Succession Heads to the Mountains For a “Tightrope Walk on a Straight Razor” in “Kill List”
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The post Succession Heads to the Mountains For a “Tightrope Walk on a Straight Razor” in “Kill List” appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Succession, Season 4 Episode 5, “Kill List.”]
What could be lovelier than a trip to Norway, to discuss a bold new era of business while looking out on beautiful forests and expansive mountain ridges? A lot of things, if you ask the Roy siblings at the end of Succession this week. The post-Logan summit gets ugly for nearly everyone involved, as Alexander Skarsgård‘s Mattson continues to skillfully play the Waystar Royco team — at this point, seemingly for his own amusement.
The episode opens in New York, with Kendall arriving for his first day as co-CEO to the tune of Jay-Z’s “Takeover” (when it comes to needle drops, this show does not miss). But after entering the office to some applause, Ken and Roman’s time as the most powerful men in the building gets cut short by a summons from Mattson.
Gathering Waystar and GoJo’s top execs together at a mountain resort is good news for the pending sale of Waystar, but it does also mean that the next few days will lead to some epic jockeying for status and approval, because the one guarantee that comes with acquisitions like this is that not everyone will still have a job, post-sale.
So while “the old guard” of execs fret over who from Waystar might be expendable, given the current executive lineup at GoJo, Roman and Kendall are preparing to face down Mattson: They’re primarily concerned that he might ask questions about the movie studio, which is being kindly referred to as a “cash incinerator” thanks to a huge studio tentpole that currently needs reshoots. (“Sleepy robot in a cave — how is that a quarter bill?” is a very fair question, one so many people outside the film business might also ask.)
However, Mattson isn’t interested in movies — instead, he wants ATN, the news network that Logan wanted so badly to maintain control over, carving it out of the original acquisition deal. Succession has never been shy about drawing parallels between ATN and Fox News, but the brutality of Mattson’s comments about the news network serve as a kind of obituary for the embattled real-life network: “It’s not complicated — it’s a lot of yelling… Small men, big veins, fat wallets… Long term, I don’t think news for angry old people works. Good parts, bad brand.”
Succession (HBO)
Mattson’s vision is to “make [ATN] more Bloomberg grade — cheap, huge, IKEA’ed to fuck” and he’s willing to pay for it. Originally, Kendall and Roman went into discussions with Mattson hoping to receive an offer of no less than $144 billion. Mattson’s offer, with ATN included? $187 billion, “50/50 cash/stock, for the whole thing.”
That is… more than expected. But Kendall and Roman, after bringing Shiv into the conversation, aren’t sure about betraying Logan’s wishes in this way. As Shiv points out, “let’s just keep one of his old sweaters — less racist,” but it still doesn’t sit right with “the CE-Bros”… to the point where they decide that they want to kill the deal, and keep the whole company for themselves. Key to this strategy of course will be making it seem like it’s Mattson’s call, but both Kendall and Roman seem relatively confident about the plan to go “full boar fuck the living shit out of this thing.”
It won’t be easy, of course, as Kendall notes: “A tightrope walk on a straight razor, 500 foot reputational drop.”
Roman, so often the voice of reason: “Who likes tightrope walking on a straight razor?”
Back home, an uncertain Connor is handling the funeral arrangements for Logan, while in Norway Tom is continuing his attempts to survive the ongoing storm, and Cousin Greg can’t stop making an idiot of himself, in his desperation to be a part of the action. He even lets himself be used by Kendall as an “anonymous source” for a hit piece about how negotiations at the summit are going poorly.
(As time has passed, Cousin Greg has started feeling more and more like a dark reflection of 30 Rock‘s Kenneth Parcell, specifically Jack’s immortal line about the NBC page: “In five years we’ll all either be working for him… or dead by his hand.” I say dark reflection because it’s hard to imagine Kenneth becoming that bloodthirsty… but close your eyes, and it’s not hard to imagine a knife in Greg’s hand.)
While she gets left out of the earlier negotiations, Shiv does get some one-on-one time with Mattson later that night, in a scene with vibes of a less-than-professional nature. However, Shiv plays it cool while watching Mattson do cocaine and talk about his relationship with his head of PR (played by Thelma star Eili Harboe).
Succession (HBO)
It’s then that we learn Mattson’s eccentricities include doing things like sleeping with his underling and then, when the relationship goes sour, sending her a “half-liter frozen blood brick. As a joke.” Shiv offers up some savvy management advice in response: “Stop sending people your blood.”
She doesn’t reveal details of that conversation to her brothers, but they’re off on their own quest — with most of the summit attendees distracted by a four-hour rough cut of the aforementioned sleepy robot movie, Kendall, Roman, and Mattson head out for a nice little discussion high up in the mountains.
On the gondola trip up, Roman receives a text from Connor: a photo of their dead father, being prepared for burial. It hits Roman hard, and perhaps that’s why he totally loses his cool with Mattson, telling him outright that they want to kill the deal. It wasn’t the plan, but Kendall hopes that it might be seen as a negotiating tactic, and on the plane ride home, they find out how successful it is. Mattson calls the board directly with his new offer — $192 million, including ATN, which thrills everyone who is not Kendall and Roman.
As the champagne is popped, Mattson calls Shiv to ask her for a photo of Kendall and Roman’s miserable faces in that moment, and Shiv obliges. She also asks Tom (with whom she shared something resembling an actual moment of flirtation, back in Norway) if he’d like to get dinner when they’re back in New York. Who knows what direction that conversation will go, though she does have some news to potentially share…
Meanwhile, once the bubbles from the champagne start to fizzle, it’s time for the Waystar regulars to go over GoJo’s “kill list” of execs who should prepare to be fired. While it’s a bad day to be an older white man —Hugo, Karl, Frank, and Ray are all listed — Gerri and Karolina are safe (Karolina likely being safe because her job responsibilities line up with Mattson’s blood-receiving ex, giving Mattson an excuse to get rid of her).
Who knows if the deal will still happen at this point; there are so many likely outcomes at this stage for the remainder of the series, from Mattson’s offer being too good to resist and Waystar getting sold for parts, to a nuclear bomb dropping on New York and Cousin Greg becoming the Immortan Joe of the wastelands.
Plus, you could create a Pepe Silva-esque chart of all the secrets being kept right now, including Kendall hiding his involvement in the negative press Logan’s been getting since his death, and Shiv keeping her pregnancy private from everyone, including Tom. And the fallout from any of those secrets coming out could have the same impact as a nuke.
New episodes of Succession premiere Sundays on HBO.
Succession Heads to the Mountains For a “Tightrope Walk on a Straight Razor” in “Kill List”
Liz Shannon Miller
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