The Roy kids have a sleepover and it does not go well.
This week’s episode of Succession picks up just hours from when we left off last week. Greg is having cold feet about his partnership with Kendall and although Greg isn’t “necessarily” a part of any of this, he is still desperate to get a lawyer and cover himself legally. This leads to a great phone conversation between Greg and Tom. I assume that these two will be on separate sides of the conflict for most of the season but I hope we still get these little interactions from time to time, because let’s be honest- we are all much more invested in the Greg/Tom relationship than the Tom/Shiv relationship.
Speaking of Shiv, as was hinted at in the last episode, she does accept Kendall’s invitation to meet, and so does Connor and Roman. For the majority of the episode, the Roy children are all together hashing out whether or not they are going to team up to kill their dad. These scenes between the kids produce some of the best Succession lines of all time so I would just like to point out some of my favourites.
Kendall saying “Shivvy” and just the general glee that Kendall has when each of the siblings arrives is really funny to watch, he really thinks his plan is coming together. This is in stark contrast to when each of them eventually declines his offer and he refers to Connor as “an irrelevant prick” and claims that Shiv is only valuable because “girls count double now, didn’t you know…it’s only your teets that give you any value”. There are moments toward the end of the episode where Ken truly goes full Logan and I can’t help but wonder if that will be his arch this season, slowly turning into his dad.
Kendall is really selling his vision of the future to his siblings this episode, he’s quoting Jay Z, making analogies to Alexander the Great, talking about the decline of the American Empire and how the Roy children can be out front when “information becomes more precious than water in the next one hundred years”. Ken has entered this zone where he is so in tune with the corporate speak bull shit that he seems to black out and go on these nearly incoherent ranks. It’s unclear if Kendall is actively using or if he genuinely believes that he is in fact “plastic jesus” as Shiv calls him but it’s thoroughly entertaining nonetheless.
Ken’s holier than now speechifying ultimately leads to nothing though as each of his siblings still won’t back him. This is the fatal flaw of the Roy children, at the end of the day they are all terrible people. Kendall calls out Shiv for thinking that she is a good person but it’s actually Kendall who is “the real her” and is actually trying to purge the evil from the company. In reality, all of these characters just want to be on top and it’s that desire to be on top that stops them from cooperating with each other and making any significant progress together.
Earlier in the episode, we witness maybe one of the only times on the show where a character was visibly hurt by an insult when Shiv goes at Roman and says “you can’t hide underneath the covers with mommy… you love showing your peepee to everyone but you know someday you’re actually gonna have to fuck something”. This seems to really affect Roman and he actually storms out of the room. He returns and makes a quip and everything seems fine but there have been a few moments in these first two episodes and at the end of last season where it seems like Roman is really starting to crack.
Roman’s defense mechanism is to make a joke about absolutely everything but he is a fundamentally flawed character. His relationship with Gerri has been interesting to watch unfold but this is the first time that someone has made an allusion to it openly and you can see that it shocks him, even momentarily. I wonder if Roman will continue to deteriorate throughout this season. It’s a small thing, but in these first two episodes, Roman’s hair has been very messy, and he seems paler than usual. This could just be due to the jetlag and the flying around the world or it could be a physical representation of this character’s deteriorating mental state.
We don’t get many scenes with Logan this episode but we do see him reconnect with Marsha. Logan refuses to directly admit to any wrongdoing but he does say that he loses focus from time to time, I suppose that’s as close to an apology as you’re gonna get from Logan Roy. However, it seems like Marsha is taking advantage of the situation to get back into the swing on things and secure her position in the family, make sure her kids are taken care of, and that she is fully integrated in the trust. Marsha was on the sidelines for most of season two and I’m so glad she’s back. She’s a character that carries so much weight and she’s so imposing but we also don’t know anything about her so she’s a total wildcard.
It’s also interesting to note that Marsha floats the idea to Logan to tell people about Kendall’s situation in England from season 1. This is the second time this season that they have mentioned the incident in the show. Kendall made a joke about killing someone last week. That is definitely going to come into play at some point.
We get just a tiny bit of Stewy in this episode and as always he’s amazing. He sends a literal trojan horse to Kendall’s apartment and I was genuinely disappointed that nobody cracked that thing open like a piñata.
I have to say I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t get a Roy kids team up, I think it would have been fun to see them try to cooperate for a few episodes until things inevitably fell apart, but it looks like Shiv is going to finally be entering the company full time using Gerri as human shield, which puts Roman in a bit of an uncomfortable position. I think after two episodes that both take place over the course of a few days, we are going to see a little bit of a time jump next week. This has been an excellent start to the season, now that the battle lines are firmly drawn we might get a bit of a cool down period, but I suspect that things are gonna get bloody before all is said and done.
