To talk about the smile we have to start at the beginning. At the top of the episode, we find Logan Roy (Brian Cox) en route to Venice to shore up yet another shareholder in the battle to retain control of his company. Even as he seeks to handle the situation, he’s inundated with calamity: calls from skittish shareholders, a notepad with a working list of chum to throw overboard should the need arise.
From some European coffee shop not so much tucked off to the side of the highway as it is planted just out of reach, he video chats with his colleague about the situation. Reflected in the video call of the phone, Logan looks old and tired; his face lingers near the edge of the screen, at once like a skittish child being reprimanded and an old man struggling with new tech. After he hangs up, digesting the news that some section of shareholders believes that he would be the best offering, he looks winded, defeated, blindsided. The camera keeps him framed against the highway, the world seeming to whiz past. This is an emperor, truly exposed and vulnerable, in touch with the real world for what feels like the first time.
Succession is filled with rich people making their own problems and then shackling themselves to them, allowing their obscene wealth to guide them and confine them. When the show started, it was about siblings clamoring and climbing over one another to become CEO of their Murdoch-like media empire, after their father had a stroke. In its two seasons it has proved to be much sharper than just that, an astute examination of disparate class politics of the 2010s and work-life integration. Just as Logan’s children will someday inherit his empire, they’ve also inherited veneers of wealth and misery, all of which they have to reconcile within this hour of TV.
The roadside disbelief he finds himself in at the start of “This is Not for Tears” — the second season closer, is a product of his own making, things we’ve seen formed bit by bit throughout the series. By tuning in week to week a viewer can see the asinine bubble of the obscenely wealthy. But taken as a whole it’s a damning portrait of how money may always win, but it will most certainly corrupt. Now what has gone around seems to be coming right back around, all the way to the top.
“This is Not for Tears” is all about this sort of blurring of lines between the personal and business. As Shiv (Sarah Snook) says, it’s not a stretch to see a Roy “family mini break” also include the chief financial officer. When Logan arrives he says hello by barking at three men (including one of his sons) for a private conference before asking them how their hostage situation left them. Whenever the children feel themselves getting too intimate they deflect by asking about the congressional hearings or business dealings they’ve got going on. But the eye of Succession’s cameras is precise: the audience sees their furrowed brows and quick glances.
For Logan, the only defense left is the truth. When the Roy family and their inner circle are finally settled on the superyacht to discuss how to handle the escalating PR crisis around their cruise sector crimes (not to mention the mounting congressional probe, and an attempt at a hostile takeover), he says simply that he believes he would be the best person to step down and take the heat. Quickly everyone’s face scrunches as they rush in with a “no!” — and from there it’s hot potato with multimillion dollar buyouts.
Succession’s story depends on granular details accruing in a towering pile until they obscure the sun. By buying into Logan’s martyr act, he has swamped them, pulling everyone further into the quicksand of his “blood sacrifice,” only then actually endangering their own positions. Clarity, logic, family — every buzzword serves as an anchor that sinks them deeper and deeper into the muck of Logan’s self-idolizing logic.
As with all things Succession, no detail is out of place. Each feature is there to make the storytelling that much more explosive, propelling the episodic beats to a larger, season-long blitzkrieg. It seems revealing then that Logan only selectively removes his sunglasses, projecting an intimacy only when it is convenient to him — Facetiming shareholders, fueling the talk of sacrifice, all but begging the opposition to call off their attack.
The most ruthless of these moments is when he turns his gaze on Kendall (Jeremy Strong). His second-born son has been on a tight leash during season two, brought to heel in exchange for a coverup of his vehicular manslaughter. This season, Succession has seen him beaten down, embarrassed, robotic in his unwavering support of Logan. In return, Kendall’s secret stays hidden, and Logan uses him as an emotional punching bag. When his eyes search for some solace following their failed settlement, he’s met with a cold gaze from Logan, impenetrable behind sunglasses. Logan will only look him clear in the eye when he guts him, deciding it will be Kendall who takes the blame for the scandal.
But Kendall has his own armor. When he leaves the yacht for the press conference to take the blame, he sheds the soft earth tones he’s been wearing this season, and leaves behind the linen. When he stabs his father in the back, it’s in a sleek black suit, slippery and unpierceable. When the “But” comes in his statement, we see Kendall as Logan sees him: through the television, with eyes that seemed trained on Logan yet could follow you throughout the room.
It comes at the end of a season that kept the audience’s eyes on Shiv’s ascension — seemingly switching to her perspective in the opening credits, making her the killer that her father envisioned someday taking the reins. Everything she has done this season, missteps and all, is in service of him as the almighty. In “This is Not for Tears” she takes a true risk by asking her father to spare her husband, a move that she surely knows is potentially fatal to her claim to the omnipotent leader title of Waystar Royco.
But the dark truth of Succession is that Logan is not a mastermind. Succession seems to posit that none of the wealthy men at the top of the oligarchy we know could be — hell, they may not even be that good at their jobs; their wealth just allows them a greater leeway than we could ever imagine. His children know it, in their soberer moments; Roman almost comes right out and says it when he asks his siblings if they can just talk (and is interrupted by Logan’s helicopter landing — details matter!). Succession has always been about the weakening of Logan Roy, starting with his heart attack in the pilot, and ending here, with him more exposed than we’ve ever seen him.
When Kendall betrays him on live TV, Cox is as rapt as we are. He slowly hushes Roman, gives a cautious look to Shiv, and, finally, magnificently, lets a slow smile creep over his face, almost Mona Lisa-like in its private joy. This emperor has no clothes, but damned if he doesn’t appreciate a slippery move. The game is on.