Succession, Season 4, episodes 4-10

So, I just finished the finale of season 4 of Succession, and it was, well, quite intense. There was so much that went on, and to be honest, at some point I had to stop taking so many notes and just watch the show. Taking notes helped because it helped me keep up with different points in the plot that I might have forgotten, but there were parts of the show that I had to watch closely, otherwise I would miss it.

There were some pretty memorable moments in this season. In episode 8, it is election day and everyone in the ATN newsroom is stressed, especially Tom, who is the head of ATN, and his assistant, Greg, who at this point is tired of taking Tom’s shit but still goes along with it. At one point, Tom yells at Greg for not bringing him coffee, and Greg asks if he wants coffee, and Tom calms down. Tom then goes to the board to see how the election results are going, and he is really stressed, so he does cocaine, and he tells Greg to do some as well. When Greg refuses, Tom grills him for doing cocaine with Lukas Matsson but asks him why he won’t do cocaine with Tom. Greg tells him that he is trying to not get addicted to cocaine, but Tom still pressures him to do it, so Greg does the cocaine. Tom then sees a bunch of sushi that Greg got from the bodega, and he gets angry with Greg for not meeting his requests for food. The cocaine scene reminded me of season 1, episode 8, when Roman, Greg, Tom, Connor and Kendall go to Tom’s bachelor party. There is a scene where Kendall is going to do four lines of cocaine, and Greg is checking in on everyone to make sure they don’t get too high or too drunk, and he checks in on Kendall. Greg sees that Kendall is going to do these four lines of cocaine, he gets worried and warns him not to do the cocaine, but Kendall tells him to leave him alone. Greg panics and then decides to do the lines of cocaine, even though he doesn’t want to, because he doesn’t want to see Kendall die, and Tom comes over and starts making fun of Greg and goading him on to do the cocaine. Greg experiences a severe reaction and panics, and instead of helping him, Tom laughs at him and tells him “Buckle up, fucklehead.” In the season finale, Tom meets up with Matsson and Matsson proposes that Tom, not Shiv, should be the CEO, and Greg texts Shiv and lets her know this. She confronts Tom and is really upset, and Tom, angry that Greg spilled the details about him becoming CEO, gets into a physical fight with Greg in the bathroom. Earlier on, whenever Tom tried to beat up on Greg, Greg wouldn’t fight back, but at this point because Greg has dealt with so much bullying from Tom, he is sick of it, so he hits Tom back. He still lets Greg stay on his team when he becomes CEO. I know the show is over, but I would be really interested to see what Waystar under Tom Wambsgans and Lukas Matsson would be like.

There is another scene in the election episode that was pretty wild. Darwin is about to announce the vote for whether Mencken or Jimenez won (Mencken is the Republican nominee, and Jimenez is the Democratic nominee) and Greg is eating from a container of sushi. Darwin has Greg move his sushi container over, and he slides next to him with his laptop. Darwin accidentally touches the side of the sushi container, which has wasabi on the side, and touches his eye and immediately his eyes start to burn, and he starts screaming. Everyone in the room yell at Greg to douse his eyes with water, but Greg ends up pouring lemon sparkling water in his eyes, which of course only makes Donny’s eyes burn even more. Everyone gets mad at Greg and this scene showed me again how Greg is always being called out for making so many mistakes in this show, even well until the very end. The election episode overall was very stressful because this year is the year of the election, and it might be kind of stressful. But it reminded me that if I want to truly feel like I can make a difference in democracy, then I need to vote. Even if there have been times when I felt like my vote didn’t matter, this episode (and real-life elections that I have lived through) reminded me that every vote counts. It was a pretty brutal moment when Mencken won the vote, and it was a stressful day for everyone at ATN.

The funeral episode, episode 9, was pretty dark, but the dialogue was brilliant. It is the day of Logan’s funeral, and also after the election results get called, people protest the election results in the streets of New York City. Kendall’s ex-wife, Rava, calls Kendall to let him know she is not coming to Logan’s funeral and that she and the kids are going to stay in upstate New York because it’s a really tumultuous day and she wants to make sure the kids are safe. Kendall drives over to her place to see if he can stop her from leaving, and when she says she and the kids have to go, he tries to block their car from leaving to no avail. Kendall not only has to deal with the stress of his dad’s funeral and Rava and the kids leaving, but also, his longtime assistant, Jess, wants to resign from her position as Kendall’s assistant. At first, Kendall tries to be happy for her, but instead he starts asking her why she is leaving. Jess says that it’s time, and Kendall gets angry and upset with her for leaving him at a really bad time. But Jess tells him that she had been thinking about resigning for a while. Honestly, I don’t blame her. Jess went through a LOT of stuff throughout the course of this show, and she tried her best to do everything that Kendall expected of her.

