“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
