season 4, episode 3, “Connor’s Wedding”

Succession has never been about Logan Roy, save in terms of negative space. For all the brilliance and the beauty and the fury of Brian Cox’s performances over the last five years, the truest portrait of the Roy family patriarch has always been one of absence: the people who refuse to share a room, a city, a nation with him; the chunks he’s torn out of those too foolish, or loving, or both, to successfully escape. His absence from his son Connor’s wedding tonight is just one more abandonment, in a life filled with them. And then, suddenly, we slam mid-episode into the truest absence of all. Logan Roy died tonight in an airplane bathroom, where no one—not even the camera—could watch the old bear as he finally abandoned us all for good.

In a brilliant, cruel episode of Succession, no decision is more brilliant or cruel than that. We get no moment, tonight, where we watch Cox suddenly look pained, the realization of death, and the end of a profoundly unvirtuous life, creeping onto Logan’s face. No last words or reflections. No final confrontation. Instead, death comes out-of-focus, with a “Hello, fucky sucky brigade,” and the voice of poor, beautiful, awful Tom Wambsgans, the man somehow trapped between the Roy kids and the moments of their father’s death.

Tom makes for a surprisingly good psychopomp; half business crony, half son, bridging the worlds as he holds his phone to Logan’s unseen ear so that his kids can say whatever they need to say to a body they’re all pretending might possibly be able to hear. Later, Tom will process his grief in the usual way, kicking shit downward to Greg, and trying desperately to maneuver. But even here, Matthew Macfadyen twists it manic: Tom’s eyes registering how hard he’s trying to force the casual cruelty that typically defines his and the Egg’s relationship. He can’t manage it. The foundation of the world’s come loose.

It’ll be interesting, at some point, to go back and compare tonight’s episode, “Connor’s Wedding,” to season one’s “Shit Show At The Fuck Factory,”—i.e., the first installment of this show in which the Roy kids and company lose their collective minds because it looks for sure like Logan is about to die. There are parallels, certainly, as the kids desperately try to fend off their dad’s death by throwing money and influence at it—Kendall’s demand for “the best airplane medicine expert in the world” tonight is one of the most darkly funny moments in an episode that, understandably, veers largely away from the jokes.

But that comparison, I suspect, will also serve as a demonstration of how much better this show is now than it was back then, when the performers were still finding these characters, and the series itself had yet to grow fully comfortable with its more dramatic elements. Certainly, nothing back in that second episode can compare to the gut-wrenching, tear-inducing sequence in which Roman, then Kendall, and then Shiv all address their father for the final time tonight. Or the way Mark Mylod’s direction, and Jesse Armstrong’s script, allow the middle of this entire episode to devolve into that mix of confusion, interspersed with moments of awful, crystal clarity, that anyone who’s been trapped in a situation like this will instantly be able to recall.

The crackling, distant sound of the voices of Tom and Frank and fucking Karl, of all people, coming through the phone with the terrible news; Roman sinking to the ground and making himself small; Shiv Roy saying “Daddy”: It’s all perfectly observed, with the familiar cadence of a tragedy that moves forward with the heartless cruelty of time. Each moment of chest compressions and defibrillators and unmoving silence drag the situation further and further away from “Maybe he’ll be okay” and deeper into the new reality of his death.

It’s Kendall who says it best, and most simply, veering wildly between little boy lost and that version of himself that sometimes shows up in a crisis. “I can’t forgive you,” he tells his father’s corpse. “But it’s okay. And I love you.” Later, he’ll be the smartest of them, the most put-together, because he’s got to be. “We are highly liable to misinterpretation,” he tells his brother (denial) and sister (stalling) as the realities of their situation come into focus, and the need to still be, well, characters in Succession, becomes apparent. “So what we do today will always be what we did the day our father died.”

One way to view the Roy family tragedy is that they’re trapped in a family drama that’s had a business drama unnaturally grafted onto it; it’s something Logan himself highlighted in his (now final) confrontation with his kids last week. And so grieving gives way, for everybody, to controlling the narrative. No one’s getting cut out yet—except poor, totally in-shock Kerry—but everyone’s trying to secure their “freedom of movement.” And, again: “Shit Show At The Fuck Factory” had this stuff, too, arguments about people getting shares and contracts being signed, etc. But it was far more stiff, far more sterile, than what we get here, because all involved had yet to grasp that the series could make this stuff more awful by dialing into these characters as genuine people, not less. Succession has since become a show where grief and business manipulation can operate in the same breath with each other, where even more minor characters like Karolina and Frank can be both human beings and conniving corporate drones in simultaneous moments.

And also, Connor is there. Connor, whose first words upon hearing that his dad is dead are a reflexive “He never even liked me.” Connor, whose Logan-shaped holes got filled up with “loony cake” 50 years ago, and which have never actually healed. Connor at least, secures something tonight: a moment of honesty (and matrimony) with Willa, our desert plant carving out some tiny approximation of joy for himself amidst the horror. Highlighting one great performance tonight is a fool’s errand, but Justine Lupe deserves credit for the way she handles the moment when Connor finally breaks down and asks Willa if she’s only marrying him for money. For half a second, a lie flits across her face, but then the truth emerges, instead: “There is something about money and safety here, yeah… Yeah. There is.” Is the eye-flick upward when she follows that up with “I’m happy” a tell? Who can say. But this is as close to a romantic happy ending as Succession is likely to get, and amidst all the high emotion of “Connor’s Wedding,” Connor’s actual wedding manages to feel more sweet than not. Connor’s always been on the edge of escaping his dad’s orbit; tonight, he may finally have managed it.

