"Succession" Recap: The Scorpion and the Frog
In "Tailgate Party," Kendall engages Matsson in billionaire warfare while Tom and Shiv's marriage hits a breaking point.
We don’t watch Succession for the business deals. We don’t watch it for the election rigging, for the operatic profanity, for the general brutality of the ultra-rich. These are the reasons we give our skeptical friends when convincing them that an eat-the-rich narrative like this one might actually be entertaining. The real reason is different, though, and it’s one we often struggle to admit: We like these people. We watch their petty arguments and internecine backstabbings not because we hate them, but because we understand them. We recognize the snake (or more perhaps relevantly, the scorpion) inside these sympathetically despicable characters we’re watching onscreen. We hope for their improvement, though we know they are hopelessly broken.
I’ve never cried at an episode of Succession until “Tailgate Party,” the episode that will henceforth be known as The One Where Shiv and Tom Had Their Fight. We’ve seen the two poke holes in their marriage before—Tom’s beachside confrontation at the end of season 2 and his betrayal at the end of season 3 being the most obvious examples. Yet there was always a sheen of dishonesty in these instances, an unwillingness to face the deepest recesses of pain that has beguiled their relationship from the beginning. But here, it all comes crashing down. He calls her selfish. She calls him servile. He tells her that no amount of approval will fill her up, she’s so broken. She tells him she doesn’t even like him—he doesn’t deserve her, and he never did. The violent honesty of this moment is crushing, and it reminds us more than ever of why we watch this show: for these damaged, horrific characters that we entirely understand.
Their fight is set up at the beginning of the episode. Tom and Shiv are living reunited in their old apartment, and all seems well. Tom calls himself “Father Sexmas” and serves his wife breakfast in bed; they joke and strategize over the evening’s upcoming “tailgate party,” an old Logan Roy election party that Matsson describes as a “bullshit, pre-election, brain-dead, AOL-era, legacy media, putrid, stuffed-mushroom fuckfest.” (Matsson is not one to mince words.) Shiv and Tom have decided to host for the first party without Logan present, and despite the positive appearances, there is already trouble in paradise. Along with breakfast, Tom gets Shiv a present. She unwraps it to find none other than a scorpion encased in glass. Why a scorpion? It’s supposed to be funny, he explains. “Like, I love you, but you kill me, and I kill you!” Shiv laughs, but she doesn’t get it.
This scorpion joke is put on hold in favor of the party itself, a lavish right-wing orgy of America’s most rich and powerful. The presidential competition this year is between the liberal Democrat Daniel Jimenez and the fascistic Republican Jeryd Mencken, and Kendall (along with Roman, his stooge) is looking to find a political method of tanking the GoJo deal, one having to do with antitrust regulations. When Shiv hears of her brothers’ new strategy, she immediately lets Matsson in on the news. Her alliance with him has become fully established by this point, and she knows full well that he needs to be there to prevent Kendall’s plan. It all leads to a moment of theatrical beauty, with Matsson and his band of merry Swedes barging in on Kendall holding a moment of silence in honor of his father’s death. The irony of this set piece (tech billionaire crashes in on the loss of a legacy media magnate) is magnificent to behold.
It also sets up their conflict to gain favor over the rest of the room, which dominates the rest of the episode and mostly boils down to who can win over Nate—the same Nate that Shiv hooked up with during her engagement, the same guy that Tom kicked out of his wedding after making him first pour his wine back into the bottle. Kendall deliberately invited him because of his liberal political connections, which could prove essential to the future of Waystar and ATN, but his strategy backfires. Matsson pitches himself well before Nate, telling him that he’d be willing to shake up ATN’s right-wing political model by firing its buffoonish leadership, i.e. Tom—a fact that Shiv does nothing to deny. This approach works, and Matsson finds himself having fun with the whole process. “I thought these people would be very complicated,” he confesses to Shiv. “But they’re not—it’s basically just money and gossip.”
Kendall, by contrast, wants to believe that this shallow world is more sophisticated than it is. His god complex is running at an all-time high, exemplified in a run-in he has with his ex-wife Rava (the return of Natalie Gold!) early in the episode’s run where he hears that his daughter has been bullied by an ATN-watching racist. Instead of realizing the toxicity of his father’s brand, he doubles down on his own ego: “You have no idea the things I’m doing,” he rages at Rava. “Six continents! I’m breaking my back, and it’s all for them!” It’s all a pale imitation of his father’s own words, as indeed are his tactics for negotiating with Nate. He tries to project a business-bro persona that comes off entirely facile, and Nate knows it. “I don’t know what you think this is,” insinuates Nate. “I’m not Gil. You’re not Logan. That’s a good thing.” There’s a surprising maturity in his delivery, but of course Kendall won’t hear it. He’s on a mission driven by his father’s dead spirit, and nothing will get in his way.
