"Succession" Recap: The Things That He Made
"Succession" turns down the volume in "Church and State," the series' penultimate episode.
“Church and State” is a reflective episode of Succession—perhaps the most reflective the series has ever been, and necessarily so. Up to this point, the Roy children have yet to truly grasp the weight of their father’s death, and with just one episode left to go, Jesse Armstrong and Co. have devised a funeral scenario that forces them to reckon with grief in its dramatic entirety. We see Shiv accepting her father’s abject cruelty, his inability to love; she forgives him anyway. So does Kendall, but with more than a little hint of Michael Corleone’s loss of humanity in The Godfather Part II. Roman, in an all-time performance episode for Kieran Culkin, finally learns why “pre-grieving” isn’t a thing. Each sibling achieves their truest form in this post-Logan world, setting them up whatever final reckoning will arrive next week.
All this reflectiveness means that “Church and State” is also a much quieter episode than most in the series, the result of both a hangover from last week’s fascist election and from th decidedly un-Succession environment of Logan Roy’s funeral. The two settings put together is a nasty brew. In an early scene, the Roy siblings ride to the funeral while anti-Menckenists swarm around their car in protest, banging on windows and shouting profanities. It’s a theatrical reminder of the destruction that the Roys have wrought upon American democracy, and of their inability to understand their evils with any real insight. This latter point is particularly true for Roman, who begins the episode practicing his remembrance speech (one that reads more like a Wikipedia description than a son’s memorial) with uncaring glee. “Honestly, I’m excited,” he tells his brother. “Does that make me a sick fuck?”
Roman’s enthusiasm isn’t simply the result of favorite-son pontifications; it also stems from the nihilistic joy of watching anti-Mencken demonstrations sweep the country. He’s downright jubilant at the chaos (“discord makes my dick hard”), which is quite the opposite reaction from Kendall, who is more than a little concerned for his family’s safety. This isn’t enough to stop him from yelling at Rava when she decides to take their children upstate to safety, accusing her of paranoia and threatening legal action. He takes a similar stance with Jess, who has decided to resign from her position as Kendall’s assistant. She sidesteps direct explanation, but the reason is clear enough: It’s hard to justify working for a man who helped elect a fascist.
It’s a dour pretense for a father’s funeral, which takes place in an opulent cathedral of which Logan would surely approve. When the ceremony begins, Ewan—who we haven’t seen this entire season—is the first to take the stage. There’s a bit of a kerfuffle from the Roy children, who don’t want him him to tarnish their father’s memory, though he is unmoved, and in fact admonishes them for their brutality: “What sort of people would stop a brother speaking for the sake of a share price?”
His speech is at once sympathetic and castigating, beginning with stories about his and Logan’s traumatic childhood in Scotland before veering into more excoriating terrain:
I can’t help but say he has wrought some of the most terrible things. […] Perhaps he had to, because he had a meagerness about him. And maybe I do about me too. I don’t know. I try. I don’t know when, but sometime he decided not to try anymore—and it was a terrible shame.
The simple honesty of his speech is chilling, and sends the crowd into whispers and murmurs. Yet the brunt of the speech’s impact land upon Roman. He finds himself debilitated at this utterly human depiction of his father, a man that he has always seen as a god. When he gets up onstage, he stammers, and then collapses into choking sobs. Never have we seen Roman in such a vulnerable state; never has the show illustrated the brokenness of the Roy children more than him whimpering a request to take Logan out of his casket. Roman finally sees the body, and it’s too much to take.
It is in these most crucial of moments that the siblings are at their most human, and indeed Kendall, Shiv, and Connor immediately come to Roman’s aid. Kendall ends up serving as Roman’s replacement, inevitably so: He began the series as Logan’s scion, and he must end it that way. He comes up with a speech on the fly, delivering it with confidence and poise, and, like Ewan, doesn’t shy away from the honest truth. He admits that his father was a “brute,” acknowledging that he had a “fierce ambition that could push you to the side.” But Kendall justifies that vileness:
People might want to tend and prune the memory of him to denigrate that force. That magnificent, awful force of him, but my God, I hope it’s in me. Because if we can’t match his vim, then God knows the future will be sluggish and gray.
Shiv’s subsequent speech strikes a similar tone, with notes about the how hard it was to be the daughter of a an unrepentently sexist man who “couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head.” And she, like Kendall, forgives him anyway, revealing the ultimate truth lying beneath the show’s dark heart: No matter how much they’ve been abused, the Roy children will always desire their father’s evil.
When the ceremony ends, the Roys return immediately to backstabbing and power brokerage. Shiv, still in bed with Matsson, has already proposed the idea of a American CEO for GoJo: a strategy that would appease Mencken enough to get him to approve the Waystar buyout. The caveat being, of course, that if they create the position, Shiv would take it. Matsson isn’t unsympathetic to the idea, though he is quick to bring up the fact of Shiv’s pregnancy—news that has spread like wildfire. Her swift response marks her indelibly as a Roy: “She’s one of those hard bitches, right? She’s gonna do, what, 36 hours of maternity leave, e-mailing through her vanity cesarean. The poor kid will never see her!” It’s a cruel line of thought that calls back to the “some people were never meant to be mothers” speech that her own mother made at the end of last season. Perhaps those hurtful words were true all along.
