“The Great Toxification”

For many months and many episodes, Successionistas have decided, all of a sudden, to care about Kendall’s kids. Once a week I see a new tweet or a new comment in the Hung Up Succession chat asking “Where’s Sophie, where’s Iverson?” and I scrunch my nose at each one. Number one: it’s TV! When we need to see them, we’ll see them. Number two: who cares! This week’s episode gives an update on Sophie-watch; Kendall, never really the present father, remembers that he has kids, too.

A reminder that there is always a chat in the Substack app during every episode accessible to paying subscribers only. It is regularly full of amazing gems like:

I went to the Gossip Girl school of loving an episode with any kind of party: whispers in every corner, a drunken confrontation, a private screaming match, public iciness. By that standard, this episode is a Succession all timer. (I’m tempted to rank kettle corn highest because it is nasty and disgusting and also the tailgate party’s prize for guessing the outcome of the election. How am I winning but getting punished?) Here’s where we stand after season four episode seven, “Tailgate Party.”

Willa Roy
There is only one woman serving cunt in that whole triplex and her name is Willa Roy. The kids are tanking everything so completely and comprehensively, the rise and rise of Willa Roy is sometimes all we can count on. Kendall and Roman try to push Connor into a deal with Mencken — not a great offer, but not a terrible one — and it’s Willa putting her foot down that Con really listens to. Willa is not moving to Oman or bowing down to Succession’s incoming fascist president or kissing Matsson’s ass. This is a great Willa episode — amidst a crop of no-nothings and do-nothings she actually knows what she wants and gets it.

Gerri Kellman
Gerri and that silk press are unstoppable. Her firing has become a buyout: “I’m out, I’m done,” she tells Roman. “First of all, I want money. Eye-watering sums. Hundreds of millions of dollars.” Every tongue that rises against her shall fall, or she’ll release Roman’s trove of dick pics.

Roman is too shocked and hurt by “Robo-Gerri” to get turned on, but this is exactly the kind of harshness he likes from her. Gerri will always land on her feet! I’m in a silly mood tonight, and I think Gerri getting out clean earns her a high ranking. An early retirement with a golden parachute is a sweet deal.

Ebba
If there is a Succession multiverse, Ebba and Lukas might be another version of this show’s Tom and Shiv: two people, a power dynamic, a reversal of that power dynamic, and a lot of love and resentment. Last season, Tom told Shiv’s secrets and tonight Ebba is telling Lukas’s. Matsson only gets to be the coder-tech genius because of Ebba’s spin, and there’s something funky going on with Gojo’s numbers in India. Ebba is too smart to just let that slip out to the brothers — she doesn’t care to protect Matsson’s deal. Making money no matter if that man wins or loses? That’s a girlboss to me!

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Connor Roy
Connor is the only Roy kid who has decided to process Logan’s death instead of pre-grieving or scheduling conference rooms to grieve or bringing dad back from the dead with AI to grieve. How is it that the Roy sibling applying for a job in D.C. is the one that is thinking the clearest?

Logan’s death (and maybe Kendall’s Living+ pitch) has given Connor a glow up in the polls. It’s enough to get the attention of the hardcore alt-righters in Mencken’s camp. But good for Conn for standing up for himself when Roman pushes him toward a do-nothing ambassadorship! 

Nate Sofrelli
Nate arrives at the tailgate party willing to hear out Kendall and his big pitch pitch: if the Dems win the White House ATN will go easier on them if they block Matsson’s Waystar purchase with federal regulations. All of this is contingent upon the election, obviously, but with Kendall’s third act about face — what if instead of Gojo acquiring Waystar, Waystar acquires Gojo — it’s for the best that they didn’t shake on a promise Kendall wouldn’t keep. 

