SPOILERS from this week’s Succession will be found below.
Succession‘s handling of the Logan Roy situation happened in a way that few could have expected. The current HBO juggernaut decided to go full “Red Wedding” and actually kill Logan in the “Connor’s Wedding” episode. This took the characters and the audience by surprise, especially since Tom sounded suspiciously like he was awkwardly executing a plan during his initial plane-bound phone call to the Roy siblings. And all of this went down after Logan pulled one of his most “Logan” moves (having Roman fire Gerri after the whole d*ck-pic situation) of the entire show so far.
One might wonder about a few of the decisions made for this episode, like why the Greglets got buried (though they subsequently rose on Easter) or why the show had to say goodbye to its patriarch so early on in the final season. We still have another seven episodes to go, after all, but this shouldn’t be too shocking. Given that the show should deliver upon its promise and tell us who succeeds Logan Roy to lead Waystar Royco, the answer should be expected to be a complex one. It can’t possibly be a cut-and-dried affair, and I sure hope that one of the many threads includes Roman trying to figure out if he should let the world know that Dad promised the conglomerate to him, with no one believing him while also hating him. That should be fun.
Will Gerri’s firing stick, as well? She’s already helping to clean up the pieces, and we can hypothesize all day about what will happen — and hope that, by some miracle, Brian Cox finished filming and then popped over to Fear The Walking Dead to play Walker Logan — or we can consider what Cox recently said on HBO’s Succession-focused podcast, via Hollywood Reporter:
“I knew something would have to be done in order to complete the show. And I knew he would probably have to die,” said Cox, referencing Logan’s health being a focus since the very first episode, while also praising Armstrong and his decision to end the show on his terms. “I didn’t quite expect it to happen as early as it did, but then we were locked into the fact that each episode is one day, which we haven’t done in the seasons before. So he dies on day three. I was fine about it, as long as I was getting paid (laughs).”
In other words, the one-episode-covering-a-day structure helps the decision make even more sense, and we can either be sad that Logan Roy is gone, or we can look forward to seven more episodes of a truly great TV show.
HBO’s ‘Succession’ airs on Sundays at 9:00pm EST.
(Via Hollywood Reporter)