Succession S4 Episode 4 Recap: Roy Family Power Ranking
Contains spoilers for "Succession" Season 4 Episode 4 — "Honeymoon States"
Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is barely interred yet by the time Episode 4 kicks off, but his children and former employees are, as Nicholas Braun's Cousin Greg puts it, "scurrying like rats." There's a limit to anyone's power, though, considering that his acolytes end up finding a piece of paper in his private safe that Frank (Peter Friedman) describes as "disturbing." It'll come as no surprise that a hastily fired-off missive from Logan found in his private safe sends everyone scrambling once again; even in death, the man still wields so much power. (Due to his lack of physical presence on the mortal plane, though, he is not included in this power ranking.)
The show pulled off a masterful move by having Logan die in the third episode of the fourth and final season, giving the characters — and by extension, the audience — seven full episodes to fight for control of Waystar Royco. Everyone from Frank to Greg to Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) to Logan's children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) wants to take Logan's spot as the head of Waystar Royco, even as they prepare to stick to their deal with Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skärsgard), who's set to buy the company. So who wins out, for now?
Tom
Ah, how the mighty have fallen. Logan's very best boy, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), the former lieutenant to the powerful man, has descended directly to the bottom of the pack thanks to, well, Logan's death. Without his protector — recall that, in the immediate aftermath of Logan's death, Tom directly told Greg he'd "lost [his] protector" — Tom is basically useless, and nobody's shy about saying that directly to his face.
This is laid bare when Tom approaches Gerri, Frank, and the rest of the Waystar Royco executives during Logan's wake to tell them that if there's a "ring," his hat is definitely in it. Their reaction is to literally laugh in his face, telling him he's a powerless loser married to Logan's daughter, who also hates him. Tom's not mentioned on the piece of paper, he's not part of the restructuring and battle over who's going to be CEO, and he's not even in the room half the time. He does have an emotional conversation with Shiv about their past together, but based on the fact that Shiv's heart is basically a black hole where Tom is concerned, that probably doesn't mean much in the long run. At least Tom gives the audience one gift by revealing a specific about Logan's death, which is that he had a cardiac event while digging his phone out of a clogged airplane toilet.
Greg
Greg is an eternal loser, and like his fellow "disgusting brother" Tom, nobody will ever take him seriously. Logan barely knew who Greg was half the time and only had to pay attention to him during his recent birthday party because Greg pulled the patriarch aside to admit that he and his date were fooling around in Logan's massive penthouse. Greg's funniest characteristic is the way he talks when he's around anyone with more power than him (which is to say, basically anybody), adopting bizarre vocal flourishes and trying to sound a lot smarter than he really is, which is what he does for the whole episode.
Greg's only decent instinct is to, in any given situation, cozy up to the person that he thinks holds the most cards. This week, it's Marcia (Hiam Abbass), Logan's third wife (whether or not they ever got formally divorced is unclear). Greg sticks to Marcia like a barnacle on the side of a boat when he's not lurking around Tom or trying to get the Roy siblings to like him — a totally futile battle — but the bleakest Greg moment concerns the all-important piece of paper. His name is, for some reason, on it, and Greg assumes that it means he's meant to be the number-two man to Kendall, who's directly named as Logan's successor. Every single person in the room bursts out laughing. What more is there to say? Greg sucks.
Connor
Don't get it twisted; Connor's still a huge loser. He's just not this episode's biggest loser, which is the smallest of victories. He and his new wife Willa (Justine Lupe) arrive at the wake and greet his stepmother Marcia, saying that they're about to leave for a trip visiting states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan... so, you know, electoral battlegrounds. (Willa dryly refers to them as "honeymoon states," which is also the name of the episode.) Connor also jumps on what he clearly views as an opportunity, asking Marcia if he can get ahead of the crowd and buy Logan's home from her. She agrees, and Connor ends up spending $63 million in the process.
