Succession Recap: Will someone please think of the market?
Wow. Just wow. If you haven’t yet watched Season 4: Ep 3 of Succession, then stop reading this blog this instant. I cannot stress the term “SPOILER ALERT” enough.
Now for those of you who are caught up, let’s ride:
“Heyyyy son”
This episode of Succession starts off like any other.
Logan awkwardly greets Roman because he genuinely doesn’t know how to interact with his son.
Tom calls Greg and shits on him, saying he got some “Greglets” to do his job in the interim.
Logan demands a blood sacrifice and forces Roman to fire Gerri, before saying something badass as the theme song swells and he boards a plane to Sweden for a high-powered meeting. It’s business as usual for the Roy crew. Until it’s not…
“Are you a … c-word?”
That’s not technically the real quote, but my mom reads this blog. Roman, obviously distraught over his father forcing him to fire a loyal and competent Gerri, calls Logan inquiring if he’s just doing this to screw with him.
The answer, while ultimately not relevant, is of course yes.
This is penance for betraying for his father and siding with his siblings. Logan wants a blood sacrifice and is just twisting the knife on his youngest and most vulnerable son.
The stage is set for Roman to be Logan’s puppet, much as Kendall was in Season Two. Until it’s not…
“Mr. Scrooge just happened to be a huge wealth creator”
Lmao the press-infested, overly patriotic wedding on Ellis Island is actually happening.
Connor, in true Con form, has to berate the staff for a “cake catastrophe.”
Apparently, Logan slapped his mother into the looney bin when he was a child, and, in an attempt to appease an understandably distraught Connor, fed him Victoria sponge cake for a week straight.
This shows again, that Logan doesn’t have any sense of empathy. He merely makes the most prudent business-like decision and throws money, or in this case, cake at the problem until it goes away.
It’s a valuable insight into Logan and his early relationship with his kids. Until it’s not…
“I think he went. I think he’s gone.”
Ok, enough dancing around it: Logan is dead.
Logan Roy, the catalyst of this show, the man around whom all the major plot points hinge, is dead.
I’m posting this blog a day late solely because I needed the time to process this momentous moment in television history (and because I watched two James Bond movies and lost track of time).
There’s so much to get into here and I don’t really know how to go about addressing it all, so I’m just going to do my best and try to segment it.
The Acting
I mean, holy fuck.
Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, and Kieran Culkin are just incredible. And all the credit in the world to the characters located on the plane as well.
Every single actor played this scene exactly how I imagine it would happen in real life.
For the kids part, they were distraught, confused, somewhat in disbelief, and above all, desperate. Without any way to physically be with their father, they were angrily demanding info, and growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of clarity.
When Shiv and Kendall take the phone, you can almost see their brains tearing in two as they try to reconcile their father’s longtime neglect and mistreatment with the reality that he’s still their dad and this is the last time they’ll ever speak to him.
Kendall, for all his usual verbosity, sums it up pretty succinctly. I can’t forgive you, but I do love you.
Shiv seems to express a similar sentiment, but ultimately reverts back to her inner child, desperately scared for her daddy.
On the plane meanwhile, Tom handles things with surprising calmness and deference. He doesn’t lie and sugarcoat the situation like one might expect. He gently explains that the situation is not good and not likely to improve.
The acting was a masterclass in realism. In an industry that celebrates hyperbole and is, by definition, overly dramatic, the 40 or so minutes of Logan’s death was about as true to real life as one can imagine.
The framing
How brilliant are the show runners? Honestly.
Everyone’s fear coming into this last season of one of the all-time great shows is that they’d screw it up. That they’d jump the shark ala Game of Thrones and put together a finale tarnished with Kumbayas and pointless platitudes.
Nope. They killed off arguably the most important character in the show in Episode 3/10 of the final season. That takes BALLS.
It’s a wild plot twist that breaks with normal television convention. We’re trained, as viewers, to expect the main character to always pull through. Because without the main character, there generally is no show.
Now we’ve seen main characters die before in shows and movies, but it always happens at the END. The character’s arc is completed, so there’s no practical reason he needs to still be alive.
That’s not the case here. For maybe the first time I can think of, the primary character of a show was killed off before the main conflict of the entire series was even close to resolved.
We expected it to come down to episode 10, some big showdown in the boardroom where Logan finally yields. Or maybe he lay dying in a hospital bed, as his kids console him in his final moments.
NOPE.
The episode is framed around him, he’s making moves per usual, then BOOM, all of a sudden he’s just gone.
Now to some this may seem abrupt or a plot twist just for the sake of shocking the audience. But it’s actually the opposite.
It’s real. It’s how life works. 82-year-old men sometimes just die quickly and without warning. So much so to the point that they don’t even show the viewer the death. It happened so fast that even we weren’t privy to it.
