‘Succession’ Recap: Logan Roy and the Bachelor Party From Hell
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THIS POST CONTAINS spoilers for this week’s episode of Succession, “Rehearsal.”
“I love you,” Logan Roy tells his four children near the end of this episode, “but you are not serious people.”
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We know the second half of this sentence is true, even if Connor, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman keep trying to convince themselves and the world otherwise. But is the first half?
On the one hand, Logan Roy is an abusive monster, who treats his children as toys in various dominance games he likes to play. This includes his favorite one, where he pits one or more of them against the others, knowing they’ll devour their siblings before ever causing harm to their old man. Even if Logan were capable of feeling love for another human being, it’s hard to argue that he feels it for these four clowns.
But on the other hand, why does he indulge their foolishness at all? Why does he keep offering Kendall and Roman chances to be his Number One Boy and be positioned as his heir apparent at Waystar Royco? Why does he repeatedly allow Shiv into the inner circle, even if he takes her counsel about as often as he does Geri’s, Frank’s, or Karl’s? Why does he even vaguely indulge Connor’s fantasies about becoming president, or running some division of the company, rather than merely bankrolling his indulgent lifestyle? And why has he not given Connor’s half-siblings a similarly cold and hands-off treatment?
Maybe this is just another game he likes to play. Maybe Logan is conscious enough of appearances that he understands it’s expected of him to support his kids and set up one or more of them to take his place one day. Or maybe, somewhere in the deep recesses of his black, black heart, Logan feels some level of affection for them, and has attempted to demonstrate it in the only clumsy, manipulative, and ultimately damaging way that a sociopath like himself can?
He issues this particular statement at the end of a dynamite scene, and one that’s fairly unusual for this series. Despite being a show about family dynamics, Succession is exceedingly careful about when and how to offer scenes that essentially only feature Logan and his four useless offspring. Heck, even scenes where it’s just the siblings — like them gathering early last season to discuss Kendall’s proposed coup against their dad — feel incredibly rare. It’s a symbol of the divide-and-conquer strategy Logan has taken throughout their lives, but also Jesse Armstrong and company wanting these moments to matter on the rare occasions when they happen.
Technically, Logan brings Colin and Kerry with him to the karaoke suite where the sibs are stumbling through an attempt to celebrate Connor’s upcoming wedding. But they are, as usual, just his accessories, even if Kerry has convinced herself that she’s a future ATN star and probably an impending addition to the Roy clan. No, this is a confrontation between Logan and his three rebellious younger kids, with Connor the collateral damage.
And why is he there? It’s certainly not to party with the child for whom he has the least use or respect. No, with Logan it’s almost always a business matter. Kendall and the others are on the verge of blowing up the GoJo deal, and he has come to try to talk them out of it. But for a while, the conversation does not go as we’ve come to expect. This is Logan trying to be vulnerable and apologetic. He utterly fails at both, because these concepts are so alien to his very being. The kids want to believe these things he is saying, because after all this time, they are still under the delusion that they can make Daddy proud of them. But he’s a bad liar, and Shiv in particular is so fed up with Logan’s interference in her divorce proceedings(*) that she will not give him an inch to maneuver. He offers vague apologies, but she demands to know exactly what he’s apologizing for. And the best Logan can offer is the stunt with the helicopter from earlier in this episode. It is, as Kendall thunderously points out, an incredibly minor transgression compared to pains he has inflicted upon them in the past, from hitting Roman to having Connor’s mother institutionalized. This is the oldest of news to Logan — so old that he’s long since dismissed most of these, and suppressed memories of the rest. He has hurt them, again and again and again, and to him it was just being a good father trying to prepare them for the cruel world around them. (That it’s a world he has made vastly crueler would never even occur to him.) Neither the apologies nor the lament about them missing his birthday party do anything to accomplish the actual goal of this meeting. And once he recognizes that they are going to continue holding up Lukas Matsson for more money, he scolds them and leaves.
(*) The gambit Logan suggests to Tom — take meetings with all the top divorce attorneys in the area, thus conflicting them out of representing Shiv even if he doesn’t hire them all — is one longtime HBO viewers know well. Tony Soprano pulled the exact same stunt on Carmela back when they were separated in The Sopranos Season Five.
It’s an absolutely dynamite sequence, as it would almost have to be with this collection of actors, characters, and grievances. There is surely some truth scattered throughout it. It’s not hard to imagine, for instance, that Logan genuinely believed the kids would let bygones be bygones — for a situation he believes to be completely their fault, anyway — and come to the party, because that is how his mind works. Mostly, though, it’s one more brick in the wall that he has built, wittingly or not, between himself and the rest of his family. So when that strategy fails, he goes back to the tried and true, attempting to peel Roman off of the new collective, with a plea for him to come work at ATN.
