‘Succession’ Asks an Impossible Question: How Do You Grieve an Abuser?

This post contains spoilers for Succession Season 4, Episode 3, “Connor’s Wedding.”

What was Logan Roy getting at when he nicknamed his youngest son, Roman, Romulus?

Given Succession’s fascination with all things Classical, it seems safe to presume that Logan meant to compare Roman to the mythical founder of Rome, raised by wolves as an orphan alongside his brother Remus, whom he eventually killed. (Sounds like a nice bedtime story for some baby Roys!) Carrying the reference one step further would equate the Waystar Royco patriarch to Mars—the Roman god of war and also Romulus’s absent father. Logan never was much for subtlety.

Logan’s kids are his living legacy, and as we’ve seen, he’s spent decades forming them in his likeness. At the same time, he’s also torn them apart with his own bared teeth—not unlike the actual Titan Saturn, who, like Logan, couldn’t stand the idea of being overthrown by his children. Daddy Roy’s sudden loss in Episode 3 (on a plane, as he skipped out on his oldest son’s wedding) challenges each of his children with an impossible question: How do you mourn an abuser?

Each of the Roy children takes the news of their father’s death a little differently—and the subtle distinctions between their responses are telling.

“Connor’s Wedding” might take place, as the title suggests, at Connor’s wedding, but it’s Roman whose emotional turmoil propels us through its first act. After that unfortunate dick-pic incident, Logan has decided it’s time for Gerri’s time at Waystar to come to an end—and that Roman should be the one to fire the woman whose phone he blew up with his genitalia. After that heinous mind game, it’s easy to understand why Roman left his father an angry (if unfortunately timed) voicemail. But it doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier when he’s first up to say goodbye.

When Tom calls and tells Roman and Kendall that their father is receiving chest compressions, Roman’s voice drops down to a murmur. “You’re OK,” he says. “You’re going to be OK because you’re a monster. And you’re going to win, because you just win.” Kieran Culkin twists his face into a searching expression as his character says, “You’re a good man. You’re a good dad. You’re a very good dad. You did a good job.” His voice cracks as he hands over the phone.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice brimming with a sob. “I don’t know how to do that.”

As Roman, Culkin’s body is constantly in motion, making visible how uncomfortable his character feels simply trying to exist in his own skin. He’s so at odds with his own emotions that he can’t answer a simple “How are you?” without a “Fuck you!” He’s the only Roy sibling whom we know Logan abused physically, and he seems to shrink in his father’s presence. In trying to comfort his father, Roman appealed to his sense of power by confirming that in his eyes, “You’re a monster—and you’re going to win because you just win.”

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Kendall’s face, meanwhile, goes blank as he takes the phone. Jeremy Strong keeps his eyes vacant, like he did during Season 3’s stunning season finale—in which Kendall finally told his siblings about his fatal car accident with a caterer from Shiv’s wedding. (You know, the one Logan used to blackmail him.) Kendall’s relationship with Logan has been the most obviously fractured since his failed coup in Season 1 and almost killed him after his pool incident last season, so it’s no surprise that he seems to struggle with how to be both kind and honest.

At first, Kendall tells Logan to “hang in there.” Soon enough, he even works his way up to “I love you.” After that, however, things get trickier.

“I love you, dad. I do. I love you. OK?” Kendall says. “Uh… and it’s OK. Uh, even though you fucking… I don’t know. I can’t. I can’t forgive you. But yeah, but I—it’s OK. And I love you.”

Alongside Roman, Shiv seems the most outwardly distressed by the news. “I can’t have that,” she says, matching Roman’s child-like vulnerability before taking the phone. She begins to comfort him before asking, through tears, if he’s already dead.

There’s a reason everyone on Twitter wants Sarah Snook to win an Emmy for her performance: Each tearful and twisted expression she makes during this installment is more painful than the last. She, too, seems to feel immediate conflict after she reaches the words “I love you.”

“Don’t go, please, not now,” Shiv says. “I love you, you fucking… God! There’s no excuses for... But I... Fuck… I don’t know. I do love you. And it’s OK. It’s OK, daddy, it’s OK. I love you.”

Give Sarah Snook an Emmy for That Episode of ‘Succession’

The last one to know is also the man of the hour: Connor, the son from a first marriage whom Logan never quite wanted to claim. Aboard the wedding yacht, we find out that Connor calls Victorian sponge “Looney Cake” because it’s what his father fed him (and presumably called it) for a week to keep him calm after his mother was committed to a mental hospital. He takes the news of his father’s death about as well as you’d expect.

“He never even liked me,” Connor says before immediately taking it back. “You know what? I’m sorry,” he sputters. “I don’t even know what I mean. He did. He did. I just never got the chance to make him proud of me. He’s dead. I can’t do this.”

Logan’s been so successful in estranging the other kids from Connor that Kendall once called himself the eldest Roy son to Connor’s face—a moment that prompted one of Alan Ruck’s best scenes. As always, Connor’s siblings seem to completely forget about him when their father is dying. Kendall runs to get Shiv and not him, and even Shiv asks why no one came to get her sooner before anyone has even considered grabbing Connor.

The good news, however, is that Connor has found, perhaps, the most functional coping mechanism of all his siblings—love. Is the relationship a bit transactional? Most definitely. Still, everyone involved is a willing participant; the two maintain respectful boundaries with one another; and their time together seems to be mutually beneficial. That’s more than we can say for pretty much any other Succession couple. Connor and Willa forever?

How Did Connor and Willa Become the Healthiest Couple on ‘Succession’?

Unlike his siblings, Connor has long refused to play his father’s games; it’s why he moved all the way out to the desert. Like everyone else, he still wants Daddy’s money, but he’s also not quite so blinded by the image Logan has projected and enforced mostly through terror. There’s no way Connor is done processing the loss of his father, but unlike the rest of his siblings, he chose to own his feelings. Confronted with a cosmic joke fit for a legend—a neglectful father steals son’s thunder on his own wedding day by dying—Connor decides to get married in the margins.

Moving forward, each Roy sibling will be forced to confront who they are without their father’s thunderous presence in the background. They’ll also, presumably, need to deal with a version of their father who still lives in their heads. Until they do, their father will remain as terrible and indestructible and immortal as ever—a villainous god in their minds, whose death will hit most as nothing but a headline.

Or, as Romulus says when he sees how much the Waystar Royco stock price drops in the wake of his father’s passing, “That is Dad.”

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