Jesse Armstrong had promised: after three seasons of brilliant but sometimes repetitive convolutions around his subject, Succession would know in its last season an unambiguous outcome. Nobody expected it to happen so early in the season. In its third episode, the series purely and simply reshuffles the cards by killing its main character. Suddenly, Succession doesn’t quite mean the same thing.
As the mischievous title of the episode suggests (Connor’s wedding), it’s wedding day for Connor and his fiancée Willa, who have chartered a boat to get married off Ellis Island, New York. Roman, who, unlike the other Roy children, has never stopped talking to his father, tries to convince him over the phone to give up. But Logan is about to take off for Sweden, in order to unlock the proposed merger between Waystar Royco and the powerful start-up GoJo.
Not only does Logan confirm to Roman that he will not be going to the wedding, but he takes the opportunity to instruct him to inform Gerri, who was his right-hand man for years, that she is going to be fired. The reasons ? Whatever, we’ll find it. Logan does Logan. “Are you an asshole? » asks Roman (the term in VO is even more vulgar) in an angry message left shortly after on his answering machine. In a few minutes, his father will be dead.
Stunning precision of the actors
It is Tom who informs the Roy children of this, as they have isolated themselves on the upper deck of the boat. Up in the sky, a stewardess gives the old man a heart massage while her son-in-law gives confused explanations over the phone to disbelieving Kendall, Roman and Shiv. The absurd competes with the tragic when Tom, unable to say if Logan is dead or still vaguely alive, asks them to say a few words in the ear of their unconscious father, in case he still hears them. Roman will refuse to believe it: “You are a monster, you are a good man…” Shiv and Kendall will tell her that they love her, against all odds. Connor, warned too late, will say nothing. “He didn’t like me very much. »
Logan Roy has just expired on his private jet, amidst co-workers preparing for the aftermath while his remains are still warm, away from his wife Marcia (part “shopping in Milan, forever”, as explained at the start of the season) and especially the children he has alienated. We will never know what or who Logan thought about when he died, what his last words were, for whom his last look was.
You have 45.53% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.