Just because he’s the central character in a drama doesn’t mean Logan is immune to the laws of nature.
This is actually the most realistic move the show could have made. What’s better is the show even teases that there may be some hope throughout the episode.
Maybe the chest compressions will finally bring him back.
Maybe he’s still breathing and Tom just has it wrong.
Maybe the plane will land in time and an EMT will rush on board to shock his heart back into rhythm.
It’s hard for us to grasp that a character like Logan who is so larger than life and seemingly indestructible can die at all. We so expect the hero/anti-hero to pull through against all realistic odds, that we’re almost willing to ignore what we already know to be true: Logan is gone.
The dramaturgical impact
I had never heard the word ‘dramaturgically’ until Jeremy Strong’s weird ass treated us to it in the closing commentary after the episode.
His strange pretentiousness aside, he’s right. This plot twist makes sense dramaturgically.
The main conflict of Succession is the name itself, succession. Who’s going to take over for Logan when he steps down.
But as the first few episodes of this season tell us, Logan was never going to step down.
I think I wrote in last week’s blog that Logan is someone who will die at his post. And he did.
As long as he was alive, Logan was never going to put any sort of succession in place. Therefore, the only possible way for the plot to move forward and the conflict to be resolved is for Logan to die.
Now we have a feeding frenzy on our hands.
Before Logan’s body is even cold, we have Kendall suggesting that their names be in the mix as potential successors, and planning out the optics of their response to their father’s death.
“Let’s grieve and whatever, but not do anything that restricts our future freedom of movement.”
On the plane meanwhile, the non-Roy executives are planning how they can insert themselves into the leadership conversation.
We have just a brief moment in this show when everyone is human and solely concerned about the events of the present moment.
When that moment passes, it’s game on.
Top Quotes of the Episode:
7. “In no particular order: the board, Gerri, POTUS…” - Karolina
6. “Yeah, he’s heavily fucking delayed.” - Karl
5. “He just finds you visually aggravating right now.” - Tom
4. “Judging by her grin it looks like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium.” - Tom
3. “Don’t turn me into a word Tom, I’m a guy.” - Greg
2. “What at the bottom of your stocking Greg? An old guy who fucking hated you.” - Tom
1. “We’ll get a funeral off the rack. We can do Reagan’s with tweaks.” - Kendall
Winner(s) of the Week: Con, I guess?
Obviously nobody was a real winner in the true sense of the word, but Connor comes out the best in all of this sadness and chaos. He never had a real stake to the throne anyways, so the business turmoil doesn’t really affect him.
AND he got Willa to sort of admit that she actually likes being with him in some weird way, which culminates in him getting married in front of a minimal crowd and no press solely because he loves her and wants to marry her.
Finally, in a fucked up sense, he’s free. His dad was a tormenting force in his life. He lived his life to make his father proud, a task which he acknowledged he never accomplished. Now he can just live for him. It will be a stupid life to be sure, but it’s his.
Loser(s) of the Week: Logan
He died.
Final Analysis
Wow. Won’t go as far to say it’s the best episode of the series, but it’s one of the most important and impactful episodes to be sure. Scattered closing thoughts in bullet form:
This is very well-put and super sad despite not being of any real consequence to the plot:
Logan’s last little fuck you was having Roman fire Gerri. You could see by her cold response to his sadness over his father’s passing that she’s now out for blood. She’s smart, experienced and will surely be a player for the Waystar crown.
It is TOUGH to have the last thing you say to your dad be you questioning whether or not he’s a C-word. Even if he kinda is one.
I think it’s very poignant that Kendall referred to the moment before their stock price plummeted by saying “there’s dad.” Says a lot about the Roy’s view of humanity, and is blatant foreshadowing of the chaos about to ensure at Waystar Royco.
Speaking of Kendall, I’m somewhat scared that Jeremy Strong killed his own dad in order to get into character for this episode. Method acting weirdo.
Unrelated to anything but Tom’s American accent sounds British in cadence if that makes any sense.
Gotta love Connor being the comic foil with the cake catastrophe. Shakespeare used to follow a dramatic scene like Duncan’s death in Macbeth with a goofy scene of a drunk porter stumbling across the stage just to ease the tension and reset the momentum of the play. Connor plays his role perfectly.
Logan has proven throughout this show that he’s the only thing that can tear his kids apart and the only thing that can bring them together. The latter was true in this episode. Let’s see if that holds throughout the remainder of the season.
Buckle up kids, we got a wild ride ahead of us. See you next week.
PS. One of my buddies proposed a spinoff where Logan is in hell and just makes Satan his bitch. I took the liberty of writing a few lines of dialogue. Tell me you wouldn’t watch this show:
