Hear Me Out: ‘Succession’ just delivered the greatest TV episode of all time
The death of Logan Roy, the hulking business brute at the centre of Succession, has long overshadowed the celebrated HBO show. Ever since the first episode, when Logan suffered a heart attack and put the fate of his self-made media conglomerate in jeopardy, his death has felt like an inevitability, with his sons, daughters and closest business associates playing a figurative game of musical chairs around him, unsure of when the music would cease and the goliath would fall dead.
Three seasons and two episodes later and the looming inevitably finally became a reality, with Logan collapsing in a bathroom on board an aeroplane and passing away after extensive CPR. Unlike the grand pomposity of the character himself, Logan’s death was rather undignified and totally anticlimactic, passing away in a businesslike *poof* without the fanfare of melodrama, in what might be one of the greatest TV deaths of all time.
Episode three of the final season of Succession began with the same majestically constructed tension as any other, with siblings Roman, Kendall and Shiv preparing to attend their brothers’ wedding whilst business duties keep their minds logistically purring. Meanwhile, Tom, Shiv’s estranged husband, is accompanying Logan on a flight to Sweden in order to meet Lukas, the prospective buyer of the media conglomerate.
The makeup of the entire episode shifts, however, when Tom calls Roman to say that Logan has collapsed and that he was being given intense CPR. Panicking, Roman gets Kendall and the pair of brothers to try to understand the situation over the phone, with the camera refusing to cut to Tom on the plane, forcing the viewer into the panicked mindset of the siblings trying to separate fact from fiction, especially when the information is coming from the mouth of a notorious liar.
Indeed, there is much distance between Logan’s death and the rest of the characters. Occurring a mile high, his death couldn’t be more physically distant from his close family, all of whom are attending his son’s wedding on a lavish boat in New York City. After he gets onboard the aeroplane, the viewer doesn’t even get the pleasure of seeing Logan one last time before his death, with his face being obscured for the remainder of the episode, separated even from his business associates who try and stitch together a report in an adjacent part of the plane.
The steady realisation that the towering pillar of Logan Roy may have fallen came like the overcast clouds of Connor’s wedding, with the facade of each character’s act slowly falling with each passing moment. Tom puts the phone next to the relative corpse of Logan, leading to a handful of poignant moments as Kendall reveals he “can’t forgive” his father whilst Connor approaches the news with apparent relief: “He never even liked me”.
Despite the death of Logan Roy being a looming inevitability throughout four seasons of the show, writer Jesse Armstrong and director Mark Mylod found a way to make the death of their leading man a totally jaw-dropping moment. Happening with the same matter-of-fact frankness as the same death of any other real-life entertainment titan, the cold distance to which one of TV’s greatest characters dies is a testament to the ambition, innovation and sheer storytelling grandeur of Succession.
‘Connor’s Wedding’ plays out like a Greek tragedy, with deceit, backstabbing, and self-interest bubbling away whilst a moment of tragic importance becomes merely ‘another obstacle’. Some treat the moment with the emotional gravity it deserves, others can’t cope with the morbid surrealism of the situation, and then a stiff-upper-lip is observed by the business elite while each and every of the business pawns is plotting their next move to get one ahead of their opponent.
Succession just pulled the rug from underneath us and has set up one of the most enticing season-long finales of modern television.
