On “Succession,” Everything Is Up in the Air
The heart of “Connor’s Wedding,” as the most recent episode is titled, is a protracted phone call from airplane to yacht lounge.
The trailer for this week’s episode of “Succession” promised another set-piece Roy wedding—this time that of Connor Roy, the eldest and oftenest-overlooked of Logan Roy’s four children, and his ever-blonder, ever more couture-clad bride-to-be, Willa. The setting: a yacht in New York Harbor decked with red-white-and-blue bunting, providing free media hoopla for Connor’s Presidential campaign, a one-per-cent bid in every sense of the term. The tricky confluence of timing: the shaky culmination of Logan’s deal with GoJo’s Lukas Matsson, which—thanks to the three younger Roy children seeking to squeeze more money out of the deal—Logan is now obliged to fly to Stockholm to secure. “Today’s the day,” Logan says in the trailer, as he boards the plane with Tom Wambsgans, his son-in-law and lieutenant of the moment. “Strategic refocus. Clean out the stalls. A bit more aggressive.”
Actually, that would be “a bit more fncking aggressive”—the opening moments of the episode, which broadcast on Sunday night, revealed that the line had been cleaned up for the promo. And those would be Logan’s final words—at least the last ones that viewers of “Succession” will hear him deliver. Fifteen-odd minutes into the episode, after the Roy offspring have gathered aboard the wedding boat, Tom calls the siblings: their father has been taken ill in the bathroom of the P.J. “It’s very, very bad,” Tom says. Logan is dying—or quite possibly has already died, but, without a medical professional present, who can say for sure?—at thirty thousand feet above the Eastern Seaboard.
When Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, admitted earlier this year that this season would be “Succession” ’s last, he reminded those who might want the show to unspool forever that “there’s a promise in the title”—somewhere along the line, in one way or another, Logan Roy was always going to surrender control of the company. The previous seasons showed Logan dangling the prize in front of each of his three younger children successively—Connor, of course, never got a look-in—before deciding to sell to Matsson, his heir of choice. Last week’s episode suggested that, rather than retiring to the golf course or some equivalent anteroom of mortality, Logan might build himself another empire within the newsroom of ATN. (“You’re fncking pirates!” Logan roared at his staff in the episode, all Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day.) Instead, mortality has made itself felt at the most inconvenient of moments. The deal with Matsson, like Logan’s plane, is up in the air; and the Roy siblings, as Connor’s love boat casts off from its East River pier, are literally unmoored.
Speaking on Friday, two days before the show’s airing, Armstrong acknowledged that, with seven episodes still to come, the timing of Logan’s death would likely be a shock to the audience. “I want the show to be organic and connected to reality,” he told me. “The business stuff that plays out across all the seasons is reflective of the real world—people who work in media and finance would recognize it as the shape of things that are happening, and a lot of the show is the playing out of the personal and bureaucratic dynamics within those structures. But that’s not all of life. Also, we get hit by unexpected events. So how do you make the authorial decision to make a thing happen?” He went on, “We once had a therapist jump into a swimming pool and break his teeth—that’s an unusual thing to happen that didn’t have to happen. And, on the bigger end, sometimes people die, and it’s a bit of a decision when that happens.”
Logan’s death does come as a surprise, as death so often does. But it’s also been intimated from the very first episode of the series, when, not long after his eightieth birthday, Logan experiences a brain hemorrhage while negotiating with his kids during a helicopter journey. There have been subsequent health scares: the funny turn he experienced while hiking around Josh Aaronson’s private island in the fourth episode of Season 3, followed, in the next episode, by a U.T.I.-induced bout of psychosis. The frailer Logan gets, the more fiercely he growls. Even the green juice supplied in a previous episode by Kerry, Logan’s “friend, assistant, and adviser,” is not enough to delay the boss’s scheduled appointment with the ultimate regulator in—as it were—the sky.
The heart of “Connor’s Wedding,” as the episode is titled, is a protracted phone call from airplane to yacht lounge. During the call, the Roy siblings learn, first, that their father has been stricken, then grow cognizant that he has been struck down. The scene ran for twenty or thirty pages, Armstrong explained, and the cast and crew filmed it at least once in a single take. “I was keen on doing it by phone call, because that’s so often how we get news, and people can be a bit adrift if you are in a different physical space from the drama of whatever is unfolding,” he said. The device allows Armstrong and his director, Mark Mylod, to dramatize the uncertainty: the viewer, like the Roy siblings, is kept at a distance from the crisis. Mylod refrains from depicting Logan’s final moments explicitly, and Armstrong’s script amplifies the way in which the experience of an intimate’s death is both utterly ordinary and entirely surreal: “The plane people are lovely, they’re good people. I think he’s—I think they’ve made him very comfortable” is how Tom characterizes the already expired Logan to his children. Each of the three younger Roys gets a harrowing moment with the phone held up to their insentient father’s ear—an opportunity to speak their own final words to the man who is undertaking this transatlantic journey only because the three of them have essentially forced him to do it. The possibility that one sibling or another will push their father to a physical breaking point has been an oft-repeated theme in the show. Finally, they’ve all done it, together.
Killing Logan off in Episode 3 came at one substantial cost: the loss of Brian Cox as a central character for the remainder of the series. “That was my one regret about doing it, the slightly personal feeling of him not being there all through the journey,” Armstrong said. “Though, as you’ll see in later episodes, his presence is sort of felt throughout the season.” But, Armstrong explained, the death had to come now in order to make it feel organic. “Part of making it embedded in the show was not putting it at Episode 9, because then we’re creating a narrative whereby death is somehow the thing that happens as the bitter cherry on the cake of the show, and I think that wouldn’t be quite right, because that’s not how the shape of life is,” he said.
One of Armstrong’s guiding observations while creating “Succession” has been to note how quickly individuals adapt even to dramatically changed circumstances. (The table read for the pilot was held on the day of the Presidential election in 2016, followed in the evening by what was expected to be a celebratory gathering. The election result was, Armstrong told me for a Profile, in 2021, “such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality . . . quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”) The children’s individual, immediate reactions to the reality of their father’s death are distinct and unpredictable, as children’s reactions to a parent’s death so often are. Shiv’s tough carapace dissolves at first: she whimpers with pain as she registers that her brothers failed to get her to the phone fast enough. But when she is asked, after Logan’s plane lands at Teterboro Airport, whether she wants to see the body, she declines. “He’s not going to get angry if we don’t,” she says, her face a mask of anguish. Roman, too, reverts to childishness, sitting on the floor of the yacht’s lounge rather than taking an armchair. Before he, alone of the siblings, goes to see Logan’s body on the jet, he removes the jacket, which, in the course of the show’s several seasons, he has started to wear as the costume of adulthood. By the time he descends the plane’s staircase, following the E.M.T.s who bear the lumpish, blanket-swaddled form of his father’s corpse strapped to a gurney, Roman has lost the jacket entirely, and is back in his vulnerable shirtsleeves.
Connor, whose wedding has been royally fncked, blurts out his own painful truth: “Oh, man, he never even liked me.” Then he goes ahead with his vows to the woman who is honest enough to admit when pushed that, yes, “there is something about money and safety” as her reason for marrying him. Meanwhile, Kendall—who is better acquainted with death than any of his siblings, having caused the drowning of a waiter at the end of the first season, and by nearly drowning himself toward the end of the third—shows an instinct for self-interest that is, in the end, as Logan-like as anything he has ever done. “What we do today will always be what we did the day our father died,” Kendall tells Shiv and Roman. “So let’s grieve and whatever, but not do anything that restricts our future freedom of movement.” A bit more fncking aggressive indeed.