Showing up to the right wing’s penthouse Death Star makes sense for Nate — due diligence, hearing out all options and angles, etc. — but you know good and damn well he didn’t show up to hear Kendall’s pathetic little pitch. A sidechick was just crowned queen — the sky could be the limit for Nate, Shiv’s frequent mistress! Nate showed up to see Shiv, and tease Tom, and there just happened to be a party going on. 

Kendall Roy
Kendall Plus looking a bit Kendall Minus when he runs around the party trying to finesse tanking the Gojo deal. First Matsson shows to the party to run his charm offensive counter-op, then Nate stonewalls Kendall’s financial regulation pitch. Plus he’s feeling guilty about ATN and the Sophie situation, but not guilty enough to turn off the bigot spigot. 

But for how bad Kendall is at everything else, maybe he’s better at reading people than I give him credit for. He works his way into Ebba’s good graces and learns that Matsson is juicing Gojo’s numbers in India. It’s not enough to tank the deal, but finally it’s something more material than a deleted Nazi shitpost. Earlier in the night, Nate told Kendall that he wasn’t Gil Eavis, and Kendall wasn’t Logan, and that it was a good thing. Kendall is better at being himself than trying to be a dupe of his dad. (Would Logan have caught the Ebba weak spot to push up the price? Maybe not.)

But what about the last minute reversal? In Tom’s bedroom-coat room, Kendall tells Frank that he wants to reverse the deal and absorb Gojo, instead of the other way around. Frank’s reaction is the same as mine: Really? Kendall doesn’t want Gojo, he wants to out-dad dad. He’s in an arms race with a ghost. Let’s say, with a prayer and a otherwise occupied FTC, the deal goes through and Waystar acquires Gojo. What happens then? How’s Logan gonna kiss him posted up in hell?

Lukas Matsson
The bomber jacket, popping that gum — chile! This sexy ass Jack’s giant beanstalk. A bullshitter always smells a bullshitter so of course Kendall figured out that something about Matsson was wrong. (I love that in trying to create problems in the Matsson deal, Kendall really did find one.) Gojo’s subscriber numbers in India are double what they should be, and Matsson hopes that the inflation will get caught in the “deal dazzle” of acquiring Waystar. 

Shiv panics and thinks that she’s hitched herself to the wrong hot guy, but I don’t think she’s deep enough into team Gojo that it is backfiring on her quite yet. The scandal not enough to drop Matsson too low in these rankings either — embarrassing public fussing with Kendall aside, this is a speeding ticket. I keep thinking of what Logan said about the Pierce family: Money always wins, and can Waystar even afford to absorb Gojo? Matsson juices his numbers just like Kendall juiced the Living+ projections, blah blah blah — a man? Lying? Girl. Another day, another dollar.

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Roman Roy
Roman has been the worst version of himself this season, like he’s unlearning whatever Gerri and Logan tried to teach him. Roman is impulsive and reactive, and forgets any realities of running a business. This is not the same Roman who knew the sibs overpaid on Pierce. Gerri betrayed him in Italy, sure, but he could’ve used her and turned on her instead of just turning on her. She’s right: she probably could’ve gotten him there.

I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something going on between the Dumpster Brothers: Roman had a certain look on his face when he snuck out of green room of people congratulating Kendall on his presentation last week. There was a certain look on his face at the sibs brunch when he apologized to Kendall for bailing on the presentation. Is he seeing his own deficiencies there? There’s a reason why he’s insistent on speaking at Logan’s funeral. He must know that Kendall as the public facing brother overshadows him, and eventually there will only be one CEBro.

Greg Hirsch
I’ve written before about how I’m getting bored of Greg as Tom’s little demon fixer. (Or non-fixer, really, as Greg only makes a mess of every message he’s sent to deliver.) He’s become the czar of firing — the hope and dream of Anna Kendrick’s Up in the Air character — but something else is going on. Perhaps Greg is getting bored of his schtick too: is it Tom’s wing that Greg is under, or Tom’s shadow that Greg’s in? 

