On an April day in the 80ºs, more people than usual are out and they’re all walking at different paces. Take this guy right in front of me. He’s walking a dog. Right now he’s a comfortable distance ahead of me but soon the dog will have to pee and he’ll slow down. And right on cue, here we go—he and the dog stop by the side of the trail. It’s not number 1, it’s number 2, so they stop for longer than I expected. I’m coming up on them quickly at my pace and right before I get up to where they are, they start moving. But he’s checking his phone so now they’re just slightly slower than me so very quickly, I’m almost breathing down this guy’s neck. So I have to speed up my pace just a little so I can pass on the left. It’s very annoying since I have to do sort of a power walk—regular walking won’t cut it and I’d look like an idiot if I just jog past this guy for a few feet and then resume my normal fat-guy walking pace. It’s also tricky because I have to pass on the left by being aware of the bikes and runners passing me on the left, as well as the opposing traffic. So I push my medial tibia and pass him, then resume normal speed when I’m farther away, so he’s not on my ass. Whew! Now I can relax and walk normally. But then look at these two ahead of me. They’re just out for a chatty walk, all day to kill, stopping and starting and spreading out over both lanes of the trail, unconcerned about any bicyclists who might need to pass them, like the only piece of the world that needs consideration is what’s right in front of their face. Now they’re just stopping completely, I guess to admire something on the side of the trail. Woo, underbrush! Look, honey—underbrush! They resume walking but are slower than me so I’m coming up behind them pretty quickly. I have to pass so I speed up a little and do it. They seem to flinch when I come up on their left as if startled or offended. But what options did I have? Would they rather I match their pace behind them and hover like a stalker? I mean, my Polo shirt and khaki pants say “middle-aged office schlub walking on his lunch break” so I don’t think I look like a threat but of course, people can’t be too careful. Sigh—this was much easier in February when I had this trail to myself—when I was apparently the only person who realized that with the aid of something called a “coat,” you could still go for a walk, rather than wait for the temperature to get above 70º and crowd this trail. I walk on until I get to the next obstacle. It’s a beautiful day.

Succession 4.3: Connor's Wedding

Oh my God, that was rough.

 

Logan Roy dies and his children become unmoored. These four, who fancy themselves power players, are suddenly just four kids who have lost their father—the sun who crowded almost everything else out of the sky their whole lives, the man who they loved and hated, who they desperately wanted to please and who they were plotting to betray. In an extraordinary scene, the camera puts the audience right there with the Roy kids and their grief, and does not give us a reprieve from it.

 

In astounding performances, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong, and Alan Ruck run the gamut of what you experience when a loved one dies—sadness, disbelief, regret, all of it. These people are trashbags but the actors tore themselves open and made these characters enormously sympathetic. Slow down, guys—there are only so many Emmys they can give out.

 

Somewhere in the confusion, Roman quietly comments “I think he’s gone,” and I was done. None of the kids will ever get closure from their father but for poor, abused Roman, it’s especially sad. He fulfilled his father’s last wish by firing his friend Gerri and then finally stands up to his father just a little in a nasty voicemail. But he will never know if his father heard that message, and it will always hurt knowing the last thing his father may have heard from Roman was cursing him out. His moment of panic after Logan’s death at whether or not he literally told his father he loved him was excruciating.

 

Even in their declarations of love over the phone to a maybe-dead Logan, the kids mix in a few F-bombs. “Don’t go,” Shiv says. “Please, not now. I love you—you fucking …” she trails off to a father who may not be able to hear her. Shiv is shattered and Snook’s portrayal of this was shattering. She’ll bear the burden of knowing she might have been able to speak to her dad if only she’d taken Tom’s phone call.

 

Ken tells his father “I love you. I do. I can’t forgive you.” By the end of the episode, this man who was ordering the best doctors in the world to save his clearly lost father is just a little kid, his face crumbling into tears as his father’s body is moved off the plane.

 

Connor’s first reaction: “He never even liked me.” Logan didn’t mean to but even managed to ruin his son’s wedding day. This comes after Connor’s pathetic hope that his dad might “pop by” to see the wedding, even though he must know deep down that Logan finds the Sweden deal to be a higher priority. It was still kind of sweet that he and Willa dispersed most of the guests and Willa got the simple wedding she wanted on the yacht. Going ahead with the wedding was maybe Connor’s final break from the Roys and an acknowledgement that his father wasn’t going to ruin his big day.

