Editor’s Note: The following contains major spoilers for the fourth episode of the fourth season of “Succession,” “Honeymoon States.”
CNN
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After the shock came the aftershocks, the power vacuum and, perhaps most importantly and impressively, the laughs, as “Succession” pivoted to confront life after Logan Roy in an episode that ultimately made good on the HBO series’ title.
Logan Roy’s sudden death left his adult children and subordinates in the lurch, each humbly offering to fill the void, while worrying about how the various candidates would play with the company’s board of directors.
At the same time, they mourned the larger-than-life figure they had lost, given how horribly he had treated so many of them. And the fourth hour also marked the return of Logan’s wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), in what felt like “Marcia Strikes Back,” while his much younger current girlfriend, Kerri (Zoe Winter), was unceremoniously shown the door. (The latter evoked memories of the musical “Evita,” when the title character kicks out Peron’s mistress, who is singing about another suitcase in another room.)
More than anything, the episode highlighted how brutally funny “Succession” can be, with Shiv (Sarah Snook) reading her father’s obituary and reflecting, “Dad sounds amazing. I wish I could have met Dad,” while brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) hilariously translated the language, with references to Logan being “a man of his time” equating to “racist.”
The episode also featured Waystar Royco executives, who were awkwardly wondering what to do with a document that included not only Logan’s posthumous wishes, but also handwritten notes that seemed to spell out who he wanted to succeed him. They joked, weakly, about flushing the paper down the toilet, while making it abundantly clear how much they really wanted to flush the paper down the toilet.
All knives are out, with Carl (David Rasche) brutally insulting Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), barely hiding behind the fact that he presents doubts about Tom’s future as hypothetical.
But there were also human moments, with a tortured Kendall expressing his conflicted feelings to Frank (Peter Friedman), a Waystar executive, saying, “He made me hate him, and he died. I feel like he didn’t love me. I disappointed him.”
“Succession” also highlighted the fragility of not only life, but also a company’s legacy, with PR people discussing how to portray and diminish Logan’s involvement in his later years as a way to boost the company and its stock price—a maneuver that Kendall ultimately and surreptitiously approved of, concluding that it was the kind of smart, ruthless move his father would have executed.
Succession issues also seem to threaten the harmony Kendall, Shiv, and Roman achieved before Logan left, with Shiv left out in a plan to occupy the CEO seat just long enough to close the sale to GoJo. Trust doesn’t come easily in series creator Jesse Armstrong’s world, and when Shiv said, “I need to get my mouth wet,” her brothers’ assurances made it clear that that mouth could easily get warped.
Ultimately, after the ups and downs of the previous episode, the show managed to turn the page on grief and move on to the next agenda. And that too, as Kendall said about Logan and the PR leaks about the “bad dad,” is “what he would do.”
