SUCCESSION: How “Connor’s Wedding” Changed Everything

Disclaimer: This article contains heavy spoilers for HBO’s Succession leading up to Season 4, Episode 4.

There’s something about death that just brings everyone together. In one of the earliest scenes in the final season of HBO’s monumental comedic tragedy, Succession, right-wing billionaire and media monarch Logan Roy (played with great bravado by Brian Cox) sits down with his personal driver/security guard/fixer Colin (Scott Nicholson) in a diner somewhere within the vines of New York’s financial district. Logan calls Colin his buddy before asking him “What are people?” He answers his own question by describing human beings as little more than commodities, vessels for buying and selling, cogs in a capitalist machine. After a moment of reflection and proclaiming aloud how nothing’s the same as it used to be, he asks Colin quite abruptly, “Do you think there’s anything after all this? Afterwards?” Colin is taken aback, much like the audience, as this is perhaps the most willingly vulnerable we’d ever seen Logan up to this point, even if it’s in the most Logan Roy way imaginable.

That existential question lies deep in the heart of the series’ final act, as it does with many prestige television shows. And while Logan asks Colin that question (or more so, while he asks himself that) we are forced to reckon with that ourselves. No matter how much it can be hard to relate to these terribly rich and richly terrible people, there is always something that draws us towards them or even makes us root for them, despite everything. This sentiment has always been Succession‘s greatest trick: to make us feel for these, on paper, completely unrelatable characters by putting the spotlight on their vulnerabilities. As the series comes to a close, all of these facades and vulnerabilities begin to rip apart at the seams before imploding, killing, and destroying their hosts. It’s a sad but compelling final act for television’s most fascinating family and a brutal descent that brilliantly begins with the season’s third hour, an episode that is sure to go down in history with the greatest of them all.

Requiem For A Roy

Logan Roy doesn’t have the death of a king. He doesn’t go out like the Shakespearean legend most of the show up to that point has built him up as. As we hear it, he just falls in the bathroom of his private jet and dies quite quietly. There are no speeches, no redemptions, no final twists: we the audience, like his children, don’t even see it happen. This event occurs not too far into the season’s third episode, ironically titled “Connor’s Wedding” (proving that even in death, Logan will find a way to undermine his often forgotten eldest son). What follows is a series of heart wrenching phone calls, hugs, and tears, parts of a whole that can be genuinely uncomfortable to watch, especially if you’ve been through the grief of losing a loved one so suddenly.

Most everyone knew Logan would die by the end of the show but the strength of the “twist” (if we can call it that) is its nonchalant manner, the fact that he was there stronger than ever and then he wasn’t, no more alive than his parents or his younger sister. We’ve all seen grandiose, wonderfully overdramatic deaths in cinema and television where the music swells and the emotion ramps up but we don’t get that here, we don’t get that morbid sense of satisfaction. We don’t cheer because “ding dong, the tyrant’s dead” because that’s far too easy and creator Jesse Armstrong and his brilliant, brilliant writers and collaborators know that. Instead, they force us to watch his now fatherless children come to terms with the fact that the main driving force of all of their lives, through love and hate, anger and pain, is gone.

It has been reported by many of the cast and crew than a good bulk of this episode was shot in one continuous take (which becomes even more impressive when you know the series was shot on 35mm so multiple cameras had to be employed to track the chaos and replacement reels were hidden around the set so the camera operators could keep up), and even if it’s edited in a way where we don’t see it in that way, we feel it. The camera feels unsteady, much like our characters on screen, and it gets up uncomfortably close to the actors and everything is happening in real time. We see Roman (played remarkably by Kieran Culkin) slowly spiral into a grief-induced denial, Siobhan (masterfully played by Sarah Snook, perhaps the series’ greatest underdog) crying into her phone while speaking to the (presumed) corpse of her father as its held up to his ear by her forever broken-hearted, backstabbing husband Tom (the great Matthew Macfadyen), and man-of-the-hour Connor (Alan Ruck in a grossly undervalued performance… seriously, he’s amazing) react by saying “Oh man, he never even liked me” which evokes a chuckle until you sit with it for a moment and realize that what he said is terribly, terribly sad. These scenes of very real, very human grief are striking because we have never really seen these characters as vulnerable creatures. They speak often but they rarely say much of emotional or honest value.

