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.
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