"Succession" Recap: Long Live the King
After last week's earth-shattering episode, "Honeymoon States" shows Kendall making a play for the throne.
It was always going to be Kendall. Even when it looked like he was the last possible man on the totem pole, it couldn’t have ever been anyone else. Nobody has wanted the Waystar throne more than him, who has worked his entire life to take over his father’s coveted role. He’s spent three seasons with a maniacal addiction to patricide, after all, and now his father is really, actually, genuinely dead. Who’s left to stop him?
Succession reminds us of this fact in “Honeymoon States,” its most recent episode, by proposing a question that in retrospect seems inevitable: What if Kendall was always the killer that Logan doubted he could be? The episode takes place not at the post-nuptial vacation for which it is named (Connor is taking Willa to the American swing states for their honeymoon—a truly romantic gesture), but instead at Logan’s wake, where family and sycophants have gathered round to mourn their lost leader, to speak to his wisdom and wit (read: racism and profiteering). It’s an event that doubles, as per most Roy gatherings, as a corporate strategy session, and an important one at that. With Logan dead, the family needs to elect a new CEO for the interim position. The palace is divided into rival political camps: In one room, the Roy children scheme methods for regaining their lost power, while the Old Guard (Frank, Karl, Gerri) concoct their own plans in another. The CEO position seems generally up in the air, though one thing is clear: both groups are intent on keeping power for themselves. The Greybeards are worried about a Roy sibling takeover; the siblings are worried that the Greybeards could keep the company for themselves.
This isn’t enough to drive an episode of Succession, however, so episode writers Jesse Armstrong and Lucy Prebble introduce another wrinkle. Turns out that Frank has discovered a piece of paper written by Logan “some time ago” stating that Logan wishes to leave the position of Waystar CEO to him. The news sends everyone spiraling. Frank, Karl, and Gerri try desperately to discredit the paper, describing it variously as a “doodle,” a “collection of musings,” “not a legal matter”—anything that would keep it from holding sway over the board. What’s more, Kendall’s name looks to have been underlined in pencil. Or is it perhaps crossed out?
This simple scratching of lead on paper, written to be precisely between an underline and a cross-out of Kendall’s name, gives Logan’s postmortem wishes the kind of theatrical ambiguity that only a show like Succession could put onscreen. This tiniest of details sends everyone into a state of utter confusion, but especially Kendall, who is crushed at the possibility that his father might have actually believed in him. “Is it real, Frank? My dad wanted me to take over?” asks Kendall with a mournful look that belies his trauma. It’s a touching scene, and not just because Kendall bares his broken heart out to his godfather. Frank was more a parent to Kendall than Logan ever was, and he here offers him the most truthful response he could hope to hear: “We think these grand horror things at times like these, that these ice shelves are gonna come at us in the night and take our heads off. He was an old bastard, and he loved you.” It’s moments like these that Succession does best, these kinds of miniature monologues that remind us that these asshole billionaires are little more than kids who lost a father.
The rest of the room are none too pleased. Shiv, typically conniving, is the first to question whether Logan’s pencil scratchings aren’t actually a crossing-out of Kendall’s name, sparking the first major rift in the fast-dissolving Roy sibling alliance. It also marks the rise of one Evil Ken. After the Great Paper Debacle, Kendall finds himself demanding that his siblings reconvene with him to discuss future CEO plans. When they won’t listen, he roars: “Can you stop ignoring me please, for fuck’s sake!” We’ve seen this kind of fury before in Logan, but never in any of his children. Kendall looks like he’s the only one filling the power vacuum left after Logan’s death.
He’s also wielding his father’s power tactics over his siblings without a second thought. When Roman and Shiv admonish him for wanting to seize power without thinking of them, Kendall knows exactly what to say to keep them in line. Roman asserts that “it doesn’t feel good for it to be just you” as CEO, and Kendall, playing a snake charmer’s tune, claims hear him, agreeing that Roman should partner with him as Waystar COO. Roman is taken aback by Kendall’s apparent cooperation, but it’s a façade. You’ll notice that Roman’s awestruck response is the exact same as when his father used to offer him just the slightest hint of love to keep him in line. Think back to just two episodes ago, when Logan told Roman that he needs him for the GoJo sale—it’s the same face he puts on here, looking up to his older brother.
