Editor’s Note: This article contains major spoilers for Succession Season 4 Episode 3.What to do about a show like Succession? In a lesser series, the story could have carried on for multiple seasons where we saw this family continue to be at each other’s throats in their increasingly empty quest for yet more money and power. After all, the characters are all so incapable of seeing a different way forward that it felt like they would have done this for years and years. While their schemes and machinations might have gotten more complex, there still was a degree of sameness that could have risked creeping in. It would have been enjoyable, but eventually, even the best-written show out there could begin to wear thin if it continued to just cycle through the same old same old. Indeed, some of these initial couple of episodes felt like it could easily be business as usual from here on out. Yet Succession was never going to be such a show to play it safe. Not only is the story coming to a close in this fourth season, but it is doing so without ever resting on its laurels. Specifically, it has now done so by killing off a character who felt almost invincible. True to its title, the monarch of the Roy family Logan (Brian Cox) has now met his end and left the story reeling.
While this followed a whole heap of foreshadowing that his demise was on the horizon, it still came with a whole seven episodes left with which to unravel its repercussions. This is, to put it lightly, now almost entirely uncharted waters that the show had only dipped its toes into prior. Logan certainly had his brushes with death dating all the way back to the very first episode, but he had always bounced back with some particularly creative vulgarities to signal he was still very much alive and strong. There is even some subsection of viewers who are holding out on the possibility that this is yet another ruse and that he’ll come strutting back in to growl at his kids in no time. While this is a slim possibility and something that Cox has teased himself, the more interesting development is that this really has happened. Not only did Logan meet his end, but it happened without any conventional narrative trappings attached to it. There was no climactic scene for him to say his final words. Instead, he just died on a flight to a business deal, trapped in a tube in the sky away from his children who he had alienated over many years. It was unhinging and reflected in all the great performances from the cast, though that is what death is. There is no way to prepare for it as it can just happen out of nowhere. Logan, while his ego made him into an imposing figure, was just a sad and lonely man in the end.
'Succession' Finally Feels Like We've Entered the Endgame
While his death means we don’t get to see Cox continuing to sink his teeth into the character, it finally feels like the show has actually entered into the endgame. Just as Logan’s body was fittingly and unceremoniously wheeled off of the plane, there now remains a lot of runway in which to explore the vast repercussions of his loss. Rather than dropping this in one of the very last episodes, the story has plenty of breathing room to really sit with this development. For all the ways viewers were trying to predict how his children may end up usurping him, there is something more genuinely tragic that he would meet his end alone and with nothing really to show for his life. Sure, he built this massive business and made more money than most would in a lifetime. But for what? To spend the last years of his life just trying to take more and more only to end up profoundly alone? The earlier episode where Logan left his own birthday and had what became a confessional dinner alone with his bodyguard showed just how lost he had become. He almost seems to know that dying in the height of luxury would not bring him any closing happiness. This didn’t stop him from continuing to try to cling to what he had, but that stubbornness was precisely the point.
Now, the question then becomes whether his children will learn from his mistakes. As of now, it seems like that will not be the case and that is as sharply bleak as the show has ever been. Before Logan was even laid to rest in the ground, the gears of business had already moved on without him. As soon as he died, it was as if he had been cast aside, so the market could be stabilized. He was sacrificed at the altar of his own company, a victim of his own greed with nothing to show for it. His kids were shocked by his sudden loss, yet they still got swept up in the organizational jostling for power that is already taking shape. It was as if they couldn’t help themselves but continue their pursuit for control of their now departed father’s empire.
Logan's Death Shows That There Is No Real Winner
In that way, the show remains similar as we can already see battle lines being drawn. All of these characters had already been callous, but it just takes on that extra level of sadness that even the death of their father could not shake them out of their seemingly unquenchable thirst for more. It is that juxtaposition between what could have been a series finale and the grim sense that we are about to get right back to business as usual that hits home. No matter how much we try to guess who will come out on top, this death proves that there is really no winning here. For all the ways we are invested in this family drama, it is Logan’s death that highlights how there is an emptiness at the core of the show’s gloriously rotten heart.
There is then a delicate balance that the show is setting up between everything having changed and also nothing has changed at the same time. While the show has always been a black comedy, the tragedy that underpins it has now come to the surface. Logan dying had always seemed like an abstract idea and it being made painfully real provides so much potential to explore. Even though there are some naysayers out there who doubt his fate, the introduction of it is the best thing the show could have done this far from the end. With Logan ripped from the story in such a fashion, it has reached the pinnacle of what all this has been building to. There is now nothing but the descent ahead. It is not just that the show rattled us and the characters as any series could do that. Rather, it is the way in which all we had come to know has now been brought into focus. Death is a great magnifier of what is important, and it now represents a turning point for all the characters. Will they go down the path of their father and find themselves just where he was? Time will only tell. What is certain is that the show feels truly different now as there is no turning back the clock on all that has been lost.
Succession Season 4 airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sundays at 9 PM ET.