 

One thing the episode nailed about a sudden death was the dilemma of when to call Logan’s death and who exactly should make that call. That poor flight attendant was going to keep doing chest compressions until somebody told her to stop, but of course, nobody can bring themselves to do that. It was an act of kindness for Tom to hold the phone up to Logan so the kids can say goodbye—he must have known Logan was dead but is gentle and tactful enough not to come right out and say it.

 

In the midst of human grief, there is still practical business to attend to. On the (rerouted) plane to Sweden, Karolina, Karl, and Frank work to draft the company’s official response and how to notify the board. They’re right that the exact timing of an announcement is crucial, but doing so while Logan’s body is still warm was pretty brutal, especially considering Kerry is badly in shock after witnessing Logan’s last moments.

 

Ken cuts through everything with devastating clarity: “What we do today will always be what we did the day our father died.” He’s talking about things from a business perspective, knowing the kids’ sequence of reactions to Logan’s death will have huge consequences for the company. But this is also very true from a human perspective. If you’ve lost a loved one, even one who wasn’t an abusive billionaire, you know that how you reacted and the mundane stuff you did before and after the death takes on a terrible poignance, and now it’s in the permanent record.

 

I will miss Brian Cox but I think killing off Logan was a good call for Succession. There are still so many meaty storylines to explore in these last few episodes and we will finally deal with the overarching question of who will actually succeed the boss.

 

Roman pulls out his phone and shows the Waystar Royco stock plummeting when word of Logan’s death gets out. He was a titan who could move the market merely by dying, but his life was also small and fragile enough to chart on a little phone screen. What a poetic, nihilistic, perfect image.

 

It’s been over six years since the awful, vertiginous night my Dad died. Like a lot of people, I mourned and came to terms with it. So I didn’t expect to have the wind knocked out of me by a TV show. That was a masterpiece.

Succession 4.2: Rehearsal

Somehow, I never pictured a big, final-season Roy family confrontation happening in a karaoke room under the soft disco glow of the pink and purple lights. Logan apologizes and Kerry explains that it’s a chance to separate their business interests and reconnect as a family. I think the healthiest thing they can all do is go their separate ways for awhile. I’ve always thought Succession is a neat twist on the cliché that high-powered business people need to resign to spend more time with their families. The Roys are people who need to spend less time with their family. They have no outside interest or lives outside Waystar Royco. They don’t have any friends or even sycophantic friends; just employees.

 

As Shiv pointedly notes, if they separate business interests and just be a family, there isn’t much to go back to because there was never a foundation there—their bond is the company. The kids showed this in dramatic fashion by barely feigning to care that Willa walked out on Connor during his wedding rehearsal dinner. Sure, their half-brother needs emotional support, but there’s a business deal ready to be sealed—there’s always a business deal.

 

How genuine was Logan’s apology? I think there was some truth to it but I think Logan does of course want to engineer the sale to GoJo in his best interests. There is a lot to apologize for, the kids tell him. Logan fucked them over in Italy, was never there for Connor growing up, and beat Roman (a rare explicit acknowledgement of this).

 

Logan hits the nail on the head. “You are such dopes,” he tells his kids. “I love you but you are not serious people.”

 

“Rehearsal” definitely showed that contrast in levels of seriousness. Logan was fiery but professional in addressing the ATN staff. The kids were acting like idiots. Kendall, 40, perpetually wears a baseball cap and snottily calls all the PGN shows “dookie.” He’s a very depressed person but he’s never been a serious one. Roman and Shiv let their feelings for their dad color their business dealings and may make a mistake worth billions because they don’t take things seriously enough.

 

Connor nails his half-siblings, too, calling them “love sponges.” Even their seeming enmity with Logan springs from wanting his love and approval. Connor never got any love from them so he’s above all this. “I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside me … I don’t need love. It’s like a superpower.”

 

The bit with Kerry’s terrible news anchor audition was funny, with everyone laughing at her inappropriate smiling and jerky arm movements. Kerry seems like a serious person but what did she think would happen—that she could waltz in and claim an anchor spot with no training? Greg should have let her on the air. The response from viewers and media critics would have been so overwhelming that he could have let them do his dirty work and Kerry would have gotten the point without Greg moving further up on her shit list.

 

Betrayal is afoot as the Roy sons seem to choose their sides. Kendall doesn’t tell anybody that Lukas Matsson is ready to back out of the deal if the kids go along with Sandi and Stewie to ask for more money. Roman is having doubts about his siblings. They attack his business instincts and he quietly separates himself from them, and is ready to go back to dad’s side. And apparently, all this will coalesce at the board meeting on the same day as Connor’s (still-on) wedding.