It's a Roy family battle royale as Succession's final season hits its stride

The most terrible thing about the terrible things Logan Roy says about his children–and he has said an enormous number of terrible things both about, and to, his kids over these last four seasons of TV–is that they’re so frequently, terribly, true. Logan may be, as Shiv accuses him during the Roy family reunion that serves as the ugly heart of tonight’s Succession, a “human gaslight.” But when he tells his kids, “I love you, but you’re not serious people”? Well, it’s hard to call bullshit on that.

That statement may, in fact, be the one really true thing Logan says during this entire hour of TV, which spends so much of its run-time watching him baldly speak reality into existence simply to suit his whims. (Interesting that I called that out as a go-to Shiv move last week, as she not-inaccurately accuses the old man of mastery of the form tonight.) The Logan Roy magic trick can be a loud one, as when he steps up onto a couple of boxes of printer paper on the ATN hanger floor and turns a bunch of snickering eye-rollers into battle-crazed minions, ready to die for their king. And it can be near-silent, as he maneuvers his “assistant” Kerry into, and then right back out of, an anchor job at the network, with little more than a few non-committal murmurs and pointed looks in Tom’s flop-sweating direction.

But it’s never more impressive than when it’s aimed at his kids, who know every trick in the Logan Roy playbook, but who still feel the tugs on the strings that he’s spent their whole lives jamming into their backs. Each kid dances to Logan’s tactically deployed “truths” in a different way: Connor demurs. Kendall hits back. Shiv marshals her counter-evidence. And Roman? Poor Roman, the true believer, the last acolyte of the utterly fucked idea that there is something meaningful called “the Roy family” left to save? Rome listens.

But, whoops, we’re perilously close to jumping to the end of the story here. Let’s rewind, back to the start of “Rehearsal.” We’re now just a day out from the sale of Waystar Royco to GoJo, and everyone involved is a different kind of antsy. For Logan, that means stalking around the floor at ATN–which is about to enjoy the “benefits” of being the sole object of its owner’s obsessions–like “if Santa Claus was a hitman,” in the words of an extra-preppy. extra funny tonight Greg. For the kids, it means spitballing plans for their Pierce acquisition. (They’re awful, by the way; Succession remains beautifully committed to never suggesting that any of the Roy kids are secret geniuses being unfairly held back from greatness.) For everybody, it involves blowing off steam watching Kerry’s horrifying ATN audition tape, as Zoe Winters makes a strong case for herself as an early frontrunner for the season’s comedy MVP. (The hands! Can’t unsee the hands.) And for Sandi and Stewie, it means trying to talk The Kids into tossing one last “Fuck you” at their old man, in the form of trying to force him to renegotiate the Waystar sales price a little higher with “the Swede.”

It’s that last gambit that puts the first serious nail in the coffin of The Kids Alliance–not because Roman is so concerned that Lukas Matsson will walk from the deal if he gets some pushback, but because it reveals what everyone’s real motivations here actually are. For Shiv and Kendall–especially Kendall–the billions of dollars in the balance are seemingly incidental to the joys of sticking a finger in their dad’s eye, of wresting a little bit of control back from the bullies eternally hanging over their lives. For Logan, it’s about control, too–other people have it, he wants it, so it’s time to deploy that expletive-ready silver tongue. But for Roman, the idea that Logan (via Kerry) floats in that gaudy karaoke room–and where better to roll out a performance operating at constantly fluctuating levels of fakeness?–is obviously seductive. What if their family, and the multi-billion dollar business that’s consumed it for his entire life, weren’t actually synonymous anymore? What if there was an actual clean break that could possibly repair the divide?

It’s a human impulse–but also a deluded one, because Rome can’t perceive that Shiv and Kendall will never trust their father again. Their maneuverings are no longer about carving out a space where Logan is forced to respect them as equals; they’re just about hitting him where it hurts. (Which is, ironically, a position Logan might actually respect.) Shiv’s hurts are fresher, exacerbated this week by Logan loaning Tom one of his classic divorce moves, adding extra “divorcing my dad” subtext to an already fraught situation. And Kendall?

