The Roy family is not a happy family. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t look like any other. For this reason, and because they are billionaires, owners of a media conglomerate that, in times of dizzying changes, is regarding to be sold to a tech company, and because the love between them is a formless, dangerous material, with more capacity for damage. than a lethal substance.
The third chapter of “Succession”, the HBO Max series that follows the powerful Roy family, dominated by the tyrannical head of the family Logan Roy, is perhaps one of the best that has been broadcast so far in this production. Not only the script, and the performances were above average (which is always high): the environment, and the way of narrating the central event, without showing more than necessary, make it a collector’s item.
EThe chapter is called “Connor’s wedding” and it begins precisely with all the pomp and display for the marriage of the eldest of the brothers, Connor (Alan Ruck) with Willa Ferreyra (Justine Lupe), the furthest from the vicious circle of ambitions, but also the most abandoned by love -if it can be called that- paternal. Connor, who always wanted to make his father proud, now wants to run for president, and the wedding is a step toward that future that he knows is unlikely. The wedding is the frame. (Are weddings good moments in the series to turn the screw that twists everything in a series, as in “The Red Wedding” from Game of Thrones?)
The other three siblings, Shiv, Kendall, and Roman (Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, and Kieran Culkin), same father, different mother as Connor, are from another world.. The dispute for the power of the company is played between them. Logan knows. Logan knows that the sons will try to stop the sale, put a spoke in the wheel, and so he goes alone to Sweden, to meet the Swedish tycoon Lukas Matsson (played by Alexander Skarsgård), owner of the tech giant GoJo, while the others are in Wedding.
An ending in chapter three
What happens then, in chapter three, is an ending. Logan collapses in the plane’s bathroom. None of that is seen, and that’s the wonder of this episode. What is seen is Tom (Shiv’s traitorous husband), calling Roman (the youngest son) on the phone to tell him that the father is wrong, very wrong. And so, with the tip of the story from a cell phone on the plane that takes Logan and his trusted men to Sweden, and another cell phone, on a ship where a wedding is being held, what happens is being built.
That patchwork of images is the one that opens the deep tunnel in which the emotions of the four children run: Roman’s denial, Kendall’s impotence, Shiv’s despair, Connor’s distance: «He never loved me. I never got a chance to make him proud.”
It’s a phone and it’s his acting skills that shape the best chapter of the HBO series. Everything important in this chapter is said over the phone.
Because, although the action remains in the hands of Tom who counts up there, and in the brothers who hear, below, in a boat, who try to understand, who want to say the last words to a father who is dying or who has already died, what floating in the air is the suffocating dimension of the news. Did the father die for having gone alone to fix something they were up to? Did Logan hear the last message Roman left him, cursing him for forcing him to do something he doesn’t want to do? What will happen now? hear the news? When to do it: before or following the markets close?
The tragedy occupies half an hour of the chapter, half an hour of emotional logistics in which the unhappy and powerful family has flashes of love and becomes profoundly fragile. In the words of the children on the phone, in those last stammering words that they choose to say to the father, the entire family essence is visible. As in the image of the three of them, hugging. As in the announcement that Shiv makes to the press regarding the news. And above all, as in the final scene, where each one makes a different decision in the face of the possibility of seeing their father dead, when they get him off the plane.
No. The Roy family is not a happy family, nor does it seem so. And now, really, begins the succession that gives the title to the best series.
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