"Succession" Recap: Guantanamo-Level Sh*t
In the second episode of the season, Connor lets everyone know just how loveless their lives really are.
What is love when it’s purely transactional? This is a question that Succession has asked time and time again, but in “Rehearsal,” it feels unusually pointed. Perhaps because the question is coming from an unusual source: the one and only Connor Roy, presidential candidate and family punching bag extraordinaire.
In this episode, he goes through the ringer. His bride-to-be abandons him at their wedding rehearsal. His siblings take him out for a night on the town, but they torment him endlessly, and don’t hesitate to sideline him when discussing business. He eventually coerces them into going to a karaoke bar, where Connor is lambasted by his siblings for his vocal performance. (This one, he deserves. Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” has to be the worst karaoke song choice of all time, if also the funniest. Roman correctly calls it “Guantanamo-level shit.”)
Then Logan shows up, and there’s the typical kerfuffle between him and his children. Kendall and Shiv demand an apology from him for a lifetime of bad behavior. Logan offers fake confessions that soon turn into justifications. Nothing is resolved; everything devolves into back-and-forth crucifixion. We’ve seen this endless cycle of toxicity before on Succession, but what we haven’t seen is Connor, the forgotten child who finally lets everyone know just how stupid they really are. “The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn to live without it,” he says, cutting straight through the Roy drama like a hot knife through butter. “You’re all chasing after dad, saying, ‘Oh, love me. Please love me. I need love, I need attention.’ You’re needy love sponges, and I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me.” It’s a fantastic, heartbreaking monologue, one that reveals Connor as the most emotionally honest person in his entire family. (A very low bar, to be clear.)
We saw some Connor show some of this at the end of last season with his “I am the eldest son” monologue, and Alan Ruck, transcendent in the role, gets to push his talents even further here. Connor says that he doesn’t need love, but of course he does. He needs it desperately, as much as his deprived siblings do, and over the past few seasons, he’s resorted to some pretty questionable means to get himself there. One could argue—as Kieran Culkin himself has done—that Connor quite literally “purchased a person” in pressuring Willa, his paid escort, to be his wife with vast sums of money. It’s a fair argument, one I’m not sure I fully agree with, it does point at something fundamentally transactional about their relationship. Connor’s proposal to her was done to keep up his presidential polling numbers (“Will you make me the happiest man-slash-most bulletproof candidate in the world?”), and Willa accepted (“Fuck it!”) so that she could fund her playwrighting endeavors. Is that love?
Certainly no less so than between the other Roy siblings and their father, who are once again frothing at the prospect of fucking him over. It begins with Shiv: She receives notice that Tom has contacted all the best divorce lawyers in New York in a deliberate, Logan-advised move to conflict Shiv out of any legal meetings. It’s a move that sets Shiv ablaze, turning her Sandi and Stewy—her father’s business rivals—out of pure spite. They have a plan to squeeze more money out of the Waystar-GoJo sale, a dangerous prospect that could blow up the entire deal and screw the siblings out of potential billions. But Shiv, an aimless, rage-filled, Logan-hating machine, has no qualms. If there’s a chance to take down her father, she’s going for it.
Convincing her siblings proves a mixed bag. Patricidal maniac Kendall is easily swayed, Roman less so. He’s still the nervous little boy scared of confronting his father. But when it comes to the sibling alliance that he’s found himself in, he’s outvoted—and out-bullied. Like a cabal of Soviet secret police, Kendall and Shiv attack Roman for his remaining sympathies to Logan, demanding to see his phone and calling him a traitor when he shows that he sent his father a warm text message on his birthday. This is the second time in two episodes where Roman has come face-to-face with his siblings’ spiteful tendencies (remember when they intimidated him into over-bidding for PGM?), and he now finds himself fighting a GoJo war that he doesn’t want to be in. It’s a series of attacks that, by episode’s end, cause Roman to scamper furtively back into his father’s arms.
