Succession Kept Its Promise

[Warning: The following contains major spoilers for Season 4, Episode 3 of Succession, "Connor's Wedding." Read at your own risk!]

In the third episode of its final season, Succession did exactly what it always told us it was going to do. Logan Roy is dead. There was no blaze of glory, no last-ditch theatrics, just an old man collapsing on a plane while surrounded by people he didn't actually care very much about. It's almost humanizing how he goes: He's in the bathroom, and he falls, and then his heart stops. The mighty Roy family patriarch, played by Brian Cox, lies prone on the floor as a flight attendant fruitlessly performs chest compressions while his children say frantic goodbyes over the phone. He's gone. 

Over four seasons, Logan's ongoing health issues have been Succession's version of Chekhov's gun. The series began with him having a stroke on his birthday, and in Season 3 he nearly tanks a negotiation while suffering from a UTI. This was destined to happen; it was essentially the show's longest-standing promise. But it's the choice to position Logan's death not only toward the beginning of the season, but toward the beginning of the episode as well — about 15 minutes in — that makes it so fascinating. Succession doesn't try to hide its biggest set piece, making Logan's death less about the actual act of him dying and more about what he represents to his children. The deceptively titled "Connor's Wedding" is an expansion of one of Succession's recurring themes: how Logan looms over every major event in his kids' lives, even when he's not present.

This is an episode built on reactions — those of the Roy children, all four of whom are stuck on the massive boat on which Connor (Alan Ruck) and Willa (Justine Lupe) are getting married, and of Logan's associates who have just watched him die. Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) is tasked with calling the kids, trying Shiv (Sarah Snook) first, and then Roman (Kieran Culkin) when she declines him. Something very bad has happened, Tom tells Roman and Kendall (Jeremy Strong). Suddenly, they might be speaking to their father for the last time, but it's shrouded in so much chaos that no one is clear on what exactly is happening. It's a brilliantly long scene that becomes almost excruciating in its mounting sadness and abject horror as the kids ask, repeatedly, whether their father is alive or dead. ("Can you breathe without a heart?" Roman wonders, distraught.) Crucially, the audience has as much information as the characters do. Each time director Mark Mylod cuts back to the plane, his camera pointedly avoids close-ups of Logan's face, shooting him only out of focus or over the top of his head, allowing the confusion to permeate. 

The first episode of the season found Logan musing about the uncertainty of death with his bodyguard, insisting that he had his "f---ing suspicions" about what happens after. It was a singular instance of him acknowledging his mortality, and he could only manage to do so in front of someone who didn't actually need to hear it. One of Logan's greatest failures as a parent, ultimately, is the way he convinced his children that he was invincible. In his refusal to step down from work and his resistance to taking time to treat his ailments, he ensured they weren't adequately prepared to live in a world where he did not exist. He acted immortal, and they saw him as such. It makes sense that Logan, a man committed to punishing his children, does them one last disservice by shutting them out of his death. As they begin to process the unthinkable, what unfolds is a riveting examination of the immediacy of grief, filtered through people who never imagined a reality in which they would ever have to grieve. Kendall, Roman, Shiv, and Connor's guards begin to fall without their dad there to manipulate their emotions for them.

Connor falls into the role of consoling big brother ("He never even liked me" is his initial response, though he quickly snaps out of it when he sees that it upsets his siblings), while Kendall tries to take control, demanding to speak to the pilot and barking questions like, "Who is medically competent?" Roman, the only one of the kids to speak to their father that day, when Logan coerced him into firing Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), vehemently denies the possibility of Logan being dead. While Shiv instantly falls apart, Roman lashes out. Shiv and Kendall grab each other's hands helplessly; Connor does his best to hold onto them all. They don't become the ruthless adults Logan wanted them to be, as they typically do in moments when they're alone with each other. Instead, all four revert back to the children he abused and neglected. 

The episode's maritime setting also makes it the latest instance in Succession's long history of water imagery. Water has functioned as a meaningful motif for Kendall in particular, and it was also notably the site of the Waystar Cruises scandal, which resulted in the drownings of multiple nameless women who became ghosts in the Roy family's haunted house. As a symbol, water can mean anything from rebirth to death, but here it's always been a marker of endless, cyclical familial trauma. When Kendall looks despondently out at the river after speaking to Frank (Peter Friedman), it serves as a reminder of his own dark experiences with water and weddings. When Connor decides to let the boat set sail, much to the alarm of his siblings who are desperate to get back to land, it's confirmation that he distanced himself the moment he found out Logan was gone. Kendall, Roman, and Shiv cling desperately to Logan's corpse, while Connor is, for once, resigned to reality: "My father's dead and I feel old," he tells Willa. There are no pretenses for him anymore — he might as well get married.

You can see the shape of past episodes, like Season 1's "Sh*t Show at the F**k Factory" and Season 3's "Too Much Birthday," layered over "Connor's Wedding." These episodes, which saw the siblings acting at Logan's behest even when he was not around to see it, helped build their father up into a monster. The Roys behaving as though Logan could pop out at any moment is part of what gave him his power, because Succession is, among other things, a show about the lingering effects of child abuse. "What we do today will always be what we did the day our father died," Kendall says at one point, speaking broadly about the global impact of Logan's passing, but also about the trajectory of the rest of their lives. Even in death, Logan will hang over his children. After all, Succession reminds us, the cycle of abuse doesn't end just because the abuser is out of the picture. Logan was always going to die. It's just that it was never meant to surprise anyone but his kids.

Succession Season 4 airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.

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