Those other three kids, though? Doomed. Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, and Kieran Culkin all filled out their Emmy reels tonight, each giving portrayals of worlds now profoundly unmoored. (Literally, after they get trapped on Connor’s wedding boat when it goes sailing away shortly after Logan dies, the one heavy-handed moment in an episode otherwise marked with considerable restraint.) There are whole essays to be written on the ways these characters hug each other: Culkin almost diving forward to wrap himself around Alan Ruck’s arm; Snook keeping her arms to her chest as she accepts Tom’s offered embrace; the three of them together for a brief, beautiful moment of sibling solidarity at the end. Of the three, Culkin hits hardest, maybe because we spend the first portion of the episode locked in his perspective, already reverting to twitchy misery after Logan assigns him to fire Gerri as his latest vile loyalty test (which turns out to be the last vile loyalty test, but for the worst reasons imaginable).

But then I remember Strong’s face at the end, Kendall broken in the moonlight. Or the wavers in Snook’s voice as she reads the kids’ prepared statement to the press, or her utter bewilderment as she begs someone to keep her dad’s body from landing and turning real for just a few minutes more. There’s room for all of it, in the pantheon of greatness; that’s what happens when a show like this goes so suddenly, dramatically big. “Connor’s Wedding” is, in many ways, the payoff to four entire seasons of Succession. It is the moment that will always define the ending of this show, for all that we still have seven episodes to go.

There was no guarantee that it would land that impact—that it could adequately contain and express the grief and love and hate of these three kids contemplating a world that no longer contains the charming monster at the center of their lives. But this cast, and this crew, have grown over the last four seasons to meet that challenge. The resulting episode is one of the show’s finest, in a walk.

Stray observations

• Logan Roy’s last words, at least as far as the camera’s concerned: “Clean out the stalls. Strategic refocus. A bit more fuckin’ aggressive.” As an epitaph, it works.
• The little we get of Cox tonight is classic Logan: the steady turning of the screws on Roman, from jovial friendship to cruel test. “So will you give her the heads-up?” lobbed so cunningly, before hitting him with the rage.
• That’s Cynthia Mace as Willa’s mom, bonding with Connor while also inadvertently highlighting the massive age gap in the happy couple.
• The kids are still into the GoJo deal, suggesting that everything that happened last week really was just about getting some blood out of their dad.
• Gerri clocks Roman so fast when he tries to fire her. J. Smith-Cameron plays cold perfectly, especially later on, when she very calmly ices out Roman’s need for what I can only label as “Oedipal comfort.” “I’m good. This is fine. This is nothing at all.”
• God, that “loony cake” story. This show never does flashbacks, but it deploys the past so well.
• “If he can hear, he’ll be able to hear you.”
• Roman: “I hope you’re okay. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Because you’re a monster, and you’re going to win. Because you just win. And you’re a good man. A good dad. A very, very good dad. You did a good job…” And then Culkin’s face just twists and he practically hurls the phone away.
• In the big list of little things that made me cry in this episode: Kendall calling his sister “Shivvy, honey…”
• Oh, and that little “Tom…?”
• Jess Watch: Not on screen, but she’s tasked with getting “the best airplane medicine expert in the world.”
• Roman, briefly worried that the one time he criticized his dad (via voicemail) killed him, (accurately) worried he forgot to tell his dad he loved him.
• Who better to usher the episode into the corporate fuckery stuff than Hugo? Always nice to see Fisher Stevens back.
• David Rasche gets some great lines tonight. “We should call [Mattson] and tell him he’s delayed.” “Oh, he’s heavily fucking delayed.”
• Greg: Once again the leakiest ship in all of Succession Land.
• Low-key a great Frank episode, too; Peter Friedman slips under the radar sometimes but he brings such humanity to these scenes: “I’m trying to do my job, he’s like 12 feet away and I knew him for 40 years.”
• Kendall, brain working fast: “We’re not estranged…We had a family function with him last night.”
• Kerry’s total “Chuckles The Clown” collapse is fascinating, of course, but seeing hardass Colin standing around like a lost puppy might be just as sad.
• Shiv, when Kendall told her the news: “I was thinking Dad… but I was sort of hoping it was Mom.”
• “We’ll get a funeral off the rack… We can do Reagan’s with tweaks.”
• One recurring element tonight: People saying “I’m sad” because they can’t come to terms with the huge, horrifying array of feeling and consequences that Logan’s death actually provokes.
• Oh, one more for the cry list: Kendall and Roman going from “We’re going to be okay” to bouncing “You’re not gonna be okay”’s off of each other. This is, unsurprisingly, a damn good episode for Roy sibling feelings. (Although the nitpicker in me notes that there’s a weird edit on the last hug they all have, where Shiv goes from facing Kendall to facing Roman. It’s like a strange little grief-based magic trick.)
• So: We’re clearly setting up for a drag-out, knockdown fight with Mattson; the kids emphasize a “family” business in their statement, and Shiv assures the press that “We’ll be there. We intend to be there.”
• “Red Wedding” is trending on Twitter tonight in response to the episode, which feels about right.