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This article comprises spoilers by way of the third episode of Succession Season 4.
He is … not risen?
I feel? For three-plus seasons, Logan Roy has ducked and weaved his well past close to fatalities—a hemorrhagic stroke, a number of company coup makes an attempt, a congressional investigation, a difficult UTI, a collapse within the Hamptons—like a hirsute, cashmere-clad Road Runner. Hostile board assembly? Meep meep. Attempted patricidal veto underneath the Tuscan solar? Fuck off. You may very well be forgiven, in any case this, for considering him immortal. Which is why it was so unsettling to appreciate, because the Roy youngsters did, by way of a cellphone name from Tom, that Logan’s revels would possibly now lastly have ended. That Logan really was, regardless of all proof on the contrary, human.
There was one thing excellent, too, about the way in which Logan’s finish was introduced, after a lot time spent anticipating it: It occurred off digital camera. As his three youngest youngsters arrived in New York for Connor’s marriage ceremony, Logan boarded a airplane for impromptu disaster negotiations with the tech mogul Lukas Matsson. Early within the episode, Logan had instructed his youngest son, Roman, to metaphorically knife Gerri, the interim CEO of the Roys’ firm and Roman’s surrogate mother-lover, whom Logan had determined to arbitrarily hearth. (“You two are … close,” as Logan brutally put it.) Just a couple of minutes later, he had collapsed on the ground of the airplane, his face not seen. Succession is all the time meticulous about blocking: In just about any scene Logan is in, he’s the focus, the black gap drawing all the pieces else into his gravitational vortex. He doesn’t usually share house with different characters the way in which that, say, the Roy siblings do. Other folks may be shot barely askew, however Logan is often proper within the heart of the body. In his closing moments, although, he was so diminished in standing that we may see solely fragments of the person: his chest as a flight attendant carried out CPR, the aspect of his head as a cellphone was positioned subsequent to it for his youngsters to say goodbye.
[Read: The real Succession endgame]
Whether or not the timing of this episode, airing on Easter Sunday, was intentional, the present’s seeming reluctance to concede that Logan was actually lifeless was grimly humorous—and greater than a contact harking back to The Death of Stalin. The episode, matter-of-factly titled “Connor’s Wedding,” was certainly set at a marriage, often a harbinger of doom on a collection the place love by no means goes unpunished and marriage is simply yet another contract that may damage an individual. But it additionally appeared solely pure to anticipate Logan to gasp, clutch his chest, viciously shove away the lady working to save lots of his life, and ream out his CFO, Karl, for consuming his whiskey. Instead, he simply lay there, whereas his children sparred amongst themselves over what was cheap to infer about their father’s situation. Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Sarah Snook had been all extraordinary in these scenes of chaotic shock. Kendall veered forwards and backwards between grownup mode (“I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay, and I love you,” on the cellphone to his father) and heartbroken baby (“Get the best heart doctor in the world, and the best airplane medical expert in the world … and I would like that in the next two minutes,” to his long-suffering assistant, Jess). Roman made himself uncharacteristically quiet and small. But Snook, specifically, was devastating: the pitch of Shiv’s voice capturing up an octave as she realized what was occurring, the way in which her composure appeared to bodily disassemble on-screen.
And Connor! The eldest of Logan’s youngsters—first pancake, political laughingstock, collector of grotesque Napoleonic memorabilia, defender of Ebenezer Scrooge as an unappreciated “wealth creator”—hasn’t all the time been afforded the breadth of humanity that his youthful siblings are intermittently allowed. But final week’s episode, “Rehearsal,” gave us the present of seeing Connor’s bare, prickly, unwatered soul. Compared with the opposite Roy scions, “needy love sponges” all, Connor declared himself to be invulnerable, “a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me.” At his marriage ceremony, which his father didn’t even plan to attend in individual, we study extra about how Connor received to be this manner: The marriage ceremony cake, a Victoria sponge, inadvertently triggered the groom as a result of it was the one factor he ate after his mom was institutionalized at his father’s behest.
[Read: The unexpected tenderness of Succession]
Knowing all this, there was one thing oddly touching about Connor’s fiancée, Willa, admitting to him that sure, the cash and security he represents to her are a considerable a part of why she’s with him, however she’s additionally principally comfortable by his aspect. Their relationship is the one intimate partnership on Succession that’s really strengthened over the course of the present, probably as a result of everybody’s expectations had been so very low to start with. (And, let’s face it, Willa has no future in theater.)
And so Connor and Willa had been married with virtually nobody in attendance. Meanwhile, Logan’s physique was carried off a airplane, with Kendall watching from afar. In some methods, we’re proper again the place we began within the present’s first-ever episode. Logan is completed, and the folks he tormented for a lot of his life are vying to succeed him. There are a number of new dynamics within the combine: What will grow to be of his assistant/buddy/adviser, Kerry, grinning “like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium,” as somebody places it? And what of Tom, seemingly weeping not over Logan’s loss of life however as a result of he could have sacrificed his marriage to Shiv for a shedding guess on a deceased man’s loyalty? Essentially, although, we’re about to see what Succession does in a brand new mode, with out Logan’s contaminating bodily presence. The prospect of what may come subsequent feels large, and crammed with foreboding. Can his youngsters reconstruct their lives to have which means and ambitions of their very own regardless of a long time of conditioning and trauma? Can they transfer previous Logan’s closing pronouncement of all of them, in final week’s episode, as “not serious people”? Will anybody be allowed a cheerful ending? To paraphrase the late Logan Roy: We don’t know. We can’t know. But I’ve received my fucking suspicions.