“A Maybe Maybe Maybe Situation”
Well, well, well.
We are back in the arms of those crazy Roys again. Last we saw our favorite gang of contemptible media oligarchs, the kids were storming Logan’s office to stage a coup, a pass intercepted by Tom’s newly ruthless nature.
I would be remiss not to mention that this is the last season of everyone’s favorite King Lear remix, so there’s going to be a ticking clock running in the background of this season. Dramatic stakes, people!
“The Munsters” starts in Logan’s Upper East Side apartment at his birthday party, following the trend of Succession anchoring its episodes around family events, particularly birthdays and weddings. We are starting in the show’s wheelhouse, gang. Connor and Willa are there, but no one else from the family is.
That’s because Shiv, Kendall, and Roman are all in LA, putting together a pitch deck for their new startup “TheHundred”, described by an offputtingly chipper Kendall as “Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets the New Yorker”. The kids are all-in on this new media endeavor, waiting to meet with investors for their “high-calorie info snacks”.
Back in New York, Kerry (introducing herself as Logan’s “friend, assistant, and advisor”) is chewing out Greg for bringing a date, Bridget, to Logan’s birthday party. With an impending purchase by Waystar Royco of Pierce Global Media in the cards, the Logan Roy apparatus is particularly sensitive to espionage. Kerry’s sticking with the assumption that Bridget is a corporate spy. Shoutout to Zoë Winters for carrying Kerry’s transformation from generally unassuming assistant to full-fledged lieutenant, embracing all the piss and vinegar required of a young woman who is not-so-secretly keeping an octogenarian’s media empire from falling apart at the seams.
Shiv receives a call from Tom that he just had a drink with Naomi Pierce (Kendall’s ex, remember?) and wants to make her aware, in the name of optics, of the situation. Shiv assumes that they were hooking up, but it is apparent that this was pure corporate espionage. Shiv and Tom, even though they aren’t even in the same state, clearly hate each other deeply at this point. Tom no longer receives the blows of Shiv’s cruelty, he volleys them right back. He has become just as ruthless and empty as she has always been, and she can’t stand it.
Very quickly, the episode turns into knotty business dealings, as the kids consider making a play at purchasing PGM to cut Logan off at the knees. Roman, horny for the new media horizons of TheHundred, is resistant, but Kendall and Shiv like the idea of staking a claim in the establishment. As Kendall puts it, “New Gen Roys… have a fucking song to sing”.
Tom and Greg finally reunite at the birthday party, with a brazen, cheeky Greg reaffirming their commitment to each other as “The Disgusting Brothers”. Tom casts aspersions about Bridget, based on the size of her bag and her consumption of canapés, but Greg is really in love, he says. Kerry and Logan get some alone time, and he is just not feeling the birthday celebration.
In a very normal exchange, Logan asks Kerry, “Why is everybody so fucking happy?” He also wishes a Cardinal or his beloved fascist Jared Mencken would show up. He doesn’t want to call his kids, so he leaves his own birthday party with Colin, his security detail, and settles in at a diner. He has a simmering existential breakdown, telling Colin that he is his “best pal” and asking him the equally normal question, “What are people?” Classic birthday thoughts! I get that way too sometimes, Loge.
To him, people are just “economic units” and “pygmies” that he towers over, caught in a dense thicket of market systems that people like him control. He also wonders about the afterlife, but gives up before getting too far into this. Remember, this is the final season!!! “We don’t know, we can’t know, but I’ve got my suspicions,” he muses.
While he’s out, Kerry calls Roman and asks him to consider calling Logan. It dawned on me here, do the kids even know it’s his birthday? Do they care? Should they care? I have been revisiting season 2, a process that lead me to realize that Logan is more correct about his children than I’d like to give him credit for. He doesn’t know how to express it, obviously, but he is practically begging them to build something for themselves. The problem is that he could only get them to do it by pushing them away. Roman will only call if he gets a text from Daddy first.
Greg emerges from the recesses of the apartment, having just had sex with Bridget in a spare bedroom. This is later downgraded to “a bit of a rummage” in the bathing suit area, but Tom gets to chew Greg out, informing him that the whole pad is under CCTV surveillance that Logan will be watching later.
Despite Roman’s protests, the kids are now all in on buying out the Pierces, putting TheHundred on ice and flying to Nan Pierce’s West Coast residence. Naomi, sporting a Princess Diana haircut and huge sunglasses, answers the door and informs Kendall that Nan no longer wants to meet with them.
The word gets out to Logan, who assembles his squad of boomers (plus Tom and Greg) to his war room to start negotiating. Gerri wisely decides to stay out of it, taking notes and pulling a Meredith Marks. Karl is forced to break the news to Logan, caramels in hand, that the kids are the rival bidders. For perhaps the first time in the show’s history, we have to watch Logan think on his feet as he prepares for battle with his own children.
