‘Succession’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Roys Keep Swinging

Is Succession a TV show, or just a summary of stuff you’ve read on Twitter? This is the unpleasant question each new episode forces us to ask ourselves. “Safe Room,” so called because of the locations to which the Roy family are spirited after a shooting incident at the ATN news network (turns out it was just some guy committing suicide because working there is so awful), is a collection of topics you’ve seen blue-checkmark accounts tut-tut about, wired together by dick jokes.

Seriously, we’re not like five minutes in before Tom tells his wife Shiv she should be excited to go see her dad at the office because “Now you can bang,” and describes her plan to move in and clean house as “Mary Poppins with a hardon.” Yes, you can absolutely write this shit yourself.

But there are some moments of nuance and, if not empathy, at least human interest. Surprisingly, one comes from the combo of Greg and Tom, typically the most purely comedic relationship on the whole show. Sure, they start off by using a human being (who lost a bet) as an ottoman. But while trapped in a makeshift safe room during the ATN building’s lockdown, Greg tells Tom he’d like to move out from under his supervision in the news department and try something else in the company, as much to get away from the network’s rabid right-wing ideology as to see if he can hack it away from Tom’s watchful eye.

Ever conciliatory, Greg holds out the possibility of coming back to work for Greg again someday, calling his proposal a sort of office version of an “open relationship.” Tom, normally only verbally abusive, goes absolutely apeshit after this, pelting Greg with full water bottles thrown at full force.

For once, the show doesn’t underline what’s going on here, but it’s plain to see: The phrase “open relationship” brings up painful associations for Tom, who regrets turning his marriage to Shiv into such an arrangement in order to accommodate her infidelity. He can’t admit this to anyone, but he sure as shit can whip Poland Spring at Greg’s face instead. Catharsis will substitute if actual healing isn’t an option.

(Things get back to normal for the dynamic duo when Greg clumsily asks Tom if it’d be alright for him to blackmail him with the hidden files from their cruise-ship coverup and Tom congratulates him for being a piece of shit. Crisis averted.)

Roman also finds solace in a strange place. Separated by a management training course from his girlfriend Tabitha, with whom he has never had intercourse due to lingering impotence issues, he tries and fails to have phone sex with her. Everything she does, from describing her body’s reactions to simply shifting her tone of voice because she’s turned on, either freaks him out or disgusts him. But a relatively routine call to Gerri to complain about his lack of screen time in the employee orientation video turns into a scorcher of a humiliation session, as the older exec berates him while his threats to jerk off segue from dirty joke to very real masturbation.

I like seeing the show explore the way power differentials are erotic to these people, particularly when they find themselves on the submissive end of one, which is so rare for the Roys. I like seeing the show treat Gerri as both sexy and sexual; this plot point is played for laughs, obviously, but they’re not laughs at her expense, or at Roman’s for being turned on by her.

Finally, there’s the continuing saga of Kendall Roy. When Shiv is invited to the office to get brought up to speed by her father, she notices Kendall’s pride of place at virtually all his meetings and greetings and wheelings and dealings, including a big one—the potential purchase of the rival, liberal Pierce news organization—to which she herself isn’t privy until she winds up in a safe room with Pierce’s CEO, Rhea Jarrell (a cameoing Holly Hunter).

True, Kendall doesn’t know why she’s really there, i.e. she’s being groomed to take over, and he’s perplexed and perturbed. But Shiv really doesn’t know why Kendall’s being treated like such a macher, given his past bad behavior. So at the end of their very long day, she confronts him, jokingly (or not) wondering if he’s blackmailing the old man.

She’s closer to the mark than she realizes, of course, though she has the positions reversed. Kendall can’t tell her this, but he can definitely tell her he will not be taking over the company when their father retires, and he can hint that he may not even be alive anymore when his father no longer finds him useful. He ends the day crying into her shoulder, then scooting away in a self-effacing retreat. It’s unclear if Shiv is capable of being moved, but she’s certainly shocked, and her reaction may even be considered loving.

The rest? Eh, you know, it’s whatever. Logan and Gerri panic over antifa, Connor and Willa attend the funeral for a thinly veiled Jeffrey Epstein analogue, white nationalist talk show hosts, mass-shooting paranoia, the collapse of legacy news media into the maw of reactionary conglomerates, yes yes yes, we get it. It really does feel like Twitter: The Television Show, because in the end, Succession doesn’t have anything interesting to say about any of these phenomena other than “Look, these phenomena exist.” At this point, that’s almost all there is to be said about, Succession, too.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Succession Season 2 Episode 4 ("Safe Room") on HBO Go