There will be a review of the Succession third, and last episode, “All the Bells Speak,” soon. This is when my plane crash will make me Europe’s weirdest king.
In the past, the castaways have tried and failed at building a raft to get away from Gilligan’s Island. A lot of the time, the Wire’s Major Crimes Unit comes close to solving Baltimore’s problems, but only to come up short and get a hollow victory at best. As time goes on, Logan Roy’s children will keep trying to get at the king of their family, but they’ll always miss each time.
We can talk about lowbrow or highbrow shows, but they’re both built on the same formula. Stories and characters may change over time, but some things have to stay the same. For example, Carrie Bradshaw loves designer shoes, and Walter White likes to blow up his enemies. For a show to be great, it needs to know how to follow a formula and say what it wants to communicate with that formula.
It’s been clear for a while that this season of Succession has been taking the show around in a circle in terms of storey. A crisis comes, Logan’s job is in jeopardy, and then everything works out for the nasty older man again and again and again. This should not be a long-term thing; it should be a pain. Although this is a show that’s always exciting and fun to watch, it still has a finger on the pulse of both its characters and the natural world they live in, which is both haunting and hilarious.
There’s “All the Bells Sing.” The season ends with a slight twist on a theme that has been done before, with all three of Kendall’s friends, Shiv and Roman, on the outs with Logan at the same time and Tom having out-played his wife to get himself and Cousin Greg seats at the table of whatever Waystar becomes under GoJo. It changes where each player is, but the game and Logan’s ability to play it better than anyone else around him stay the same.
On the other hand, does it even matter if the same thing repeatedly happens when the leading team of Jesse Armstrong and Mark Mylod write and direct the episodes? That’s why “All the Bells Sing,” which is one of the show’s best episodes, had so many things that Succession does well. Many of them were better than they’ve ever been.
Last week, there was a cliffhanger, but it turned out not to be that bad. We pick up where we left off this week. If Comfry is telling the truth, Kendall did pass out in the pool. The family isn’t going to look down on him because of this. Because he can’t push the rock up the hill, Sisyphus is stuck with the task. Each time he thinks he can get the rock to the top, he has to chase it down instead. His family is getting married again, and he’s not happy to be there. He feels like an outsider at the wedding, and cater waiters come and go, making him think about the late Andrew Dodds every time they come and go. This story has happened too often for him to believe that he’ll be the subject of a Vanity Fair profile. He’s been through this too many times to think that he’ll be the subject.
Now and then, even Greek mythology likes to use the same thing repeatedly.
Many people who watch Succession are still talking about the New Yorker profile about Jeremy Strong that came out last Sunday. It was great to see that reference in an episode that aired while so many people were talking about the New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong. Some people thought Brian Cox and Kieran Culkin wouldn’t have been so critical of Strong’s acting style and how difficult it can be to work with him if they thought he would still be on the show for Season Four. Instead, it looks like everyone already knew how they felt about the guy and that they were willing to put up with his annoying process to get good footage.
During the first half of the episode, Kendall sleepwalks. Strong plays Kendall as if he wishes Comfry hadn’t come along in time to pull him out of the water. Even though Logan has his first meeting with Lukas Matsson in person, adult business is in other places. GoJo now wants to buy Waystar, not merge as they had planned. As a result, Roman can’t get into the deal. He instead has to mess around with Shiv and Connor (who are both angry at being treated like half-brothers again) and then worry even more about Peter Munion’s plans for Caroline’s money.
In the middle of all this, there is a comic vignette that is always fun to watch. Willa’s response to a marriage proposal is the least romantic in history. She says, “Fuck it! How bad can it be? asks an excited Connor, who isn’t aware that it can and likely will be very bad indeed. Comfry and Greg are having “separate bedding” in Italy, which justifies Greg moving to the Contessa. Roman, on the other hand, calls Roman a “sexual pervert,” which gives Greg the upper hand in terms of words. There is a lot of sparkle in Nicholas Braun’s delivery of lines in this episode. Connor, Roman, and Shiv each come up with a different way to describe and think about Logan’s possibility of getting Kerry pregnant. On the other hand, Shiv is still very happy that Roman sent their father a dick picture.
You might not notice how down the show’s protagonist is for a while. The episode is so funny that it’s easy to forget. When Shiv and Roman start to think that Logan might sell the company, they realise that Kendall is an excellent person to have by their side again. But when they need his help with the business, he needs his brother and sister to cry on. Kendall finally tells them about his role in Dodds’ drowning in a mesmerising scene. The strategy meeting in the parking lot instead turns into a confession. It’s a little surprising that the man does not tell them how he helped Logan hide the truth.
