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.
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