Rust and Ruin

The thing that maybe is hardest to watch about Succession is how a lack of parental love has affected all four Roy kids. They have all the money, power, and influence in the world and will never want for anything materially, but they will still cannibalise their own souls and each other for one moment in the sunshine of their father’s fickle love to the point that even long after he’s gone they’re clawing and scraping for the one thing that says maybe they were the favourite. That maybe they were loved by him after all. And that maybe by clinging on to the part of themselves that most resembled him they can hold on to a piece of him forever.

The idea of Logan sitting down a seven-year-old Kendall and promising him the keys to the kingdom in a Lion King-esque “all that the light touches is yours” fashion while Connor, his actual eldest son, was around and well and probably in need of his dad sure is something.

The scene of Logan after dinner, singing a song with his whole c-suite (and Kerry and Connor) is so tragic in that it had seemed like Logan dying on a plane surrounded by these people who work for him (and Kerry and Tom) was so bleak and awful and an indictment of his life and choices (rejecting time with his kids and being at his own son’s wedding), but in a way he was with perhaps the people he felt closest to (and Connor) in that his expression of love was how many times he could kick you before you stop coming back and yet Frank, Karl, and Gerri always did, in a way that his youngest three kids really tried to stop and break away from, because they never got these kind of moments with him.