The karaoke scene is definitely the outlier for Logan in “Rehearsal,” where he otherwise attempts to return to basics as he prepares to sell off all of his empire save for ATN. He shows up in the newsroom unannounced, scaring the snot out of everyone. (Cousin Greg suggests he is “just moseying — terrifyingly moseying” and later compares him to both the shark from Jaws and Santa Claus “if Santa Claus was a hitman.” It is, in other words, yet another spectacularly quotable Cousin Greg week, even before he tries and fails to talk Kerry out of her news anchor dreams without offending her.) ATN is what he’s got left, and he’s going to do whatever he can to keep it feeling relevant. Heck, he even finds a few moments to offer the carrot rather than the stick, delivering a passionate monologue — one not too far off from Ned Beatty’s classic “Primal forces of nature!” speech from Network — about all that ATN can become post-deal, and seems to genuinely inspire the troops with it. It’s an effective reminder that bullying cannot be 100 percent of anyone’s management style. Maybe 99 percent, but every now and then, you have to make the troops think you believe in them, and we’ve seen him be similarly encouraging to each of his children. (Well, maybe not Connor.)
Kendall, Shiv, and Roman, meanwhile, start off the episode trying to figure out what to do with Pierce. They bought it to spite their father, and now they have a behemoth legacy media operation that doesn’t match any of their tastes. Kendall pitches a high-minded new strategy devoted to hard news reporting from around the globe, which Shiv amusingly dismisses as “Homework: The Show.” This is Kendall once again trying to sell the world on the version of himself that he wants to be, even as we know he’s too weak to do that, and will ultimately go down whatever is the most craven and profitable route
Or is he that weak? Midway through the episode, Matsson calls him, attempting to stamp out Stewy and Sandi’s plan to try to renegotiate the deal. To this point, Kendall has been reluctant to play along with their idea, but Matsson’s approach backfires, and puts Kendall on board with his good pal Stewy. As with Logan’s apologies in the karaoke bar, you can interpret the switch a few ways. One is that the call makes him realize that Matsson is more vulnerable than the Swede lets on, and that Sandi is right about them leaving money on the table with the current deal structure. The other, though, is that the call leaves Kendall feeling like his manhood has been challenged — and that the only way to prove himself is to go hard at Matsson, and preferably hurt Logan (the ultimate emasculator) in the process. If it screws up the GoJo deal — which is necessary for the sibs to be able to afford the Pierce deal — so be it. Kendall has a history of being tactically savvy in isolation, and of letting his emotions dictate his actions, so it’s possible the choice here is a bit of both. However you read it, it puts him on the offensive and Logan on the defensive for the rest of the episode.
Caught in the middle, as usual, is Connor, the elder sibling who has never been allowed to feel the kind of status that so often comes with that position in a family. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a person as insufferably oblivious as Connor, who responds to Willa’s meltdown at their rehearsal dinner by declaring that he wants to go to a real bar, with real people: “With chicks, and guys who work with their hands, and grease, and sweat from their hands, and have blood in their hair.” But Connor did not come by his particular brand of patronizing cluelessness all by his lonesome. He was raised by a father who never liked him, and who had his mother locked up, alongside half-siblings who treated him as an outsider. In that emotional environment, buttressed with that amount of money and power, is it any wonder that this is who and what Connor has turned out to be? He is so far removed from authentic experiences that he takes the others to karaoke “because I’ve seen it in the movies.” (And when he finally gets a chance, he chooses, of all things, Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which is almost certainly a song Willa introduced him to.) He is not involved in the GoJo deal, yet it’s his impromptu bachelor party that gets hijacked by an argument over the thing. He tries to play peacemaker, but no one listens, because who ever listens to Connor Roy? With good reason, but still.
When Logan leaves the suite in a sullen and defeated frame of mind, Shiv and Kendall celebrate like they’ve just won the lottery. Roman, who’s always most empathetic toward their father despite having abundant reasons not to be, is sullen. It’s Connor, though, who sums up life in the Roy family the best. “The Good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you,” he says, “is you learn to live without it.” He argues that his siblings are “needy love sponges,” while he has become “a love cactus.” It’s a stoic pose to adopt, but it feels like as much of a lie as everything Logan has just said. Connor wants the love of everyone else at least as much as his brothers and sister do — arguably more, since the other three have at least some level of affection for one another that never quite extends out to him.
But when you have no love in your life and way too much money, it’s all too easy to become an unserious person. Logan is not wrong about his children, even if he’s the one who made them into this.
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