“Complicated air-flow” as a character says early in the show’s run. Alone, each of these portraits of grief (brought to life by one of the best ensembles in a long time) would be very moving but seeing all of them together, one after another, is relentlessly upsetting but also poignant and it is perhaps the silence between their words that sting more than anything else. Roman’s pacing, Shiv’s shaking, Connor’s thousand yard stare: it all cuts deep as even though we understand how broken these people are on the inside, we never truly see its physical effects manifest until this episode. Roman can be forever “working on” his issues, Shiv can say hurtful things, and Connor can… be Connor but we’ll always be deprived of any real, communicated feeling. Except, of course, when it comes to our number one boy.

A Thing On Kenny’s Heart

Perhaps the most crushing moment of this episode comes when Logan’s second eldest son and on-and-off heir to the throne, Kendall (Jeremy Strong in a role that I believe to be one of the defining, most expertly realized screen performances of the 21st century so far. A bold claim but I will die on that hill) speaks to his dead or dying father on the phone and says “I can’t forgive you. But it’s okay. And I love you.” This is the moment the show had been leading up to for thirty one hours, punctuated by Kendall saying in the next episode, “He made me hate him and he died.” Kendall spent the entire series up to that point backstabbing his father, being backstabbed by his father, or becoming completely complicit to his father due to blackmail and guilt. He had publicly called him a “malignant presence”, called him evil to his face, and openly resented him yet he is perhaps the one who grieved Logan the most. Thus, when the time comes where his father finally dies, it comes as no surprise that we see a colossal grief immediately flood through him and you can almost pinpoint the exact moment in which all of the blood is drained from his face. When he goes to tell Shiv what is happening, he doesn’t walk but stumble. These feelings and expressions are much in line with what his siblings are feeling here but the key difference is that, unlike his siblings, we’ve seen Kendall weep before this moment, we’ve seen him break down, and we’ve seen him collapse in on himself. Kendall, in many ways, is the most human, the most feeling of all of Succession‘s characters which makes his grief all the more difficult to witness.

Kendall has also had the most brushes with death when compared to the rest of the ensemble, at least from what we see and hear. Near the end of the first season, he inadvertently caused a young waiter to die and this incident became his main haunting for the entire series, even up to its very last episode. Most importantly, this instance leads to perhaps the most unbearably uncomfortable, depressing scene of the series up until this point: three seasons of misery catches up to Ken in season 3’s finale and he breaks down in front of his siblings. “I’m blown into a thousand pieces” he says with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m all apart.” Yet even with this scene being punishing sad, there is still a sense of levity there with Roman making wisecracks. But not in “Connor’s Wedding”. There are a couple of quick one-liners here and there but they’re very brief and rarely come from any of the four siblings. Before this episode, even with the show at its saddest, we could count on some sort of lightness being brought in decently soon by Greg’s (Nicholas Braun) buffoonery or some dialogical wit or even by a distraction courtesy of the company’s chaos. But you don’t get any of that here, you don’t get that sort of release like most previous times. This sort of sadness, the type that’s been bubbling beneath the surface for three whole seasons, has risen to the top and as we come to learn, it’s here to stay till the final cut to black.

Where They May Be Found

So it is sadness and death that essentially permeate the rest of the season: the stench of a dead father in combination with the possible death of a family empire. But it’s not just misery for misery’s sake: it marks the definite beginning of the end for the show and the saga of these characters and solidifies the show as a tragedy: a line which is balanced on (between comedy) for much of its run until this definitive moment. From here on out, there is much more darkness brewing, a feeling of uncertainty, and a feeling of the world changing for the worst. America is about to possibly elect a fascist into office, Waystar-Royco is about to probably be sold to a flaky tech prodigy, and the children of Logan Roy are left to hang in the balance of it all, each one breaking down at an increasingly rapid rate. Catharsis is not a very apt word to describe this show most of the time but “Connor’s Wedding” is full of it and those feelings will only increase and develop until the series’ bitter end.

The episode ends with three siblings, Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, huddling together in a group hug before departing, each going separate ways. Decades of silent resentments, broken alliances, and crushing secrets are set aside for a moment, a beautiful moment, of shared grief. There have been moments in the past between them all in which they seemed to like each other but there is no moment of true familial love or clarity until here. They embrace each other not to fester in their grief nor as a way to lessen the blow of a final stabbing: in this moment they are simply three lonely children who have just lost their dad. Their futures are uncertain and perhaps just as dark as they are implied to be but right here and now all is calm and genuine for maybe the first time in their entire lives. There’s something about death that just brings everyone together.