During the funeral scene, Gregory’s grandpa, Ewan, gets up to deliver his own eulogy, and they try to hold him back because he wasn’t scheduled to deliver a eulogy, but he does so because Logan was his brother, even with their very complicated relationship. Ewan shows another side of Logan and him that I hadn’t seen before. He doesn’t sugarcoat his feelings about Logan, in fact, quite the opposite. He says that Logan was mean-spirited, power-hungry and all around not a great guy. But he tells everyone about how Logan got sent to a well-off school when him and Ewan were kids, and when Logan came back he got polio and their sister ended up dying of polio. Logan blamed himself for a long time for their sister’s death, and their aunt and uncle made him feel like he was responsible for her death. This was kind of a touching moment because Logan never told them about it, and I think it was revealing for me because the whole time I was watching the show I wondered, Do we get any backstory about Logan? Ewan and Logan don’t have a great relationship, and Ewan is reluctant to come over to Logan’s for Thanksgiving because he hates what the Roy family has become: a bunch of money-hungry individuals who tear at each other and make the people around them feel less than. Logan is showing off some medals he has been collecting, and Ewan says that while Logan never served as a veteran, he, Ewan is a veteran, and he grills the family about being full of themselves and forgetting the importance of morals. He tells his grandson, Greg, to not associate with the Roy family because they are a bunch of terrible people, and when he confronts Logan at a conference, he tells him that their mother wouldn’t be happy with the kind of person Logan has become.

Roman tries to get up and deliver his eulogy, and he takes a few minutes to arrange and rearrange his index cards, but he ends up breaking down in tears and not being able to deliver his eulogy. His siblings embrace him in a hug, and Roman looks through tears in disbelief at the coffin holding his father, and it hits Roman so hard because his dad really is dead and is not coming back, and it is painful. Kendall delivers his eulogy, and he says that while Ewan was right about Logan not being a nice person, he tries to share some positive qualities about his dad, that his dad inspired people to become ambitious and want to achieve success, and that at the end of the day, he created a life for Kendall, Shiv, Roman and Connor. Shiv shares her eulogy, too, and she talks about the not-so-great memories of her dad, like when he yelled at her and the kids, but she also acknowledges the huge impact that he had on her life (“my world of a dad”) and gets emotional as well. There was a really interesting moment when Marcia and Kerry briefly reconcile. Earlier, Marcia kicks Kerry out of the house because Kerry and Logan had an affair together, but then Caroline introduces Sally Ann, who was Logan’s mistress while Caroline was married to Logan, to Marcia and lets Kerry sit with them in the front row. It kind of showed me how Logan’s infidelity hurt all of these women involved, and overall, it showed the very messy complicated relationships he had with the people in his life. While Gerri, Karl, Hugo and Frank are talking about Logan, Gerri asks if they actually miss him though after the way that he treated everyone so poorly. Karl and Frank try to not say anything nasty or negative about Logan, but Gerri jokes that they have “Stockholm Syndrome,” which shows how, while he was alive, Logan manipulated everyone and made them feel inferior. Ewan talks about how Logan brought out a really ugly side in people, and throughout the course of the show Logan tells people to “fuck off,” insults them and has put his kids through years of abuse and manipulation. I think that is why the grief they go through is so complex because on the one hand, he was their father and it’s hard losing a parent, but at the same time they are emotionally scarred from all the abuse he put them through.

Roman at this point has adopted a very nihilistic view on life, and there is one scene in episode 9 where he leaves the funeral reception and goes out in the streets, which is blocked off to make way for anti-Mencken protesters. The police warn him to not go where the protests are because they have gotten violent, but he ignores them and leans over the railing and shouts insults at the protesters. He goes out to where they are marching, and he pushes a few of them and they push him to the ground, leaving him with serious bruises. Kendall and Shiv ask him why he has a big cut on his forehead, and he tries to brush it off so that he doesn’t have to talk about it, and he wants to be left alone. In episode 10, Kendall and Roman share a moment in their dad’s office where Roman is overwhelmed with grief at losing his dad and not becoming the CEO of Waystar even when his dad promised him that he had potential, and Kendall gives him a huge hug. But then when Shiv doesn’t want to go with the plan to let Matsson acquire Go Jo, the three siblings erupt in a huge fight and then Kendall shouts that he is the oldest sibling. Roman ends up making a comment about how Kendall’s kids aren’t biologically his, and Kendall beats him up, prompting Shiv to leave the room. There is a brief tender moment during the course of this very intense final episode, and it’s when they are at Logan’s house (which Marcia sold to Connor and Willa) and they watch a video of their dad having a casual conversation and singing and laughing with the people on his PR team, including Kerry, Gerri, Hugo, Karl and Frank. It is a really innocent moment where they are just having fun and Logan isn’t hurling nasty insults at them, and the siblings start to tear up because it is a really touching moment for them and it reminds them that even though they had a really difficult relationship with their dad, they really miss him. Another sweet moment is when the three siblings are at their mom, Caroline’s house, and they pretend to crown Kendall “king” and make him this disgusting blended mixture of food found in Caroline’s fridge. Caroline tells Roman not to eat her husband Peter’s cheese, but after she goes back to bed, Roman, when she is out of earshot, starts licking and sniffing the cheese and him and his siblings start busting up laughing. Shiv gives Kendall the gross mixture to drink, and he ends up drinking only a little, and Roman pours the rest over his head, prompting all of them to burst into giggles. This for me was an enjoyable moment in the show because the rest of the time, they are dealing with these serious adult problems, but this scene showed them being able to enjoy this brief moment of child-like innocence where they are at their mom’s house and just goofing off.

Honestly, as intense as this show was, I’m glad I watched it. The acting and directing was really good. And the music by Nicholas Britell is amazing.