Succession review, season 4 episode 5: Romulus can’t take it any more

R to the I-P L to the O-G, yes, but I for one was thrilled to see that Logan (Brian Cox)’s death had ushered in the long-awaited return of Corporate Gangsta Kendall (Jeremy Strong), who is first seen in this episode listening to Jay-Z in his town-car with dark shades on, looking like a kid who’s studiously avoiding making eye contact with another, harder kid by sitting very quietly on the bus to school. “Takeover,” Jay-Z spits in the background, “the break’s over.” For a second, I judged the musical supervisors onSuccession for selecting a track that was so unavoidably on the nose for this week’s episode, in which Waystar Royco’s major staff all fly to Norway for a corporate retreat with GoJo, but I soon realised my error – of course Kendall would choose something thunderously obvious to listen to as pump-up music for the trip, just as it’s inevitable that when Hugo (Fisher Stevens) leads him into Waystar Royco for the big day, nobody remembers to applaud his entrance until Hugo coughs.

All three of the primary Roy siblings – with apologies to Connor (Alan Ruck), who this week is busy trying to ensure that Marcia (Hiam Abbass) does not bury Logan in a kilt – are set in their respective ways, and just as this was reflected in the varying depictions of their grief, here it shows in their divergent takes on how to handle business. Kendall believes himself to be a powerful, dead-eyed business shark, but is really an insecure wreck; Roman (Kieran Culkin) wants to carry out his father’s dying wish of selling Waystar Royco but retaining ATN; Shiv (Sarah Snook), who lest we forget is suffering the dual tragedies of her father’s death and being pregnant with Tom Wambsgans’ (Matthew Macfadyen) baby, simply wants to wash her hands of the affair and move on to a newer project. “Shiv, we’re death-wrestling with ogres,” Kendall tells her. “You’re reading documents, Ken, is what you’re doing,” Shiv says, flatly. A nice, subtle touch as everybody boards the jet: Frank (Peter Friedman) and Karl (David Rasche), two elders wrestling with death in their own way during their first trip on the plane since Logan’s demise, are seen putting on compression socks.

Fulbrights coming out of their ass

Among the senior employees of Waystar Royco, the mood is one of uncertainty and terror, owing in part to rumours about just how young and fit and Scandinavian the staff at GoJo are. The man doing Hugo’s job there “is a ski-jumper, ex-Winter Olympics”, Karolina (Dagmara Domińczyk) crows. “They’re Europeans,” Gerri (J Smith Cameron) says, in an eerie, authoritarian tone, “sick on vacation-mania and free healthcare. They may think they’re Vikings, but we’ve been raised by wolves, and we’ve been exposed to a pathogen called Logan Roy.” Why does Gerri sound like a Scorsese villain this week?, I wrote in my notes, before realising exactly who she sounded like – Logan Roy, as if she had momentarily been possessed by his angry spirit in the very jet he died on. I will resist making a joke about “spiritual planes”, because I am not Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun).

The idea that someone not related to Logan by blood might be better at being The New Logan than one of the Roys is a persistent theme this week. In the face-to-face with GoJo’s Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), Kendall’s burlesque of impassive toughness is revealed immediately to be both flimsy and ridiculous – Matsson, like a lot of people with real power, is relaxed enough to project a playfully unhinged energy, smiling and simultaneously suggesting a coiled snake about to strike. When he sneeringly describes the Roy kids as “a tribute band”, he is not wrong, the three of them offering up a cover of their father’s greatest hits on different instruments: Roman’s foul mouth, Shiv’s disdain and Kendall’s stony face. After joking, cruelly, that he’d like to buy the company for a dollar, Matsson makes a different play: he’ll pay above the odds for Waystar Royco, but he wants ATN thrown into the deal. “I think he knows ATN is an emotive issue,” Kendall says, “and he’s being a f***in asshole.”