The episode culminates in an argument in which Kendall and Matsson, petulant billionaires, throw childish insults at each other in front of America’s most rich and powerful. Matsson roasts the “meaty predictions” that Kendall made at the Living+ launch, hinting at his interest in tanking the deal. Kendall, who has just received notice that GoJo’s India subscriber numbers are wildly inflated (“Like, if there were two Indias, it would make sense”), makes a similar dig at GoJo’s unreasonable growth. It’s an embarrassing show, but it reveals the extent of Matsson’s immaturity and inability to restrain himself. (Earlier in the episode, he told Shiv that he wouldn’t “scream people are data and stick my dick in the guac,” and he can’t keep to his word.) All this incel-ranting causes Kendall’s narcissism to grow to unfathomable new heights. He pitches to Frank the idea of using this scandalous GoJo information to go “reverse-Viking”: they’ll tank the sale, then get Waystar to acquire GoJo. “One head, one crown,” says Kendall as he betrays his siblings for what could be the last time.
All of this billionaire warfare is invigorating, but it isn’t what makes “Tailgate Party” great. Hiding through all this was Tom and Shiv’s relationship, which explodes out from the background with horrific cruelty. Tom has reached his breaking point: He can’t handle his wife’s willingness to joke about how he’s going to get fired from his job in the GoJo sale. Shiv defends herself with her fears over her backing of Matsson, who is looking more and more like a fraud. But Tom doesn’t care. He’s sick of being the punching bag. He lets loose, compounding hurtful words upon each other until he finally tells her the worst possible thing: He tells her that she is not good person to have children. Even without him knowing about her preganancy, these are perhaps the most cutting words that have ever been spoken on the most malicious show in the history of television.
The brilliance of this fight isn’t just in the torturous dialogue (by episode writer Will Tracy), but in the way it creeps up on us. Directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman foreground the action on Kendall and Matsson to keep us distracted from the simmering marital strife bubbling just beneath the surface, yet no so much as to keep us entirely unaware. We see Tom’s anger growing from across the room as he pushes wine to his party patrons (“It’s light and fruity, and it’s the kind of wine that separates the connoisseurs from the weekend Malbec morons”), we hear it in his voice as he continually reminds her of how tired he is—a subtle way of letting her know he’s fed up with her shit.
It’s hard to imagine them coming back from this, but with three episodes left in this relentless season of Succession, it’s hard to say. This relationship has seen more ups and downs in two years that most do over sixty—and this is exactly the thing that keeps us watching. The wars between billionaires are all well and good, but this is not where the heart and soul of Succession lies. We watch this show because, despite ourselves, we care about these hopelessly broken children of abuse. They are terrible, terrible people who have caused inexorable damage to their friends, their family, the world, and themselves. Yet in moments like these—moments of shocking, violent, and profound honesty—we see ourselves.
Notes and Quotes
Look at that, a Succession recap posted five days after the episode aired! My film festival job has been heating up, and so I’ve been left to publish these recaps far after their expiration date. Oh well. Better late than never?
Through all of this, Roman is left in the shit, peddling Nazis and trying to convince Connor to drop out of his presidential race. His conversation with Gerri is just as bad. She’s furious that Roman would deign to fire her, and is now threatening him with the power of genitalia. If she doesn’t receive an insane severance sum, she’ll reveal years’ worth of his dick-pic sexual harassment to the courts. Roman’s incompetence has been on full display this season; the repercussions of his failures begin in earnest in this episode.
Also, Roman is going to speaking at their father’s funeral. Hmmmmmm…
Speaking of which: Roman’s negotiations for Connor to drop out of his presidential race is maybe the funniest gag this entire season. A number of banger one-liners get dropped in this episode, mostly from Connor. Connor asking for a position in Europe in exchange for his abandoned candidacy: “Can I creep up through the underbelly? Come up through the Balkans? A couple of senior departures, Berlin by Christmas?” Connor denying Slovakia and Slovenia: “I think I’m a no on the Slos.” Connor thinking of placement in North Korea: “I could open it up like Nixon did China!”
Connor is also once again proving to be the sole member of the family to have an inkling of trust in himself and his loved ones. When Willa rightly tells him how much it would upend their lives to move to Oman, he actually listens. He tells Roman as much when he turns down his offer: “There’s one person here who doesn’t think I’m a joke, so that’s who I’m going to listen to.” It’s about as heartwarming a moment as you’ll get in the Roy family.
There’s an impressive amount of depth to Matsson and his cronies, who over the course of just a few episodes have become every bit the Bizzaro Roys as the Pierces were a few seasons back. Per Matsson, Oskar is a “number-two who’s moon-beamed on edibles,” whereas Ebba is a “communication officer who’s terrified of communicating.” They’re every bit as beautifully, hilariously, disgustingly weird as the Waystar shitshow.
The all-American meal that they were serving at the tailgate party looks elitist and delicious and equal measure. Did you see the high-end salt they were dropping on those fries? To quote Tom from an earlier episode: “I’m slavering, pig-man.”
A quick shoutout to Greg, who is not only participating in mass layoffs without a care in the world, but is successfully ingratiating himself before the Swedish Alliance. Well done, Greg!