'Succession' Season 4, Episode 6 Recap: Matsson's Tweet and Kendall’s Win
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Spoilers below.
Staring into the soles of the “big, big” shoes he wants so desperately to fill, Kendall Roy goes the way not of a savvy tycoon, but of a scammer. His precursors in episode 6, “Living+,” are not so much Logan Roy and Rupert Murdoch as they are Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann—strivers, as it were, but with nothing but noxious gas inflating their ideals (and prices). Roman predicts as much when he and Kendall zhuzh up the concept for Waystar’s Living+ real estate pitch, making it less about living and more about living forever: “I mean, you know, get loaded onto a chip and fired up someone’s ass. Float around as a gas.”
It’s their last-ditch effort to stave off the deal with GoJo billionaire Lukas Matsson, whom they’ve come to despise. Here’s the idea: Just make so much money that the deal becomes unnecessary. Or, anyway, drive up the price enough to force Matsson to walk. Matsson is clever enough to recognize that the Living+ product is either a) antithetical to his own business plan or b) a threat to it, and so he enlists Shiv to help halt the launch. But, as the episode goes on, we see just how much Kendall and Roman have shut Pinky out, despite their numerous promises to the contrary.
“Living+” begins with the jarring image of Logan himself, reading a teleprompter announcement cooing over the “significant boost” the real estate development is sure to provide for Waystar’s parks earnings. Kendall watches the footage with a heady combination of derision and adoration, but it’s not until he meets with the full crew that his plan shifts into focus. Shiv catches on immediately. After Kendall and Roman try, ineffectually, to throw a little dirt on Matsson’s name before Frank, Gerri, Karl, and their ilk, she leans back in her swivel chair to confront them.
“Boys, you’re not good at this,” she says. “You’re trying to fuck the deal.”
They apologize for keeping secrets from her and hug to break—or, depending on your perspective, buoy—the tension. But Shiv now recognizes her brothers want it all: Waystar, Pierce, everything. Already reeling, she careens directly into the conference room her assistant booked for her to grieve at scheduled intervals, only for Tom to shuffle in as if on cue. He employs just enough ethos to shatter her defenses, and they kiss. Wambsgans is back in the game, and all it took was patience.
Meanwhile, Kendall and Roman prepare for Investor Day by perusing the Living+ materials, in which Ken discovers this gold nugget: “personalized longevity programs.” Roman meets with Joy Palmer, head of the Waystar Studios film division, to try and “get the franchise pump pumping,” but his eagerness to invoke his dad’s emotional volatility—with none of the late Roy’s three-steps-ahead thinking—leads him to fire Joy with little concrete explanation. A few scenes later, he does the same to Gerri. Roman’s drunk on what he thinks power should look like, but the hangover is coming on much faster than he anticipated. He’s immediately sick with doubt. And the fact he’s exclusively firing high-level women should be lost on no one.
Back in the brainstorm bubble, Kendall fires off his longevity-inspired idea: “This is the killer app. Maximize your physical potential, live—well, not forever—”
“Why not forever?” Roman interjects.
“Well, sure. If not forever, live more forever.”
They both have their own emotional stake in the idea. Logan’s death took them completely by surprise, in spite of his age and numerous health scares. His loss “was very un-Dad,” Kendall says. Death is “bullshit.” Why not buy their way out?
In their own section of the Waystar Venn diagram, Tom and Shiv are having a lovely time flirting with their incisors. (“You want to play Bitey?”) The romance is their perfect brand of bizarre, a constant power struggle in which Shiv convinces Tom she’s lost all affection for him while providing ample evidence to the contrary. They sleep together, after which Shiv asks for Tom’s advice re: Matsson. This spirals instead into a conversation about last season’s betrayal, in which Tom sold Shiv and her brothers out to their father. Tom attempts something like earnestness, sharing that the move was largely money-motivated; it was not a personal vendetta. “It seemed to me I was going to be caught between you and your dad,” he says. “And I really, really, really love my career. And my money.”
Shiv scoffs, and so her estranged husband tries to call her bluff. If you’re so valiant, Shiv, why not eschew your name and your Alexander McQueen suits in favor of a loving, middle-class life? “I’d follow you anywhere for love, Tom Wambsgans,” she says, before they both break out into maniacal laughter.
After a cloud machine mishap and some hastily inflated projections, Kendall is all in on the Living+ pitch. But Shiv gets to Roman in time to further curdle his suspicions, steering him away from his position by his brother’s side. The presentation is going to be a disaster, she warns him, and he buys it. When the Investor Day moment finally arrives, Kendall steps onto the stage alone, determined to convince his naysayers—his siblings chief among them—that he has what it takes to fill those giant shoes.
And fill them he does, though with shapeless putty as opposed to real substance. He sells a “sanctuary” accented with “character IP life enhancement,” as well as the kicker: “What if I told you it was all going to last forever?” Living+ will deliver pharmaceutical and wellness tech once only available to the über-rich. It’s a moonshot, a ludicrous one, founded on a lie that Logan himself seals from beyond the grave. In footage edited with eerily prescient AI, Logan tells the audience he’s convinced that bringing “the cruise ship experience to dry land” can “double the earnings of our parks division.” Double? Both the crowd and the internal Waystar crew lap it up.
Even Matsson takes an L, watching the Living+ performance and tweeting, “Doderick macht frei,” an ugly play on the Waystar mascot Doderick the Dog and the Nazi saying “arbeit macht frei,” which once hung over Holocaust camps. (It translates to “Work sets you free.”) The disgusting jab doesn’t play well, and Kendall spins it well from the stage: “He’s very European. If and when we complete the deal, and he gets into the incredible opportunity we’ve presented, I think he’ll be tweeting something different.”
Afterwards, Kendall is lauded as the return of the king, while both Shiv and Roman remain humiliated. In the passenger seat of his car, Roman listens repeatedly to another edit of their dad’s Living+ footage, this one tweaked to accuse Roman of “always getting it wrong.” He listens again and again, knocking the phone against his head, a physical manifestation of his internalization. Shiv rides alongside Tom, planning to host the upcoming election party. (“I can’t help it if I find strategy sexy,” he tells her.) Finally, Succession returns to its longtime water motif, soaking Kendall in the ocean, where—at long last—he’s not immersed. He’s not drowning. This time, we could easily mistake him for floating.
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