Well, Kendall’s the tricky one, isn’t he? For the first half of “Rehearsal,” Kendall seems completely on board with the original plan, letting the sale go through, moving on to creating his god-awful cable news shows on Pierce. But then he takes a call from Matsson–Alexander Skarsgård’s welcome first appearance in the season–and something shifts. It’s a hard moment to read: Does Kendall sense weakness in Matsson’s attempt to steamroll the nascent rebellion? Does the Swedish bullying kick him into oppositional defiance? Or does he simply realize that the sudden ability to tank the sale gives him the chance to do what he really wants to do: Fuck his dad, well and truly, and in a way that will actually stick? The fact that Kendall doesn’t tell his siblings about Matsson’s call underlines the fact that there’s something ugly bubbling up to motivate the turn here; in trying to analyze it, I keep coming back to that “I need something super-fucking absorbing in my life” comment he made last week. We haven’t seen that smile on Jeremy Strong’s face—the one he flashes on the car ride home tonight, the one that will never, ever reach his eyes—in a minute. It never bodes especially well.

And, damn it, we’ve found ourselves back at those final scenes again, haven’t we? Swept up in the seismic pull of five Roys in a room together, carving flesh off each other as efficiently as they can. But that unfairly skips over huge swathes of tonight’s episode, which is also one of the funniest in recent memory, as Tom and Greg attempt to navigate the horrorshow of Logan’s personal attention resting on ATN, and the Roy kids take Connor out for a night in “real America,” after Willa freaks out over the whole “marrying a man she doesn’t love” thing at their unseen trainwreck of a wedding rehearsal. That’s to say nothing of the smaller comedy setups that dot the episode: Hugo and Gerri getting caught mocking Kerry’s tape; watching the shit roll downhill to Greg as he’s forced to be the one to break the news to Logan’s right-hand lady that she won’t be becoming a national TV star. This is vintage Succession-as-comedy…it’s just lurking in the margins surrounding some absolutely killer Succession-as-drama.

Because it all comes back to Roman, really. You can even watch the moment when it all breaks down, written plain as day on Kieran Culkin’s face. It’s in the bar, before Logan even shows up to work his magic: Kendall and Shiv are taking turns tearing Rome down, attacking his instincts on the Matsson deal. And then the “Fuck this” just blooms on him, his face hardening into something wounded and angry, just like it did all those times their dad did this exact same shit to him. That’s when they lose him, and they don’t even notice; the rest is really just a formality.

Pretty fuckin’ good formality, though: Succession plays very sparingly with getting as much of its cast in the room together as it does here, and the result is typically impressive. Lit in gaudy purple karaoke parlor light, we have Brian Cox playing Logan playing humble, eyes wide and “vulnerable”—after he spent the opening span of the episode hiding them with sunglasses—offering apologies to his kids as though they were line items in a contract. (And is there a more Logan move than creating a slight—in this case, canceling the kids’ use of a company helicopter on their way to Connor’s rehearsal—just so that he has an easy item to apologize for later?) Roman, anxious for reconciliation; Shiv, open and raw; Kendall, perched above it all, just trying to extract some pain. It all builds, after every failed probe, to that “serious people” comment; Logan unable to see his own part in creating kids who can only feel anything about a multi-billion dollar business deal in terms of what it means about their relationship with daddy. Rome’s the only one still formally vying for that fabled kiss, and so he’s the one who ultimately breaks: Slipping off to Logan’s place afterwards to entertain offers of betrayal that come in the seductive language of need.

