Succession S4 Episode 3 Recap: Roy Family Power Rankings After THAT Episode
Contains spoilers for "Succession" Season 3 Episode 4, "Connor's Wedding"
Well. It's safe to say this was the bombshell episode that "Succession" fans have been waiting for, perhaps since the show's very first episode. The king is dead, and his court is in chaos. The episode opens innocently enough; Connor (Alan Ruck) is having his sad, bombastic wedding to Willa (Justine Lupe), who seems to vaguely hate her future husband, and most of the characters are gathered to celebrate the couple's nuptials. This doesn't go as planned, though, because this is "Succession."
When Logan's three other children — Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) — get a call from Shiv's ex-husband and Logan's (Brian Cox) right hand man Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), things go downhill quickly. Logan, who was about to take off on his private plane to head to Sweden to deal with Waystar Royco buyer Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skärsgard), has gotten, according to Tom, "very sick." The remainder of the episode is, to put it lightly, tense. (If you have high blood pressure, maybe don't watch it.) As Logan dies with the flight attendants desperately performing chest compressions on the billionaire, his children listen on the other end of the phone, grappling with some wildly complicated emotions over their cruel, often absent, larger-than-life father.
Let's get right into it. Here are this week's Roy family power rankings, from least to most powerful.
Connor
Is anyone — really, anyone in the entire world — surprised that, for the third week in a row, Connor still has absolutely no power at all? The episode is literally named after his wedding and he's still barely in it. Connor is ornamental; he's of absolutely zero importance. His fiancée still barely wants to be around him, to the point where he asks her, on the day of their wedding, if she's only with him because he's rich. He spends most of his screen time having a fit about the wedding cake and not wanting to see its "internal qualities."
The real kicker when it comes to Connor, though, is that his three half-siblings don't even bother to go and find him when they get the news that their father is dying on the other end of the phone. Connor doesn't register as a Roy as far as the rest of his family is concerned. His father, right before he shuffles off this mortal coil, is prepared to skip his eldest son's wedding for a business deal; his siblings never give him a second thought; he acknowledges that he never made his dad proud; his hang-up with the cake is because his mother went into mental health treatment when he was a kid and he was given cake to help deal with it.
Ultimately, Connor's also the grossest of his siblings — he goes ahead and has his wedding knowing his dad died — with like, four people in attendance. Connor is awful, and he's probably doomed to sit at the bottom of this ranking forever.
Cousin Greg
Cousin Greg doesn't do a whole lot in "Connor's Wedding," but considering that he spent the season's first two episodes royally pissing off both Logan and his assistant slash lover Kerry (Zoe Winters), he's not in a good spot. He's still allied with Tom, who will be jockeying for power alongside Logan's kids and top executives, but he has absolutely zero pull in any real way.
Greg's most important moment, if you can even call it that, comes as the episode closes its chapter, when Tom tells him to get to the office and delete a folder on his computer called "Logistics." Greg, as he usually is, is just utterly hapless, a comically tall fool who stands on the fringes of important situations and reacts like a simpleton. It's possible that he could have a pretty huge role as the series comes to a close, but for right now, Greg remains on the periphery; but when all is said and done in this situation, he's not quite as unimportant as Logan's actual firstborn son Connor.
Kendall
This is a power ranking, not a review, but it still feels important to note that Jeremy Strong's performance in this episode is nothing short of breathtaking. (He's matched by Snook and Culkin, who more than pull their weight as well.) Kendall, along with his siblings, gets the shocking news over the phone that his father is dying, and to say that Kendall has complicated feelings towards Logan is a wild understatement. Kendall has seen his father support him, betray him, abandon him, and save him at various turns, and just like his siblings, he doesn't quite know how to feel about losing his dad.