Kendall, for his part, makes his move by approaching both Hugo and Colin—one of the few people who knows about Kendall’s manslaughter. “This is an explicit plan to fuck the deal, me rule the world,” he tells Hugo. “You can come, but it won’t be a collaboration. You’ll be my dog, but the scraps from the table will be millions.” Hugo and Colin both respond with proclamations of servitude, though not Mencken, who proves a far more elusive, and much more popular, target. In a hilarious scene, everyone from Kendall to Roman to Connor to Greg crowds around the president-elect in an attempt to bend his ear without a whiff of success. Only Shiv, who pulls him away for a terse conversation with Matsson, is successful, pitching the American CEO idea with Loganesque poise.
Kendall tries to swing Roman to his side (“The Roy Boys versus Shiv the Shiv”), but Roman is not at all on the same plane as his brother. By episode’s end, Kendall has embraced the position of paternal tormentor over his younger brother, coldly lambasting him for having ruined the deal with Mencken. It sends Roman spiraling out into the street, one filled with election rioters to whom he hurls insults in an attempt at masochistic self-destruction. It works: he gets bludgeoned and beaten by rioters protesting the very fascism he just brought to power. The scene is powerful, and oddly reminiscent of a similar scene from Todd Phillips’ Joker in which another angry nihilist embraces the chaos of a riotous crowd. Yet where Phillips’ film failed to thematize this nihilism (and it failed completely), Succession finds in it a deep resonance, focusing on Roman’s innate brokenness as the basis for a genuinely tragic arc.
There are a number of tantalizing questions left to ponder before the series ends, yet for me, the most significant lies with Tom and Shiv. The two get quite the moment of reconciliation near the end of the episode, with Tom—who didn’t even attend the funeral after an exhausting post-election work schedule—giving a tear-stained confession about having already said goodbye to Logan during that ill-fated plane ride above the Atlantic. Tom loved Logan in his own twisted way, and when he breaks down crying, Shiv offers him a place to stay. For all their betrayals, the two of them still have each other. Whether that lasts into next week will reveal something essential about the soul of the show.
Notes and Quotes
There are several revelations in Ewan’s speech, particularly about his sister Rose, who has remained an enigma for several seasons. We learn that she died of polio at a young age, and that Logan, who himself got the disease while away at school, blamed himself for his sister’s death.
Roy mother Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walters) returns to the series in this episode, and she gets some great moments. In a brilliantly understated scene, she instinctually clocks Shiv’s pregnancy. The way that Walters subtly asks after her daughter’s health is a genius moment of performance; she immediately reveals how much she knows about her daughter’s inner workings after the slightest physical contact.
Caroline also manages to gather together each and every one of Logan’s wives and mistresses into a single pew, a badass move if there ever was one. It’s also the catalyst for a touching moment of kindness between Marcia and Kerry, who were at each other’s throats the last time we saw them.
Speaking of female rivalries: Shiv and Marcia, who have been in state of step-mother/step-daughter rivalry for the entirety of the show’s run, finally get a moment of reconciliation. “He broke my heart, and he broke your hearts too,” she offers up to Shiv in a moment of surprising authenticity.
Roman’s sex-mommy complex seems to have leapt to entirely new levels in the wake of Mencken’s election—a power-grubbing event which itself probably got him hard. Here’s him telling Kendall on Marcia’s hot funeral fit: “She’s a sexy funeral lady. If you think that’s weird, wait till I have sex with her on Dad’s coffin.”
Relatedly, when Shiv finally confesses her pregnancy to her siblings, Roman drops some beautiful, theatrical, and entirely horrible responses: “Is it mine?” “You’re having a Wambs-gland—I thought you were just eating your feelings.” “If I see you breastfeeding, I am gonna have to jerk off—I mean that because it’ll be hot.”
Logan’s final resting place is a mausoleum that he bought from a “dot-com pet supply guy” at a $5 million bargain. “Cat food Ozymandias,” Shiv calls it—a perfect summation of the billionaire nickel-and-diming tactics that Logan took with him to the grave.
The way that Matsson offhandedly refers to Mencken as “the handsome Nazi over there” immediately reminded me of Steve Buscemi calling a Soviet art director “Slim Hitler” in The Death of Stalin, itself written by Jesse Armstrong’s longtime writing collaborator Armando Ianucci.
Connor keeps up the political comedy in this episode with an amazing Slovenia-ambassadorship pitch to Mencken: “What if I said to you, Pan-Habsburg American-led EU alternative?”
Roman hyping himself up for his ill-fated funeral speech: “I am King Dong. I am the King of Dong. Bow down to me. I selected the president—do you see his pecker in my pocket?”
Matsson, Tall Blond White Guy, wondering about the consequences of Mencken’s election: “If he does [win], would that be bad for a Tall Blond White Guy?”
Matsson’s political philosophy is still the ultra-sophisticated “Privacy, pussy, pasta.” Or as Shiv paraphrases, “Anarcho-capitalist parmigiana.”
Greg bikes to the funeral! I can’t explain why this is funny beyond once again emphasizing that somehow, every single thing Nicholas Braun does in this show is funny. Every single thing! How is it possible!
Greg’s beautifully inept response to his Grandpa Ewan’s incisive speech: “That was a good, hard take you gave.”
I love that Greg’s response to Matsson calling him “sexy” is “Oh, that’s very kind.”
I think this is the first time we’ve seen Greg’s mother since the series premiere back in 2018.