Let’s actually finish with Connor, though—poor, despicable Connor—as Alan Ruck gives one of his best performances of his entire lovely, ever out-of-focus tenure on this show. Partly because his last monologue tonight is just perfectly awful, and partly because it nails his, and his sibling’s, pathologies, pretty much to the bone. “The good thing about having a family who doesn’t love you,” he starts, honesty and self-pity mingling in his voice, “is that you learn to live without it. You’re all chasing after Dad, saying, ‘Love me, please love me, I need love, I need attention.’” Shiv, lying to everybody, including herself, tries to deny, tries to claim that what she and Kendall are doing is somehow the opposite of that, but Connor just rolls: “You’re needy love sponges. And I’m a plant that grows on rocks, and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn’t come back, that’s fine. Because I don’t need love; it’s like a superpower. And if she comes back, and doesn’t love me, that’s okay, too. Because I don’t need it.”

“Thanks for the party.”

Stray observations

• The murder face Sarah Snook ends the cold open on, once Shiv realizes that Tom’s screwed her over on the divorce attorneys, is really a thing of wonder. Snook never stops using that rage for one second of the rest of the episode.
• Greg, describing Logan’s stalking of the ATN news floor, in some of the funniest writing/deliveries of the episode: “I don’t know, he’s…moseying. Terrifyingly moseying…It’s like Jaws, if everyone in Jaws worked for Jaws.”
• I, for one, was not familiar with the Stakhanovites, Soviet socialist workers with a focus on hard work and efficiency. Thanks, Succession: You make learning fun!
• Jess Watch: Would Jess watch Kendall’s awful international news programming ideas? “Uh, if it was on…totally.”
• The Kerry audition tape is the comedic gift that keeps on giving. Kendall: “She is doing…the shit…out of this news.”
• We’ve seen god knows how many different shades of Manipulative Logan over the years, but his speech to the ATN workers is a flavor we rarely get. You can see it hit the workers, but it’s hardly necessary: As Cox ramps up into it, it’s hard not to get swept up in the spirit. “You’re fucking pirates!”
• Everything about Connor and Willa’s rehearsal is weird, of course, but for some reason, the strangest detail for me is Willa’s mom being there.
• “We can drink, right? A little bachelor party for…POTUS scrotus?”
• Connor’s request for a bachelor party venue: “A real bar, with chicks. And guys who work with their hands, and grease, and sweat from their hands, and have blood in their hair.” Roman: “I don’t like these guys. They sound like a medical experiment gone wrong.”
• All of the Roy kids’ drink orders at the bar are deliberately obnoxious, but Shiv’s “The house red, do I dare?” actually manages to out-pretentious Connor’s Belgian weissbier.
• I love that Roman “being nice” to Connor just means saying the same horrible things, but in a slightly nicer tone. “I’m not saying your cum, I’m sure your cum is very washable…”
• The other big reveal tonight: Roman’s been texting with Logan ever since the birthday party. “It’s dick pics, anyway, he’s got a real taste for them now.”
• On second watch, it becomes clearer than Roman was probably angling for some kind of reconciliation with Logan all night; it’s why he leaks the details of the kids’ wobbling to Connor, and there are moments when he’s clearly prompting Logan to give the apologies Rome thinks might heal the rifts with Ken and Shiv. He really does want to fix it, poor kid.
• “Stop ganging up on me like you’re Lennon and McCartney, and I’m fuckin’ George. I’m John, motherfuckers. *points to Shiv and Kendall* Ringo. Yoko… He’s still Connor, but he won having drinks with us at an auction.”
• It’s always fascinating to see the expressions Logan makes when his kids actually score some leverage on him. “They’ve got some juice.”
• Connor, getting his karaoke dreams: “You think they have ‘Desperado’ by The Eagles?” (He ends up doing Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” instead, dialing deep into his infidelity fears.)
• Shiv and Kendall, to Kerry about her ATN gig: “Has he fucked you on that?”
  “That’ll happen, the fucking. But congratulations on losing your betrayal cherry.”
• This is, I think, the first time we get someone outright saying Logan hit Roman when he was kid, after years of implications. Roman’s heartbreaking response: “Oh, no, I mean…everyone hit me. I was fucking annoying.”
• Next week: The wedding of Connor Roy and Willa Ferreyra. Because what’s ever gone wrong at a Roy family wedding, right?