Lurching unpredictably into the void

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This article was published 15/04/2023 (948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SPOILER ALERT: This column discusses plot details of season 4, episode 3 of Succession, entitled Connor’s Wedding.

Last month, I publicly declared that I’m incapable of binge-watching Succession. I can’t wait to view this brilliantly caustic show (streaming Sunday nights on Crave), but I can only take one episode at a time. Any more than that is simply too harsh, too sad, too demoralizing.

A little later, I chatted over email with a friend who is a committed binger. When it comes to series that drop week-by-week, he and his wife just wait until the season ends and then watch it all at once.

I get that. I grew up in the era of three TV channels. These days, we want what we want when we want it.

But there are drawbacks to this viewing mode. Right now, my friend is missing out on Succession’s watercooler-television moment, the kind of shared public discussion that’s become increasingly rare in the age of on-demand streaming, when everyone hits crucial plot points at different times. (It might also have something to do with the decline in regular office attendance, not to mention the disappearance of watercoolers.)

Doling out a series week-by-week is a recognized HBO strategy, and one that currently has a whole lot of Succession viewers talking and writing and reading and obsessing about last Sunday’s Big Event. It also means any fans who are saving up episodes for later will need to scrupulously avoid spoilers until the season ends. They’ll particularly have to dodge recaps with titles like: Succession: Well, that happened or Succession finally did it.

So, if you haven’t seen season 4, episode 3, stop reading right now. (But maybe bookmark all those articles so you can come back later, because, really, you’re going to want to connect.)

Cleverly constructed and emotionally exhausting, this hour of television starts, in typical Succession style, with a mean joke. The episode is cruelly, comically titled Connor’s Wedding. But of course, Connor is the Tiffany Trump of the Roy family, the habitually left-out sibling, and this episode will not be about Connor’s wedding.

This episode is about the sudden death of Logan Roy, a seismic incident presented not with ratcheting suspense, not as a last-minute cliffhanger, but as an oddly anticlimactic off-screen development placed early in the episode. Logan and his entourage of nervous sycophants are on a flight to Sweden, and Kendall, Shiv and Roman, that uneasy “rebel alliance” of adult children, are attending Connor and Willa’s super-depressing super-yacht nuptials.

Logan’s heart seems to stop when he’s in the airplane bathroom, but everything remains confused and unclear. As the medical team does chest compressions, each of his children speaks to him over the phone, though nobody can be sure he’s heard anything, which is heart-rending to watch — and also an effective shorthand expression of the family’s lifelong dysfunction.

Then Logan is gone — but also not gone. The man was scary, angry and unpredictable when he was alive. (He’s “moseying, terrifyingly moseying,” as Cousin Greg says of Logan’s unannounced appearance at the ATN studios in the previous episode.) This business patriarch’s looming, withholding, controlling presence has distorted his children’s lives, but we sense his absence might be worse. His death has left the survivors confronting a black pit of complicated feelings, with all the Roy siblings staring into the void.

The series continues to smash together comedy and tragedy. Even with this, the most devastating Succession episode ever delivered, we get the Fox News-like chyrons running on ATN (“China hack could see 40m Americans entombed in their electric cars”).

It also mixes up love and money and power. We see the most extreme expression yet of the hideous dynastic dynamics that have messed up the Roy kids. Logan’s death causes a welter of grief and bewilderment and shock. (And the gifted cast just acts the heck out of this.) But everyone — even those closest to him — are also thinking about stock prices and board meetings, about power moves that need to be made and computer files that need to be deleted. There’s a suggestion that maybe the plane should keep circling until the market closes.

And perhaps the darkest idea in a very dark episode is the suggestion — thrown out partly in despair, partly in a weird act of hope — that the death thing is just another strategic ploy, Logan’s gaslighting taken to a grotesque but logical end. Maybe, Roman suggests, Dad is faking the whole thing just to see how they’ll all react.

As this raw, riveting and extraordinary episode makes clear, their father might be dead, but those daddy issues aren’t going anywhere.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca