For me the real magic trick of SUCCESSION 406 is, as I mentioned yesterday, that you end up feeling strongly for all three kids, even as they're actually fucking each other over.
In my experience, that is not generally how SUCCESSION has worked. Other than when they're unified against Logan, we've usually been given reasons to root for or against one or another of the siblings. If I step back and think about that, it's usually their flaws that are used to guide us against them. Kendall has crazy ideas and is often a public embarrassment; Shiv has a hard time standing up for herself; Roman is such a daddy's boy. The show offers us these moments and in doing so guides us to side with the other siblings.
(I realize there are people who would say, I have been Team Shiv from day one, and her "flaws" are much more indicative of her father's horrendous manipulative treatment of her than a judgment on her in herself, and so on for all the characters. Another way of putting it might be, the show has loved to expose characters as "weak" in some way to turn us against them.)
As we start 406, we find ourselves headed into familiar Roy sibling territory. Kendall and Roman have a plan, they are not letting Shiv in on it, even though that's what they promised they would do just a few days ago. And so of course I'm rooting for her.
But then slowly she comes around to undermining them, which on the surface, hell yeah. Fuck them. But then in that moment before Kendall is going to go on stage, after Shiv has convinced Roman to not go up there on the stage with him, we watch Kendall sitting in a chair, just reeling, as we've seen him do before.
But rather than satisfying it's painful. In some ways that's precisely because we've seen him in this place before. Here again, we're revisiting an icon of the show. But where the water imagery is used to create contrast, here the repetition is like a doorway back into the sympathy we've had for Kendall at other times, the vulnerability that we know is who this guy is beneath the surface.
And so instead of feeling vindicated, because he has been a complete shit to Shiv and also he's so incredibly self-destructive, we're suddenly protective of him. Sad Vulnerable Kendall is itself part of the language of the show, so much so that when played it generates sympathy.
(While I'm trying to look at this strictly from a writing point of view, it's important to note, this scene works like it does because Jeremy Strong just fucking kills it. He's so damn good in this episode.)
And writers Georgia Pritchett & Will Arbery are not content with leaving him stripped away like this. They make him go lower, first by having Carl, who is by far the wishy washiest character on the show, the most milquetoast, go absolutely toe to toe with Kendall, ruin the plan he's spent the last few days dreaming up, and leave him speechless.
Pritchett & Arbery set this moment up so well; earlier in the episode we get Gerri and Roman going head to head as well. And she is in many ways more confrontational than Carl, and a stronger character by far, and Roman absolutely steps up and shuts her down. Meanwhile Kendall, facing a far weaker foe, can barely get a word out.
And even that is not the bottom for Kendall. We watch him go out onstage, and his opening moments are just a trainwreck—he's repeating the same thing over and over; he's talking to the teleprompter; he has a simulated conversation with his dad—so painful. It's just one long spiral of agony, with cutaways to his family and employees watching in horror.
There's just no way not to care about this guy in the face of all that.
And yet again, he is being terrible to Shiv, lying to her face and seems completely at ease with it. And he's tanking a deal that he absolutely shouldn't. All of which is classic Kendall.
Which for me makes where the show leaves us with him just an incredible feat. And I can look at structurally how they did that—repeat an iconic Kendall trope; have him roll over and play dead against a weak foe; and publicly humiliate himself—and say yep, that's how they did that. And now we can too!
But honestly I think I'm still barely scraping the surface. Because there's something else going on in the episode with all three characters, beats of them being really exposed and vulnerable—always in private—that seems to grant each of them that same sympathy, even as they are each being, again, so horrible to each other.
Could it be that the good will and sympathy that the Logan's death episode generated in us is still a work? Is that what this is?
I may continue to babble about this tomorrow. It's just such great writing.
