In what might be a basic description of every episode of Succession, a member of the Roy family has a terrible idea and no one is capable of talking that person out of it, but there was a really nice moment in the middle of the whole thing.
OK, arguably two members of the Roy family have a terrible idea, and no one can talk them out of it, but while both of these situations are embarrassing, one is degrading as well as embarrassing.
For the simply embarrassing decision, that’s Connor’s announcement for his presidential campaign. It’s a rambling bit of freeform thoughts where he basically says he is anti-tax and he isn’t going to be paying any more of them. That’s…that’s admitting to dodging the law while running for the highest office in the land, right?
Point is, Logan decides to dispatch Shiv to talk Connor out of that. Not only is Connor oblivious to her common sense reason–Connor is generally oblivious to everything outside of whatever shiny object currently holds his attention, so nothing new there–but she ends up seducing some guy for a one night stand while Tom is away in Hungary for the Waystar corporate retreat where Logan seems to be making an even worse decision.
See, Logan wants to buy out/merge with Pierce Global Media. PGB is classy, respected news compared to the more tabloid style of Waystar. Logan has tried to do this before. He has never succeeded. He figures that in a fight to keep the company in his hands, a merger would make Waystar too big to be taken over by outside forces. Everyone else more or less thinks this is a terrible idea.
Likewise, everyone else is too scared to tell him themselves. Shiv asked Tom to do it since she wasn’t going. Other executives asked him too. Tom, well, he knows this is a terrible idea since Logan is reaching high levels of paranoia and megalomania. Kendall is just doing what his father wants at this point, and Roman reaches out to a younger member of the Pierce family to see if there’s even a way to do this.
Kendall, of course, uses that against Roman, and Logan calls Roman a moron in front of, oh, everybody.
It doesn’t help that someone is writing a biography of Logan that, well, Logan wants squashed. Someone inside the company talked. That someone was Greg…accidentally.
Logan’s general inability to see the PGM idea is, well, terrible, causes him to psychologically bully and torture everyone over dinner, with no one willing to stand up to the old man, everyone stabbing each other in the back, and one man who honestly thinks he can’t leave the room to use a bathroom at first. “Boar on the floor” is a game Logan made up to depict three possible suspects as pigs, and two of them are Tom and Greg.
The mess is largely cleared first when Kendall tells the old man bluntly that no one likes the deal, and the fact there’s a dead boardmember out there that was probably the one who talked to the biographer. Logan is going ahead with the merger, and Greg is off the hook.
Probably.
Point is, Logan and Connor might have a lot more in common then they let on.
Oh, the nice moment? Greg confesses to Tom about his accidental revelations, and even though Tom could have easily ratted out Greg to save his own skin, he kept quiet. Is it possible Tom will say something later? Sure. But the mutual hell Logan put both of those guys through last night shows at least in this one small area, Tom might be made of sterner stuff, and he may actually care about the guy he set up as a patsy when he destroyed the Parks paperwork that proved there were a lot of bad things going on there. Knowing full well that Tom could still say something…I thought it was a nice moment in an otherwise ugly-yet-entertaining episode of Succession.
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