Shiv is similarly blindsided by Kendall’s manipulations. When she protests that she is being left out of the conversation, Kendall argues that she doesn’t have the experience, that her work at the company has been mostly meaningless, that having all three siblings would look “wonky” in front of the board. The key factor in all this—beyond the fact that he’s already swayed Roman to his side—is that he promises Shiv to give her the keys to the kingdom. He claims that the three of them will work together on everything, that this CEO position is only interim, that they’ll get her into a position of power soon enough. But really, it’s the same kind of promise that Logan made to Shiv at the beginning of Season 2—empty, meaningless words told to keep her under his thumb.
Shiv accepts the deal knowing it isn’t true. Ken and Rome lead their way to victory at the board meeting, and leave the room as new royalty. Greg commemorates them with a typically ingratiating chant of “Long live the King!” but Shiv is distraught. She’s angry. She catches Stewy and Mark Ravenhead giggling at some inane joke and commands them, childishly, to shut the fuck up. She walks onwards, catches herself on the stairs, and trips badly. When she gets up, she’s distressed beyond belief, commanding everyone to stop smiling amid a clearly unsettling scene.
Some of Shiv’s chaotic state may have something to do with the fact that she’s pregnant, and hasn’t yet told Tom. At the beginning of the episode, she receives a call from her doctor informing her of an embryo growing healthily inside her, and it colors her actions throughout the rest of the episode. There’s an added weight to each look that Shiv gives to her soon-to-be-ex-husband, who himself is shopping around for a new Roy protector with the desperation of a doomsday prepper before the zombie apocalypse. He’s not like that with Shiv, however. To him, she’s still his wife, and he instead offers her sweet reminiscences over the time that “they first knew each other” in Paris. (As Kathryn VanArondonk has noted, it’s the first time that Matthew Macfadyen has reconciled his Tom Wambsgans with his Mr. Darcy.) With her mother’s cruel words from last season fresh on her mind, she can’t bring herself to accept him. She’s too worried about what she might do to her offspring.
Still, the central source of her ire is Kendall, who is taking over the family like Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather. The threat he makes to Hugo at the end of the episode—forcing him to approve an anti-Logan PR strategy despite not having Roman or Karolina’s say so—is the kind of bold move that Logan himself might have done. With the paternal blessing of an underlined name, Kendall is now operating with his father’s violent calm. The image that closes out the episode—of Kendall smiling, calculating and certain—shows just how much he enjoys it.
Notes and Quotes
Sorry again that this recap got out late. Turns out work is hard, and takes up 40 hours of your week!
Some episodes of Succession overdo it on the music, pointlessly adding in Nicholas Britell’s score when silence would better fit the scene. This is one of those episodes.
In the aforementioned scene between Kendall and Frank, Kendall offers up a phrase that summarizes his every feeling: “He made me hate him, and then he died.” It does the same thing as Connor’s “My dad is dead, and I feel old” quote from last week’s episode, perfectly capturing an emotional state in a single, poignant sentence.
The call between the Roy sibs and Oskar, Lukas Matsson’s call guy, is hilarious. “You know what happened yesterday, right?” asks Shiv to this Swedish troll. His response: “Oh sure. Bad one.”
The award for Funniest Dialogue in this episode goes to Karl and Frank, who hypothesize about what would happen if the Piece of Paper were to accidentally fall down the toilet. Of course, that’s just Karl making a joke. “You’re speculating in a comic mode” remarks Frank. “Yes, in a humorous vein,” adds Karl.
Contrastingly, the award for Most Heartbreaking Scene goes to Kerry, who arrives to Logan’s apartment a total mess. She’s crushed by Logan’s death and the loss of their future plans, but Marcia will hardly let her into the house except to get her things. She takes an embarassing spill in her stammering state, tossing her remaining things to the floor. Roman, in a rare moment of kindness, comes over to help, asking if he can get her personal number and offering words of sympathy.
Speaking of Marcia, she’s running Logan’s wake like they were never estranged. She is dominant and cold-hearted, asserting that she and Logan were still very close, that they had “intimate conversations every night.” I’m not sure I believe her—but I respect the power play.
Marcia also offers a stab at Willa after her and Connor’s marriage: “Congratulations. Look how far you’ve come.” But Willa has been around the Roy family block long enough now to have a comeback prepared: “Well, look at us both, right?”
Good old Greg returns to being his hilariously sycophantic self. He offers the Roy sibs some truly awkward hugs, with some truly awkward words of sympathy: “My guys, my lovely guys.”
Connor on the political legacy of Logan Roy: “Can you believe this shit? He’s trying to make pop into a neoconservative. He wasn’t a neocon, he was a paleo-libertarian. He was practically an anarcho-capitalist.” Sounds like projection to me, Con.