Nan Pierce emerges to meet with the New Gen Roys, informing them that they have missed the train, as her main bidder (Logan) has made a comfortable offer. Kendall wisely tells her that Logan will likely gut the company and make it ATN II, something he and his siblings just won’t do. Remember, the Pierces are libs!!!!! It’s clear that she just wants the payout for the family, alluding to a string of crises that are making them house-poor. Nonetheless, Kendall appeals to her pride.
Nan asks Shiv about the potential conflict of interest involved in her marriage to Tom, President of ATN. With the confidence of a 7th grader saying they’ve totally done weed before, she tells Nan that she’s actually getting a divorce, a surprise to her siblings. If this isn’t the end for Shom (my couple name for Shiv and Tom), then what is?
Or should it be Stim? Anyway.
The money game goes back and forth for a while, until Logan makes Tom call Shiv on his behalf to figure out the deal more or less directly. The kids end up with an offer of ten billion dollars, which is “something to think about” for the Pierces. Nan informs Tom that they are no longer entertaining bidders, and the deal closes. Logan talks to Shiv, Kendall, and Roman via Tom one last time, accusing them of stealing his ideas and labeling them “morons”.
Late that night, Shiv returns to the apartment she shares with Tom in New York, disrupting Mondale the dog’s snooze and waking Tom up. He is so so sleepy, but asks her to talk anyway. She accuses him of fucking models while she has been working (they are currently having a trial separation for their open marriage), and he stops her right there.
“Do you really want to get into a full accounting of all the pain in our marriage?”, he asks. To face her own cruelty would be too much, so she dodges it and struggles to regain the upper hand. Tom gets his digs in, offering that Mondale no longer recognizes her scent, but she effectively dumps him. For the final time, he wants to talk about it, but she doesn’t. He offers to get it up, for old times’ sake, and she shuts him down. She’s about to kick him out of the apartment for the night, despite the fact that he was already sleeping, but ends up offering him a spot on the bed, on top of the covers. “We gave it a go,” she murmurs, drifting off to sleep.
Logan sits in his armchair, drinking whiskey and watching ATN. He hates what he sees, so he calls Cyd and tells her to get her act together. She’s on it, she insists, and he hangs up before she can finish.
Logan is starting to see it all start to slip away. But, is it? Or will he perennially have the upper hand?
Phew, Jesse Armstrong has really tricked us into watching and ENJOYING an hour and change of corporate maneuvers, mergers, and acquisitions. It’s kind of like when you’re flipping around on TV in the middle of the summer and you get really sucked into some obscure sport you barely understand. We don’t come to Succession to understand the legalese.
For example, I didn’t write about the GoJo acquisition at all in this recap because I don’t really remember how it fits in to all of the other deals. But, Alexander Skarsgard is coming back in a few weeks, and I‘ll get it by then.
An honorable mention is due to Presidential Candidate Connor Roy, who is considering spending 100 million dollars in order to keep his name in the conversation, despite polling at one percent. He heartbreakingly begs Willa to make the wedding bombastic and public in order to get “huge savings from paid media”. Willa resists the hoopla, but Connor is a Roy at the end of the day. He wants to make a scene. What if he wins, though?
Logan’s insistence on a roast battle between him, Karl, and Frank was charming, even though it ended in Greg’s father getting dragged through the mud. But good on Greg for telling his great-uncle that he’s mean, scaring him, and asking where his kids are!
I really appreciated the way that this episode widened the scope among the kids, as the show has typically focused squarely on Kendall while siloing his siblings’ stories.
Queen Gerri was a little quiet in this episode, but I’m sure the lion will roar again in the coming weeks. I was also intrigued by the degree to which Tom had to serve as an intermediary between Logan and his children, despite (or given) the fact that he and Shiv are barely talking. He has become such a soulless functionary that he has no choice but to pass along messages that both sides are too proud to share directly.
Speaking of, Shiv and Tom’s big bedroom scene made me want to throw up. Contemptible, I say!!!
Favorite things:
- Shiv rocking the French doors at Nan’s house, twice.
- “Bingo, bongo, hit that bango.”
- The very different décor styles of the episode’s three locations.
- “Nobody tells jokes anymore, do they?”
Anyway, that’s episode one for you all. I’m excited to go on this journey again, for the last time. It’s been excellent, Roys.
This recap, by the way, has some exciting things planned!!! Guest reviewers? Audio? Video? Who knows! All I know is that Kendall in a good mood weirds me out.
I want to hear your thoughts! Leave some comments about what you thought of the episode and some of your predictions for this season. Will Greg and Tom finally kiss? Or will the creators stop short of giving the people what they want?
See you next week!!
