It’s a safe bet that on TV, when they show someone rehearsing something they’re about to do, they won’t actually get to do it for real, or will do it in a form very different from what they were rehearsing. So when I saw Roman cavalierly running through his eulogy, I figured he wouldn’t get to give it straight during Logan’s funeral. It sounded like Roman’s speech would have just been boilerplate, more about his father’s business legacy than anything else. As usual, Roman makes jokes on the way to the funeral, mocking Ken for using sunglasses as a shield for his tears and teasing Shiv about her pregnancy. “If I see breastfeeding, I’m gonna have to jerk off” is such a charming thing to say to your sister on the way to your dad’s funeral.
But hearing Ewan’s honest eulogy about his dad visibly breaks something in Roman; you can see him snap. He finally, finally drops all his defenses and can only sob at the lectern. The full weight of who his father was and what he lost hits him. The crying was heartbreaking, and another great performance from Kieran Culkin (engrave his Emmy while you’re doing Sarah Snook’s). When he says “Is he in there? Get him out,” this is a grown man reduced to a child in the face of losing his dad.
Ewan’s eulogy was extraordinary. Every criticism of his brother’s rapacious capitalism and hoarding of wealth was true (“the grain stashed while another goes hungry”). But his recounting of their perilous wartime trip across the Atlantic, and the death from polio of their sister Rose—and Logan’s guilt for having think he caused it—was humanizing and intimate to an almost painful degree. Nobody in Logan’s circle had probably ever heard any of that. “He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men,” his brother says. “Perhaps he had to, because he had a meagerness about him. And maybe I do about me, too. I don’t know. I try. I try. I don’t know when, but some time, he decided not to try anymore. And it was a terrible shame.” This was praise and burial, humanizing and demonizing. No wonder Roman broke down.
Ken acknowledges his father’s monstrous tendencies but asserts that he used that monstrousness to build something great—newspapers, movies, ships. His is a shadow of his uncle’s speech and he can only really relate to his dad through money. “I hope it’s in me,” Ken says of his dad’s ruthlessness, as much a eulogy as an audition.
Shiv’s speech was a little more human than Ken’s Ayn Rand tribute. She acknowledged the problems he had with women, saying Logan “couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head,” but also saying goodbye to her “world of a father.” By the time they get to the cemetery, after seeing how Roman can’t go into the mausoleum and hearing him say he “couldn’t breathe” when dad was around, Shiv starts to doubt, asking Karl and Frank what kind of person her father really was; she gets no real answers that she doesn’t already know.
There were some nice touches I liked at the funeral, like Caroline immediately sensing Shiv is pregnant (your mother can always tell). The monosyllabic exchange between them was like something out of Ab Fab. In a lovely grace note, Logan’s wives make peace with the mistresses who supplanted them. I liked the small touch of humanity Marcia showed to the genuinely shattered Kerry.
The funeral once again underlined something very sad about this family: it’s really only immediate family and the hangers-on from Waystar in their circle. A funeral is usually a time when you reconnect with relatives and friends who come out of the woodwork to pay their respects, but the Roy kids weren’t actually mingling with or receiving any family like most normal mourners do. It was all dealmaking and corporate intrigue. These Waystar people are not your friends, which was again clarified with the cruelty with which they made fun of Roman’s breakdown. But how can you expect real warmth in a family where Logan chose his company’s lawyer to be his daughter’s godmother?
I realize they wanted to go with gravitas at the recessional out of the church with the slowed-down Succession theme song. But what kind of Catholic funeral doesn’t end with “On Eagles’ Wings”?
I also liked Jess’s flash of dignified defiance at her resignation, and the subtle suggestion that everything with Mencken and ATN’s rightward turn influenced that. Sorry, Ken, I know it was a rough day for you with your father’s funeral and all but you did force an answer out of Jess about the meeting. It was only her tact and desire not to burn bridges that kept her from telling you off.
The cemetery was kind of anticlimactic but I liked the way even everyday things can intrude on solemn moments—you still have to get out of the car to walk over to the grave. Shiv’s “I’m intrigued to see how he gets out of this one” was gold, and a bit of meta-commentary about the audience.
With completely predictable hilarity, Mencken has stopped caring about doing favors for ATN and stopping the sale now that he’s on the cusp of real power and can control the narrative by at least claiming victory. (But is Mencken president-elect? The Electoral College has another month before it has to meet and there needs to be some sort of legal remedy for those lost Wisconsin ballots. So the ATN call could be legally wrong as well as politically wrong. I’m enough of a nerd about this that I need closure.) You could see his eyes glazing over as Ken, Connor, and Greg approached him for favors. How dumb are these people to believe this guy would follow through with a verbal promise? Instead, Mencken will back the sale of Waystar to GoJo with Shiv as American CEO.
It's tragic to see how alone Roman Roy is. His abusive dad is gone and he doesn’t know who he is without him. His siblings could choose to comfort him in his obvious distress, but Ken mocks him for not giving the eulogy, saying “you fucked it.” Clips of his sobbing at his lowest moment are going viral. And so, he has nothing and nobody left, choosing to run into the crowd of protestors, surrendering to their abuse and the chaos he helped unleash.
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