The Ending Of Succession Season 3 Explained.
Let me briefly remind you of the content of the previous two seasons. Seventy-two-year-old Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is the creator of the huge Waystar Royco media empire. In business, Logan always acted extremely tough and decisively, and he also brought up his children in great severity. But now Logan is old, he suffered a stroke, and it is clear that he needs to retire and appoint his successor.
Logan has three sons and one daughter. The eldest son from his first marriage, Connor (Alan Rock), by definition, is not capable of leading a corporation. He is not distinguished by his intelligence and business acumen, he is obsessed with ecology and lives in some kind of wilderness, where he is struggling with global warming and cockroaches in his head. Connor declares his presidential ambitions, but for everyone close to him, it sounds completely ridiculous.
Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems to be the most suitable candidate for the role of successor, especially since he was engaged in the operational management of the corporation while Roy was recovering from a stroke. But Logan thinks that Kendall is too soft and that he lacks the real toughness and cruelty that is needed to run a business like this.
Daughter Siobhan (Sarah Snook), her father’s favorite, is very independent and smart, but Logan believes that a woman cannot lead such a corporation, she simply, in Logan’s words, “does not have enough eggs for this” and she cannot “turn on the damn beast mode ” (full fucking beast) when absolutely necessary.
Well, the youngest son Roman (Kieran Kalkin) is a kind of “enfant terrible”: a man with a bunch of psychological problems that originate in early childhood, and he is not even able to manage a shop at a gas station. However, he, like all the other offspring of Logan, has his own ambitions, and besides, Roman is not at all useless, he has certain qualities thanks to which Roman is able to find a common language with those people with whom Logan cannot agree.
In the first two seasons, Kendall first tried to revolt against his father, which he failed to do, then he tried to make peace with Logan. At the same time, the entire Waystar Royco began to have huge problems: numerous cases of violations of the rights of workers, sexual harassment and other bad things that happened inside the company’s cruise business surfaced, and Logan will have to decide which of his closest assistants or children he will give to the slaughter: he must accept take full responsibility, be punished and thereby divert accusations from the holding as such.
Logan chooses Kendall as a scapegoat: firstly, he will never appoint him as his successor, and secondly, Logan can blackmail Kendall with some kind of incident in which Kendall was involved, and this incident ended in the death of a person.
And the second season ends with Kendall, instead of taking all the blame, at a press conference in New York, announcing that Logan Roy was well aware of all the violations and covered them up, with Kendall providing certain evidence confirming it. the words.
In the third season, Kendall has created his own operations headquarters and is trying to get other family members on his side to confront Logan. Siobhan and Roman, in principle, are not averse to listening to their brother and see what he will offer them for this: they understand that Logan’s time is gradually running out. No, at the moment they are afraid to go against their father, but who knows what will happen to the holding next, given the current scandal, the precarious economic situation and the fact that traditional media are gradually being squeezed out of the market more and more under the pressure of online services.
Logan again has to decide whom he – at least formally – will put in charge of the company, because he cannot be the head for the period of the investigation. And it is clear that at the same time, the struggle between the main candidates for this post immediately begins.
He also has to deal with major investors who are becoming more and more dissatisfied with what is happening. Logan is trying to make a very big deal to solve financial problems, but in doing so, he will have to make very serious concessions, which he is not used to doing.
At the same time, Waystar Royco will face the issue of acquiring a rapidly developing Internet service created by Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), and he himself is a very, very difficult person and quite successfully can not only resist Logan, but also play all sorts of psychological games with him. games.
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In the review of the first two seasons, I did not tell one important thing, so I will tell you about it here: what this series was born from. British screenwriter and producer Jesse Armstrong has been nurturing for many years the idea of a film about Rupert Murdoch, the Australian and American media mogul, the owner of the News Corporation holding, the Fox News channel. Murdoch is one of the richest people on the planet and has six children from three wives. In the script for Armstrong’s film, Rupert Murdoch’s family was going to celebrate his 78th birthday, and then all sorts of skeletons began to crawl out of the closets.
Jesse’s script was liked by the HBO management, but they offered to remake it into a series, and make the head of the media corporation collectively. So in the Roy family, you can find features not only of the Murdochs, but also of the Redstones (Viacom Corporation), Eisners (Disney) and some other very famous and wealthy families.
How is the third season? In my opinion, he remained quite at the level, they did not lower the bar. True, the expected really serious confrontation between Kendall and Logan was not really here, but Kendall by type is not at all the person who can really resist the powerful charisma of his father. In a direct confrontation, he will not survive in any way, and to topple the old man with cunning and meanness – he does not have the mind for this, he is not Roman. And Roman is in no hurry to help Kendall, on the contrary – he does everything to support his father, and in the third season it is especially noticeable how much Logan’s attitude towards Roman has changed: now he trusts him much more and entrusts his son with all sorts of important things.
Brian Cox as Logan still demonstrates truly Shakespearean passions, and his King Lear in the modern American style is absolutely magnificent. And it’s really an outstanding role: it was such in the first two seasons, it remains so here. Logan is absolutely amazing, and in the third season he shows a certain readiness for some kind of compromise, because he understands that in the new circumstances he can no longer shove ahead like a rhinoceros. At the same time, there is a great episode here, as Logan wipes his feet on the current president of America – it was very funny.
There were no particularly striking episodes with Siobhan, but she took an active part in all this family activity, as usual, referring to everything that happened with a certain irony.
Her husband Tom (one of my favorite characters on the show, played by British actor Matthew McFadyen) is touchingly preparing to go to jail (he should be sacrificed if things get really bad), and the episodes with him are absolutely hilarious, especially when he picks up a prison consultant and looked at photographs of prisons as if he were examining trendy resorts. Well, there it is extremely interesting to watch his extremely complex, confusing and, of course, very dependent relationship with Siobhan, with whom Tom can never be sure that at some point the same Siobhan will not give up.
In fact, she turned him in – no one particularly objected to Tom going to prison for the sins of the family, although Tom himself was not involved in anything like that. And I really like the fact that this character in the series is shown not at all as a spineless man who simply clung to a rich family. No, Tom himself is quite charismatic, strong-willed and decisive, but to hell with all this shit – well, let’s assume that all these private jets, yachts, helicopters, boats and luxury hotels – they are addictive. Although this is how you look at how these characters of the world of rich people live, and you’ll think – God forbid they live like this, honestly, despite all these private jets and luxury hotels.
Well, Greg is also one of my favorite characters. Greg is underestimated by everyone – both the audience and the heroes of the series. He seems to be completely spineless, miserable and a slug. And Nicholas Brown plays him very well. In the world of cool rich people who decide the fate of this world, no one pays any attention to Greg, but since he is like a relative, he is tolerated in the family. And they put him in various positions, where Greg, by the way, has access to certain documents. And there, even in the second season, these documents worked. And in the third season, we are clearly shown that the same miserable and dull Greg has a chance to rise steeply. And they show it very carefully, not directly hinting at anything.
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Greg who takes over and buys a Waystar Royco in Season 4 – why not? It would be quite logical, effective and interesting. And such cases, by the way, have happened in history, and more than once.
A good third season, I really liked it, looking forward to the fourth.
Heirs. Third season / Succession. third season review
Director: Jesse Armstrong Cast: Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, Matthew Macfadyen, Nicholas Brown, Peter Friedman, Alan Ruck, Gee Smith-Cameron, Adrien Brody, Alexander Skarsgård
Series, USA, 2018, 60 min. 9 episodes in season 3