The dialogue shifts seamlessly from shock to grieving to maneuvering. The firmament has shattered. God — or the devil, or both — is dead. That vacuum must be filled, and the deluge prepared for, whether you are family, staff or, like Shiv’s estranged husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), an unhappy bit of both. “I have lost my protector,” he says, like a “Game of Thrones” bannerman realizing that his head may soon part company with his neck.
It’s a bold and potent move for Armstrong, who has one of TV’s greatest actors in Cox, to give us none of this from Logan’s point of view. We don’t know what he was thinking at the end. We, like his children, don’t know what he felt or if he heard their last words. There is no closure, no satisfaction. He will forever be a question mark at the center of the universe.
Instead, a scene from the season’s first episode amounts to his last testament. Restless and unsettled at a birthday celebration that Kendall, Roman and Shiv have chosen not to attend, Logan ends up at a diner with his body man, Colin (Scott Nicholson), whom — is it possible to pity Logan Roy? — he calls his “best pal.”
To his wary companion, Logan launches into what now sounds like a deathbed monologue. “What are people?” he asks Colin, and then answers his own question: “What is a person? It has values and aims, but it operates in a market. Marriage market, job market, money market, market for ideas, et cetera.” And while he is a winner in the judgment of the market — “a hundred feet tall” where most people are “pygmies” — he doesn’t seem to feel like one.
At last, he asks Colin whether he believes in the afterlife, and again, Logan supplies his own answer. “We don’t know,” he says. “We can’t know. But I’ve got my suspicions.”
Those suspicions were confirmed or denied on an airplane floor thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a most appropriate choice for “Succession.” The series is about people untethered to place, who move from vehicle to vehicle, from one antiseptic luxury space to another.