The really gut wrenching moment for Kendall is when he's holding the phone, ostensibly speaking to his unresponsive father, tells him he "can't forgive" him. It's not clear which of Logan's hurtful actions is what drives Kendall to say this, but it's real, and it's deeply sad. Kendall also makes the decision to not see his father's body at the end of the episode; whether or not he'll regret this decision remains to be seen. Kendall's not powerless, but he's also not powerful — far from it. He's a broken shell, and without his father, he'll undoubtedly struggle.
Shiv
Shiv is the last of the Roy siblings — save for Connor, who barely counts — to find out what's going on with her dad, but her reaction is explosive; as she tells her siblings, she "can't have this." Openly sobbing and telling her dad she can't handle him dying, Shiv is the most emotional of the three, trying to handle herself in the wake of her father's death. Despite being overcome with emotion when she sees Tom, letting him embrace her, she still manages to brush him off, seemingly remembering that her soon-to-be ex-husband is now her enemy.
She's also the sibling who pulls herself together and delivers a statement to the press as the episode comes to an end, showing that she can still access her most composed side even in the worst times. Shiv isn't particularly powerful in these harrowing moments, but she helps to keep her family together, forming a tightly knit unit with Kendall and Roman as they grapple with Logan's death. (Again, Connor does not count.) Shiv is still capable of wielding real power, and she also delivers one of the episode's most devastating lines, saying she wishes it had been their mother instead of Logan.
Roman
The biggest reason that Roman ranks above his two non-Connor siblings in this power ranking is that, before Logan's death, he has allied himself with the patriarch once again. In the previous episode, he was asked to deal with Matsson alongside Logan, and as this one opens, Logan calls his middle child and asks him to also fire Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) while he's at Connor's wedding, for good measure. Roman also, weirdly, handles the news of his father's rapid decline and illness with the most maturity; he's more responsive than Kendall and ever-so-slightly less emotional than Shiv.
Roman, unlike Kendall, decides to see Logan's body on the plane before the mogul is removed and taken away by authorities. (This doesn't mean he's more powerful, but again, it feels like the mature choice to say one last goodbye to his father.) Logan was right about Roman being able to handle Matsson when others couldn't, so it feels likely that he'll be able to keep some peace where the Swede is concerned. Roman's savvy; nobody should count him out of the battle that's coming after Logan's death.
Tom
It's tough to say where Tom will land in future power rankings, but one thing brings him to the top of this one: he's the one by Logan's side when the man dies. Logan's own children aren't with him when he passes away, but Tom — the man who screwed over his own wife to get into the billionaire's good graces and once offered to go to prison as a scapegoat for Logan — is the one holding the phone next to the man's ear while his kids try to say goodbye.
As he says to Greg, though, Tom is now in a seriously precarious position. His protector is gone, but he also wants people to know that he was with Logan when he died. Tom is so thirsty for power that even his grief at Logan's passing feels completely manufactured, but his lack of genuine emotional connection could make him more powerful than any trueborn Roy. Tom is dangerous, savvy, and knows the Roys way too well. He's still a major threat, even without Logan's protection.
Logan
Even in death, there's no question that Logan is the most powerful person in this episode. Logan is only in a few scenes — he tells Roman, over the phone, to fire a top-ranking female executive at Waystar Royco that Roman famously sexually harassed for an extended period of time — and he boards his plane to Sweden, intent on handling Matsson ahead of the deal that will sell Waystar Royco GoJo. When he gets sick, he isn't seen again except for an overhead shot where he's half-clothed on the floor of his plane, receiving chest compressions that, ultimately, don't save his life.
Logan Roy will probably be even larger and more important in death than he was in life; without him holding every ounce of power he can grab, his children and employees will fight for their lives to become his successor. (Get it? It's the title of the show.) Logan is barely in this episode, and yet, he's the center of it; he's the most important person in the room even when he's not in the room. As he dies on his private plane, about to finalize the biggest deal of his career, Logan gets the death he probably always wanted, and in the process, he sends everyone in his orbit into complete disarray.
"Succession" airs on Sunday nights at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and HBO Max.