Connor can be the saddest Roy sibling, but he's also just as craven as his siblings are and as his father was. Once he gets Marcia to agree to the sale, he and Willa get cracking, already discussing renovations they want to make and which walls they'll knock down in the process. Connor's still a Roy, after all; he's still more or less incapable of actually caring about anything except for money, status, and power.
Shiv
Ever since Logan was spotted drinking some sort of fertility smoothie in Season 3, fans have been buzzing about whether or not his lover and assistant Kerry (Zoe Winters) would get pregnant, introducing a new Roy child into the mix to piss off the adult kids. It's not impossible that Kerry could still bring a bouncing baby Roy into the world, but for now, the pregnancy bombshell belongs to Shiv.
Approaching the 20-week mark, Shiv hasn't told anyone she's with child — least of all her future ex-husband Tom, who is probably the father based on their upsetting night together in Italy in Season 3. (In case you forgot, Shiv's idea of foreplay was telling her husband he wasn't good enough for her and that she doesn't love him. Hot!) Worse than that, she's edged out of the CEO spot by her own brothers — and though they assure her, swearing on "yesterday" (meaning the day of Logan's death), that she'll be a part of every single decision in the background, that seems like it probably won't hold. She also trips and falls down, and it's really embarrassing. Shiv ends the episode at a serious deficit, but she's still one of Logan's children, and surely, she's figuring out how to wield her pregnancy as some sort of weapon.
Marcia
Somebody's back from "shopping in Milan forever!" Marcia swans back into the picture upon receiving news of Logan's death, but according to her, the separated husband and wife were still quite close, as she tells Kendall the two had "intimate conversations" every morning and evening. (Kendall and his siblings are, understandably, way grossed out by this.) Marcia's real power move in the episode, though, comes when Kerry decides to crash the whole affair.
Marcia handles Kerry with an attitude that hovers between indifference and fury, having someone go and collect Logan's lover's belongings from upstairs without giving her access to his room and saying Kerry had to head out to take the subway home to her "tiny apartment." (Man, these people really hate the subway, don't they?) Logan is gone from the power ranking, but he's got Marcia to carry on his icy legacy — and with him out of the picture, it feels unlikely that this is the last we'll see of Marcia.
Roman
Roman is doing pretty well these days, even though, you know, his dad just died. He still seems to be the only person Matsson will engage with throughout his entire family, and now, he's rising to the top alongside Kendall (but more on that in a moment). Roman is, at his essence, a foul-mouthed little chaos goblin who probably shouldn't be given an ounce of responsibility when it comes to literally anything. Now, he's one of two CEOs at Waystar Royco. What could go wrong?
Now that the board has voted to install Roman and Kendall at the top, it remains to be seen whether or not the brothers' promises to Shiv will mean anything. After the three banded together to grapple with their father's death, it seemed like the trio had marked a real turning point and were real allies, but before Logan's death, Roman was secretly corresponding with him. Roman's a rat, and Shiv should be watching her back where he's concerned.
Kendall
After not doing a whole lot for the first three episodes, Kendall has reached the top of this power ranking based on one enormous factor: his father left a note saying that he wanted Kendall to take over in his stead. There's some discord in the room over the marking Logan left on Kendall's name — was Logan underlining it, or crossing it out?! — but in the end, that doesn't matter. Kendall and Roman are the newly anointed kings, and it's now up to them to ensure the sale to Matsson goes through, that Waystar Royco's news division ATN gets a rebranding, and to deal with the other $10 billion media company they just bought. Pretty simple stuff, all in all.
It's what Kendall does next, though, that's really interesting. As the episode draws to a close, he pulls Hugo (Fisher Stevens) aside and tells the executive to go ahead and leak every bad thing Logan ever did. (The list, we can imagine, is more extensive than we even know.) What's Kendall's endgame here? What will discrediting his dead dad really accomplish, and why doesn't Roman or Shiv know what he's up to? It's an interesting move, and we'll have to wait and see how exactly it pays off, if it does at all.
"Succession" airs at 9 P.M. on Sundays on HBO.