When Shiv and Roman were together, they went up and down a lot. Suddenly, Kendall is in so much pain that they can’t even think about the possible sale of Waystar. Then, he tells them a storey that leaves them shocked. When Strong and Kendall are talking, Kendall’s pain is so natural that his voice sounds like a child. But look at how Culkin portrays Roman’s fear of being honest with his brother or finding a way to comfort him that isn’t making inappropriate jokes. He can’t do it, even though the fools cheer up Kendall from time to time. (No matter how different Strong and Culkin’s acting styles may be, the result can be pretty amazing.) Or watch Sarah Snook’s body change as Shiv gets impatient with Kendall because her career seems to be going down the tubes, and she doesn’t have time for another one of Ken’s breakdowns. When she realises how much pain he’s in, she decides to make Laird’s call even though it’s a difficult time for their family. For her, it’s hard to say no to the temptations of power and influence. She wants to care and sometimes does. Shiv places her fingers on the boy’s scalp, and Roman puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders. Kendall is sobbing on the asphalt as Roman and Shiv look on. They have spent most of the season apart, with very different, conflicting goals. Here, they are physically linked through Kendall’s pain and the others’ efforts to soothe it, and soon they will be spiritually linked by their plan to stage a coup and blow up the deal, which they will do together.
If this were The Wire, this would be when the MCU is about to kill Stringer Bell or when parts of the city government are considering letting Hamsterdam stay an unofficial zone where drug dealing isn’t illegal. This season, Kendall has come back to life. He feels like he can finally do the good thing that he didn’t do so well earlier in the season. When Roman saw Shiv, he agreed that Logan took a dick picture too far and won’t be considered for the throne. And Shiv is in her element. She is not only sure she can do it, but she also seems to think she will be first among equals when the dust settles after the fight. This is how it works:
Instead, it turns out that if you treat your husband like a turd stuck to the bottom of your shoe, he will find a way to make your life smell bad. When Tom finally accepts that Shiv doesn’t and won’t love him the way he wants her to and that she may even hate him, he makes his big move and joins Logan. Shiv thinks that Tom is a vital part of the plan. Remember how he told Kendall that he had never seen Logan gets fucked once? This is what he said, Kendall. Well, this time, he made sure that didn’t happen. He asked Cousin Greg to be part of this new deal with the devil. These two are the only love that doesn’t seem to be affected by the currents and eddies of the storey around them. Because they’re giving up their souls, “Boo, souls!”
During the long drive back to the war room, Logan bribed Caroline to change the divorce agreement and eliminate the power Logan thought his kids had over him. Tom, Logan’s No. 1 Boy, told him that Logan should do this, but Logan didn’t listen. For a short time, the scene looks like a negotiation. Instead, it turns out to be a loyalty test that Roman and the other people fail. Roman begs his father to change his mind when he realises how bad this will be for him. He offers only love as a way to get his father to back down. That doesn’t mean that Logan can be genuinely in love with anyone but himself and the idea of winning; we already know that. It’s not going to work, and even Roman knows it when he says it. Roman is kneeling in the parking lot, and Kendall, who isn’t in any worse shape than before, has his hands on Roman’s shoulder.
If we didn’t know that Armstrong and his team were already hard at work on Season Four, this would be the perfect way to end the show. Each child will likely try to get Daddy’s attention again when we come back, but from a greater distance than before. So it’s also a possibility that they’ll fight him from the outside or that Logan will gracefully retire rather than try to take over the company.
However, whether or not Succession comes up with a new song or keeps humming the old one, this is still a show that sings, especially at the show’s end. It was good.
Other thoughts:
In “Chiantishire,” there was also a cliffhanger about Gerri’s place in the company after Roman lost an item. It looks like this issue has been forgotten, in part because Logan needs to hire a lawyer. After all, the deal with GoJo changes all the time. It looks like she, Frank, and Karl will all be in a tight spot when the sale goes through, and maybe this comes back to bite her in the end. But for the time being, she’s alive and back in Logan’s good books, while her harasser is one of the new bad guys.
Finally, Hiam Abass has been so scarce this season that it was almost shocking to see Marcia at the wedding reception and learn that despite Logan’s increasingly public affair with Kerry, she still knows what’s going on behind the scenes. This year, the show didn’t have much room for a great character like this one.