Logan, meanwhile, is out at ATN headquarters, puttering menacingly around the ground floor of his right-wing news network looking like “if Santa Claus was a hitman,” per Greg. (Another certified Greg banger: “It’s like Jaws, if everybody in Jaws worked for Jaws.”) With the GoJo sale imminent, Logan is looking to reestablish influence over his kingdom, and he does so in a rabble-rousing speech that captures the toxicity he exerts over his empire. “Our rivals should be checking in up the back of their chauffeured cars because they can’t believe what we did,” he sprays across the room while standing atop boxes of printer paper. “So fucking spicy, so true, something everyone knows but nobody says because they’re too fucking lily-livered!” For two episodes in a row, Jesse Armstrong and Co. have done what Pete Carroll never could and let Brian Cox cook, giving him monologues that emblazon his cynical parochialism onto a terrifying spotlight.
Once Logan hears about his children’s ploy to upend the GoJo sale, his moseying around ATN suddenly loses some of its weight. What if his kids actually manage to blow up his empire? In as much an apologetic mode as we’ll ever see, Logan corners his kids at the karaoke bar (truly one of the all-time great Succession settings), where he plays nice in the hopes that he can sway them to his side of the GoJo deal. Inevitably, things don’t go his way—in this regard, he has trained his children well—and quickly turns to anger. “I love you,” he tells them, “But you’re not serious people.”
The scariest part of this accusation—beyond its inherent toxicity—is that Logan is right. His children aren’t serious people. They’re spoiled, incompetent billionaires whose motivations are driven by a facile need to outdo their father. Behind all the bullshit economics and Loganesque business dealings, these kids are just that: kids. They’re still the broken scions of an abusive patriarch, and it’s hard to see that ever changing.
Connor got it right when he called them “needy love sponges.” But unlike his half-siblings, he knows it. Yes, Connor has his ridiculous obsessions with libertarian presidencies and Napoleonic penises, but he is also the one member of his family that has some inkling of what love is. Consider his marriage to Willa. He coaxed her into marriage with promises of money and artistic freedom, but everything he does for her is genuine. There’s no expectation for her to be anything different than she is. You can see it in the pain he feels when Willa goes up onstage at their rehearsal ceremony and says, “I can’t do this.” He makes jokes, he feigns invulnerability (“I don’t need love. It’s like a superpower”), but Connor is still genuinely sad at having been left the altar. He loves Willa unconditionally and without reservation, and is heartbroken when she doesn’t reciprocate. It’s a love defined by transactions—but it’s better than anything else in the Roy family shitshow.
Notes and Quotes
However shallow and transactional his relationship, Connor does return home at the end of the night, and Willa is still there. The two of them lie there, not saying anything, accepting the other’s emotions for what they are. That’s a more authentic relationship than anything his siblings ever had.
I didn’t get a chance to mention the commotion behind Kerry’s amazingly bad news anchor audition, which was hilarious from start to finish. Roman describing her Zuckerberg-esque performance: “Must act natural to fool the humans.” Tom describing to Greg the difficulty of breaking the news to Kerry: “It’s like Israel-Palestine. Except harder, and much more important.” Greg actually breaking the news to Kerry: “The arms aren’t right. They’re, uh, a little un-TV.” Kendall to Kerry after she realizes Logan screwed her over: “Congrats on losing your betrayal cherry!”
I’m always excited for whatever new musical variations composer Nicholas Britell comes up with for each new season; this season is no less exceptional. The swelling-strings theme variation that plays over Logan’s ATN speech sounds downright menacing, and the clarinet (or maybe oboe?) solo that plays out over the end credits feels appropriately foreboding.
The first time that Stewy shows up this season, and he’s impersonating a Persian cab driver. It’s hilarious. I am here for anything Arian Moayed wants to do.
Connor’s idea of a good time: “A real bar, with chicks. And guys who work with their hands and grease, and sweat from their hands, and have blood in their hair.” Get a life, Con.
I love how Connor’s choice of beer in the working man’s bar is a Weissbier, but specifically “not a Hoegaarden.” What do you have against the Belgians, Con?
Kendall dropping one the better dis lines of his career: “Want to give us a quick blast of ‘New York, New York’ and fuck off?”