The Tragedy of Terminal Tom

After a couple of weeks of table-setting, it seems the games of Succession season 3 have officially begun. Both sides have their soldiers in place, and Shiv’s letter was the opening shot.

Kendall is bragging about “manifesting” the FBI raid in his disgusting Hudson Yards apartment (of course he lives there) when he hops on a conference call with the whole WaystarRoyco gang, dubbing himself “Little Lord Fuckleroy”. The impending shareholder meeting looms large, and a last-ditch effort to bring Kendall back is underway. He doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Greg is called in to meet with Logan about his position in all of this. Our boy is playing ball! Or maybe not, but I think he knows what’s going on. This is likely the first time Logan and Greg have had any sort of substantial conversation, and we see Logan put the charm on for the first time this season. He gets Greg tipsy on a rum and Coke and tries to get him to sign something, but Greg backs out at the last possible moment.

Roman dredges up a story from Kendall’s bachelor party where they paid a “hobo” in New Orleans to tattoo Kendall’s initials on his forehead, one of the more depraved acts done in the name of a good time on this already troubling show. Roman wants to leak it in order to make “Wokeahontas” look bad, but Gerri wants to keep it under wraps.

Finally, Shiv is chafing under the collar Logan has put on her, attempting moves and getting blocked at every possible goal. She meets with Connor, who is looking to bolster his work experience before another presidential bid (this fucking guy). She offers him a wine-tasting show, which he balks at. He lets slip that he has a “megaphone” and can raise a fuss like Kendall about Logan being a “nasty, racist, neglectful individual”. Rich coming from the man who has done literally nothing but profit off of his daddy’s money.

But the set piece of the episode takes place outside of the corporate environment. Josh Aaronson, a minority shareholder, needs to meet with both Kendall and Logan for a temperature check on the future of the company. No one wants him to jump ship to Sandy and Stewy, so Father and Son trek out to Josh’s compound (filmed on a real property in Wainscott, NY) in two separate planes and helicopters in matching black ballcaps. The family’s carbon footprint makes Shaq look like a Rockette.

Josh Aaronson, played with an eerie calm by Adrien Brody, had initially asked for the meeting to be in the city, but asked them to come to him last-minute because his daughter had a fever. We later see her jumping in the pool, so I guess she’s fine.

It becomes apparent that Josh is playing some durational game with the Roy men. He leaves them in the living room together while he goes to get something (glaring silence) and makes them go for a walk around his property (snippy insults). The Roy Boys have to talk to each other and play civil, but Logan gaslights Kendall for his past drug use and Ken continues to position himself as the moral authority while also dunking on his elderly father’s inability to walk long distances. Josh keeps leaving for phone calls, which I don’t think are real, and then starts to lead them back to the house “the quick way, [which] sometimes takes longer”.

As they walk and Nicholas Britell’s score ominously drops out, Josh’s game becomes clear; he is testing Logan’s health and pride, and putting Kendall in a position where he has to care for his father. Both men fail, as Logan repeatedly refuses Josh’s helpful offers of a golf cart to take them back to the house, and Kendall refuses to aid his father. Logan eventually has a minor episode and they head back to the house. Word gets out immediately, Roman attempts to shame Kendall (an impossible task at this point), and Logan tries to sweep it under the rug.

Back at the office, Tom is totally losing his mind. His offer of putting himself under the bus for the Roys is looking like a check he will need to cash, so he flips through a binder of detention options for when he does, in fact, go down. Shiv, his wife and now superior (a situation that he doesn’t feel threatened by whatsoever) offers very little in the way of comfort, so he mosies on over to Greg’s new windowless office for a game of insult dodgeball.

This is where we really see that Tom is unraveling, as he opens up to Greg in a way that he never could with Shiv. Greg has received a huge basket of “courtesy pastries”, presumably from Logan. Tom sees Greg’s leverage here, and lets him know that he can get anything he wants from WaystarRoyco. But our man just wants to run one of the theme parks in Buffalo and make his way up the Parks ladder (get this man on Podcast: The Ride already!), not a hint of the depraved Elizabethan ambition of everyone else in the family.

Tom pivots, telling Greg the tale of Nero and Sporus, the Roman emperor and his favorite slave boy. Nero killed his wife and had the boy castrated and married him. And they lived happily ever after. And with the most conviction seen yet from Tom, he locks eyes with Greg and tells him, “I’d castrate you and marry you in a heartbeat.” My brain can’t even begin to comprehend this beat on levels of metaphor, so I’m going to take it at face value. He then asks Greg to wrestle him to the ground, ridiculing him for not wanting to grapple. Crushes make you go crazy!

While Shiv is busy trying to get Mark Ravenhead, an ATN anchor, to put some pressure on the President as a protest against the corporate investigation, Tom still needs reassurance. He pleads with her to consider their ice-cold glasses of white wine when they get home from work, contrasting their Sancerre with the toilet wine he will probably drink while locked up. The best running joke in this episode is everyone’s half-hearted reassurances that Tom won’t be going to prison. We’ll see.

Back on Long Island, Logan and Kendall both think they have Greg, but it seems that Josh is really the boss in this meeting. He knows the Roys work for the shareholders, but he also knows they underestimate him. His torturous little game was a final test of the family’s fortitude. The final result is revealed when Kendall sees Stewy embrace Josh from the window of his private plane.

Divided the Roys fall.

This episode revolved around two big themes for me: the company and family’s enabling of bigotry, and the unraveling of Tom Wambsgans.

In each of the subplots, a different element of the family’s prejudice and depravity is highlighted: classism with the tattooed “hobo”, misogyny with Logan limiting Shiv (as well as Karl and Frank’s refusal to listen to her), and antisemitism and racism with Logan’s conduct on Josh’s island. As Connor points out, the company culture of “no Jews, blacks, or women above the fourth floor” hasn’t really gone anywhere, it’s just been airbrushed.

And, like many girlbosses, Shiv is complicit in that system. I’d like to think that Logan’s dilution of her influence (as well as the Nirvana fiasco last week) is going to get her to jump to Kendall’s side, but the whole operation is clearly in disarray.

And Poor Tom. He’s lost his ever-loving mind, his wife/boss won’t console him, and his best boy Greg is rising like a supernova before his very eyes. But Matthew MacFadyen brought it this week, delivering some of the most insane dialogue in television history with relative ease.

Speaking of Poor Tom, the King Lear parallels were underlined and bolded this week. Except, while it’s typically Logan playing Lear, this week it was Josh soliciting love and praise from Logan and Kendall. What a ride!

Special shout-outs to Gerri hitting the dating scene and Roman’s insane jealousy, Kendall’s machine-learning technobabble, and Kieran Culkin’s pure depravity in Roman’s meeting with the man from New Orleans.

Side note: did Greg sign that paperwork off camera? Or was Logan bluffing?

This was a big weekend for our friends, as Kieran hosted SNL, Nick Braun made it into Gawker, and I saw Adrien Brody in The French Dispatch (good film!!!).

The shareholder meeting is next week… someone’s gonna get punched, I think.