“You’ll keep it light?” Roman (Kieran Culkin) asks his father Logan (Brian Cox) in the opening minutes of this week’s episode of Succession. No such luck for us, the viewer: 20 minutes later, the King is finally dead, the great catalysing incident the show has been building towards for the last 29 hours of its screen-time finally landing like a crashing, flaming private jet. Viewed retroactively, Logan Roy’s uncharacteristic declaration of familial love last week takes on an additional note of desperation, as if the Succession patriarch might have known more about the frailty of his health than he was letting on. Either way, Cox will be missed, and with Logan dead, the show will lose some of its roaring, rushing power, and a new Succession – one that does not orbit a dark, immovable locus, like a black hole at the centre of a galaxy—will be forced to take its place.
Eggwatch
It feels necessary to begin with something light—a Greg-the-egg salad, if you will, in contrast to the three-course meal of grief and rage and weeping that makes up the bulk of this episode. It will come as no surprise that most of this week’s notable, quotable lines belong to cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), who we first see calling Tom (Matthew McFadyen) to check that he has appropriate backup for the meeting Logan is currently en route to with Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) in Sweden. “Yeah, I got like three or four people Gregging for me,” Tom replies. “Gregging?” Greg wails. “Yeah, I roped in a few little mini Gregs from the pigpen. Little Greglets,” Tom responds with evident glee.
“Okay, well, don’t turn me into a word, Tom, I’m a guy!” Greg huffs, shambling around Connor’s wedding in a manner that, in fact, absolutely begs for “Gregging” to be made into a verb. “Who are all these little guys, these little Greggies running around? Who are these little Gregs?” That Greg himself, in spite of being played by the six-foot-seven Nicholas Braun, is a “Greglet” and a “little guy” himself is obvious, even if it does defy the laws of physics.
‘Loony Cake’
It would not be a Succession wedding without at least one haunting or sexual anecdote about somebody’s mother, and because this season it is Connor (Alan Ruck)’s wedding, it is Connor’s turn to air his Mommy issues – he is triggered by his wedding cake, a Victoria sponge, because it too closely resembles one that he was given as a child on the day his mother was committed to a mental institution. “He says it’s a loony cake,” Willa (Justine Lupe) informs Kendall (Jeremy Strong), looking as if it might be occurring to her that her husband-to-be is a loony cake himself.
Elsewhere, Roman (Kieran Culkin) has been told to fire Gerri (J Smith-Cameron), the surrogate Mommy with whom he has had an arguably haunting and inarguably sexual relationship over the course of seasons one through three. “I guess you just lost [Logan]’s confidence,” he tells her, shamefaced. “Since when?” Gerri fires back. “Since you sent me repeated images of your genitalia?” “Well that’s reductive,” Roman mutters, although if there was a motivation behind his mid-meeting penis spam last season beyond “it’s just like, here’s my dick I guess,” we don’t get to hear it. Furious with his father for what he believes is an emotionally manipulative power play, Roman calls Logan to complain about being made to dismiss his former I-have-no-idea-what-word-to-use-to-define-Gerri-and-Roman’s-thing, ending his voicemail with: “so, like, are you a c***, I guess that’s the question, give me a buzz!”
‘You’re going to be a monster and you’re going to be OK’
If Roman feels a little proud of standing up to Logan in that voicemail, his pride comes before what might be the most dramatic fall in the show’s history, as Tom calls him from the private jet halfway to Sweden and informs him, on a line that’s crackling with static, that Logan is “sick, he’s very, very sick – it’s very, very bad.” Roman, who unfortunately answered said call with the indelible and immortal greeting “f***y sucky brigade, how can I help you?”, pulls in Kendall, and then Shiv, and the three of them swing wildly between optimism and panic as Tom holds the phone to Logan’s ear and lets them say their last goodbyes.
In his much-discussed New Yorker profile last year, one of the many thinkers Jeremy Strong quoted was the playwright Harold Pinter. “The more acute the experience,” Strong described him saying, “the less articulate its expression.” Part of what reduced me to entirely unexpected tears in the scenes that surrounded Logan’s death was the depiction of this very inarticulacy, which felt like a truer reckoning with grief in the immediate aftermath of death than the usual tidy speeches and redemptive moments one so often sees on television. Time and time again, the Roy children contradicted themselves, one minute declaring their love for their monstrous father, and the next offering a caveat. “I love you, dad,” Kendall mumbles, “even though you f***in’…I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay.” (Even Shiv (Sarah Snook), whose tearful “Daddy, don’t go” was the thing that finally pushed me towards something close to sobs, immediately follows up her plea with the same expression of inchoate rage: “You f***in’…”) Here there were no zingers, no quotable lines; the transcriptions in my notes, seen altogether, look more like a cry for help than like memorable screenwriting.
Something else that struck a chord: I could not help noticing that as Tom put the phone to Logan’s ear, Roman and Kendall and Shiv all offered some variation on the phrase “it’s going to be okay,” and it occurred to me that this is something parents usually say to their children. Had Logan Roy ever uttered this particular phrase? It is impossible to know, although it’s extremely possible to take an educated guess. When Shiv and Kendall walk back into Connor’s wedding holding hands, they look as if they might be eight years old, and the image is heart-breaking; when they tell Connor what’s happened and he says, unthinkingly and calmly, “oh, he never liked me” before switching into a more appropriate expression of his grief, it’s doubly so.
What is or is not appropriate in the face of death is the central question of the episode, just as the central question of Succession as a whole has often seemed to be what is appropriate or sincere as an expression of love – whether a father who behaves tyrannically towards his children in order to teach them strength can be a loving parent in his own way, and whether a child who tries to beat their father at his own game might be doing so only in order to win his respect and affection. When Kerry (Zoe Winters), Logan’s girlfriend and assistant, emerges from the bathroom on the private jet where he has died with a strange grin, her affect is as wildly incongruous as it was in her audition tape last week; when Tom calls Cousin Greg and says “he’s passed away, and you’ve looked out [for me], and what’s at the bottom of your stocking, Greg? An old guy who f***ing hated you” and then dissolves into a horrible, frightening laugh, it is jarring but not exactly unnatural. What do we do when cruel men die, and what do we do when those cruel men are our bosses, or our lovers, or, especially, our fathers?
In the end, Willa and Connor go through with their loveless marriage, and after considering whether or not they should conceal Logan’s death in order to preserve the company’s value on the market, the Roy siblings find out that his ill-health has already hit the news, and decide to do the right thing and release a statement. “Every single thing we do and say today is going in the memoirs,” Kendall reasons. “It’s going in the congressional record…we are highly liable to misinterpretation, so what we do today will always be what we did the day our father died.” The last part of this statement is true even for those of us who are not responsible for multi-billion-dollar companies, and it is another reason why no form of grief is “right” or “fitting.” By the time the episode concluded with a shot of Kendall gasping, watching Logan’s body being unloaded from the private jet, I was dazed, a little overwhelmed, and generally left thinking more or less the same thing Jeremy Strong is described as thinking in that wild New Yorker profile: what the Shrek just happened?