Eggwatch

“OK, so, laid before you is a chess board,” Tom is heard saying in voiceover at the first night’s party, the camera panning slowly to the right, “so every move is crucial. What’ve you got?” Even before the lens discovers them, we know this discussion will be between Tom and Greg, raising concerns – does Greg know how to play chess? Has Greg heard of chess? Confirming our worst fears, he offers Tom his spiciest intel: “Matsson? When he’s f***ing randos, he does noise-cancelling headphones… He just lies back, cans on, watches them slide the beanpole.” “OK, well, I’m not sure how I’m gonna use that to my advantage,” Tom says, resigned. (Two memes have been stolen to make up parts of Matsson’s personality: the first is this sexual detail, which is taken from a long-running blind item about a celebrity I will not mention, and the other is an obvious reference to this viral tweet when he says “No sorrys for Lukas?” I have nothing further to add here except to say that, yes, I am aware that I spend too much time online.) One useful piece of intel Greg has managed to acquire: GoJo has a “kill list” of employees from Waystar Royco, running to eight or nine names.

Later, Tom and Matsson share some derogatory small-talk about France, and Greg – who may not know how to play chess, but who has “read an article in The Economist” – decides to step in and become the saviour that the nation did not ask for. “Don’t bet against old lady France!” he beams. “The baguette might be mightier than the bagel.” “Sorry, who are you?” Matsson squints. “I don’t remember you from the list.” If there’s one thing we learned about Greg in last week’s episode, it is that he’s never deterred by being left off a list, or by only being included provisionally, in pencil, with a question mark next to his name: “Well, therein hangs a tale! Greg Hirsch. Ory. Greg Ory.” When it’s announced that he is Logan’s nephew, a few of the GoJo staff begin to joke in Swedish, and although we can’t tell what they’re saying, the word “Habsburg” comes through loud and clear. “Maybe it’s funnier with subtitles,” Kendall sulks. Believe me Ken – it’s pretty funny as it is.

Majestic stags sparring with their memory-foam hard-ons

Both sides of the deal, as it turns out, have a little poison in them. ATN has a truly immoral political bias, letting the campaign team for Mankin, the hideous far-right candidate from season three, listen in on their morning meetings. Matsson, too, has a secret, and it goes hand in hand with his not-so-secret misogyny: since he broke up with his Head of Comms, he has been regularly sending her litres of his blood in frozen bricks, like he’s the artist Marc Quinn if Marc Quinn were Jeffrey Epstein. “Deniability is going to be difficult,” Shiv says, carefully, “because she has… so much of your blood.”

Kendall, feeling humiliated, decides the only thing to do is tank the sale; Roman, who was always going to be nervous about going against his late father’s wishes, is easily led in this direction, and when the two brothers are alone with Matsson, we presume it will be Kendall who decides, and Roman who falls quietly in line. Matsson, who realises that the brothers have discreetly (or “discreetly”) leaked a story about the retreat being a bust to mess with GoJo and the deal, accuses them of “Scooby Doo-ing” him and being graduates of the “Hanna-Barbera business school”. He also offhandedly calls Logan “a prick”, and this observation seems to trigger Roman – not necessarily in the therapeutic sense, but as if he were a ticking time-bomb.

“There really was no part of you that was like: hey, let’s reschedule this, because their dad’s just died?” Roman asks. “Because my sister’s f***ed up, and my brother’s a mess, and I’m f***in, I’m gone, I’m dead, it’s over for me, it’s OK, it’s fine – but you still drag us out here, you inhuman dog-man.” In this moment, he has exactly the same scary-sunny energy that Matsson normally has, which is to say: he appears powerful, at last. “We’re not selling to you,” he snarls. “I f***ing hate you. And if you tell the board I said any of this, I’m going to say it was a negotiating tactic.”

On the jet home, both Roman and Kendall are stunned to discover that Matsson has chosen to treat Roman’s outburst like a negotiating tactic, and has upped his offer for the company by five billion dollars. Obviously, it is not just that Matsson is impressed – it is also because he knows that by forcing up the sale price to an amount that cannot reasonably be refused, he has f***ed Roman and Kendall just as hard as they’ve f***ed him. The kill-list comes through by email, and Karl, Frank and Hugo are all scheduled for the chop. Shiv – oddly reinvigorated by an earlier fight with Tom in which she ribbed him for the whiteness of his shoes, and he hit back by describing her “thick and chewy” earlobes as resembling “barnacle meat” – decides to ask him out for dinner. All in all, nobody involved could have been more effectively thrown off their axis by the trip to Norway if Matsson had personally mailed them a fresh litre of his frozen blood.