Greg has always been ignored by Shiv, loathed by Roman, but he’s on the bubble with Kendall. Greg clings to Matsson at the party at Kendall’s direction. Oskar clearly hates him, but Greg’s naked (and often misplaced) ambition can be amusing. Maybe one of My Idiot Brothers will find a use for Greg, the way Logan did with Tom.

Siobhan Roy
Shiv quietly parades Matsson around the party, making him her big ventriloquist doll and feeding him lines about money and gossip. She pulls him aside for a private moment, and asks what he’s done to make all her finagling worth her while. His reply, “What do you want? I really like talking to you, so you can have whatever you want,” paired with that sinister smirk made me the emotional equivalent of jfkaldjfklafjd — that is, nonsense, brain scramble, he just took custody of those words from T.I. 

Maybe that’s why Shiv’s reply was so discombobulated, like Inspector Gadget short circuited reading Business For Dummies. Shiv is pitching a man to give her a job (at the company that bears her name, sure) and her big sell is: “I know the company, I know everything. I know my way around. I’m collaborative. I have the name. I am- I’m hot shit and I’m ready to go.” Now girl. You know the company you’ve worked at for not even a year? Shiv has spent more of her career avoiding working at Waystar than actually working at Waystar. When she says she “knows her way around” she means she knows the way to the offices of Frank and Karl. The bare minimum she could do was go to the Elizabeth Holmes school of at least sounding specific. No, I’m sorry, bye. As jfkaldjfklafjd as Lukas’s attitude makes me, it was crickets when he smiles and shrugs off her non-pitch, just like Logan would’ve.

Later, her Marriage Story-off with Tom proves that the only thing Shiv is divorced from is reality. Tom spilled tonight: no affirmation will fill Shiv up because, quietly, I don’t even think she can justify to herself why she should be CEO or deserve anyone’s love except that her last name is Roy.

Tom Wambsgans
Tom and Shiv haven’t made up or resolved anything, but they’re dealing with the rot at the core of their marriage the way any reasonable emotionally avoidant adult would: by having sex non stop instead of talking about any of it. It works for a time, until Shiv’s blows it up by whispering around the party that Tom is about to lose his job, and then goading him into a fight.

Last week they could be tender and honest and “be broke but in love with me.” This week they get to be cruelly real. “I think that you can be a very selfish person, and I think that you find it very hard to think about me, and I think that you shouldn’t have even married me,” Tom tells her. “I have given you endless approval, and it doesn’t fill you up because you’re broken.” Shiv protests and Tom plays a lowly Saint Paul peasant boy, but really they both have — and would, and will continue to — do whatever they need to advance themselves, and know the other would too. How do they square that with needing to feel needed and loved? 

But this is a list of power rankings, not a close read of their relationship. The last time Tom’s back was against the wall, when Shiv was ready to send him to jail as the family’s fall guy, he defected to Logan. It’s more dangerous to Shiv to have him on the outs, I think, but as it stands she’s still the daughter and he’s still the almost ex-husband. That final shot of Tom was very:

He is in bed ready to scheme.

Rava Roy
You are not in your damn right mind if you’re going to talk crazy to me in front of a Birch Coffee. “I was raising our daughter while you were running a racist news organization” is a bar, but God forbid Kendall questions someone else’s parenting. Last year he ran through Rava’s house like the tomb raider, this year he’s challenging her as a mother? On a sidewalk? A prayer circle for my sister, she is down bad having to listen to this man.

Mondale
His parents have invited fifty-leven people into his home and he’s not even in his exercise pen to see the action? I roll my eyes whenever people ask about the kids or Shiv’s pregnancy — it is TV, and Succession’s timeline is famously imprecise — but Shiv and Tom are wrecking Mondale’s home.

Malbec
“It’s the kind of wine that separates the connoisseurs from the weekend malbec morons.” As a full-bodied red wine lover, I don’t think Malbec comes back from this one, I’m sorry. Succession did to malbec what Sideways did to merlot.