‘Succession’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: A Roy’s Best Friend Is His Mother

Let’s talk about dicks. Succession sure loves to! And I’m not even talking about the episode-opening scene in which Kendall takes a dick pic for his new love interest Naomi Pierce, or Logan’s new sexual relationship with former Pierce CEO Rhea Jarrell.

No, I just mean the near mathematical certainty that Succession will make a dick joke if it’s at all possible to do so, or even if it’s not.

Like Tom, anticipating an internal investigation about the cruise-ship scandal will be so easy he could “put on the Eagles and start playing with myself.”

Like Roman, encouraging his dad to fight a recalcitrant shareholder by telling him “you should jam your dick into his one good artery.”

Like Kendall, comparing the family’s desperate maneuvers to stave off a shareholder rebellion to “an octopus giving reach-arounds to every fish in the reef.”

Like Logan, saying his least favorite jet pilot “always looks as if his dick’s still wet.”

Like Roman, comparing his father’s sexual relationship with rhea to “a rhino fucking a candy cane.”

Like Gerri, asking Roman if there’s any truth to the rumor that he used to pay his personal trainer to jerk him off at the end of every session.

Doesn’t this get tiresome for people other than me? Like, don’t you want a little more variety in your comedy-drama hybrid than fucking dick jokes an average of once every ten minutes like clockwork? Is that really and truly the only way the venality and machismo of the ultra-rich can be conveyed via humor? Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick? (“How many dicks is that?” “A lot.”)

Because this is not a show without redeeming qualities, much as it tries to hide them. In this episode, I enjoyed the episode-ending revelation that Logan and Rhea colluded to short-circuit Shiv’s bid to run Waystar Royco after Logan steps down by entrapping her with an offer to run rival company Pierce, then blabbing it all over town. That reveals Rhea to be a real snake in the grass, Logan even more so, and shows that Shiv really is, as Rhea put it earlier, “not as smart as she thinks she is.”

Elsewhere, Kendall, Roman, and Shiv’s mother Caroline makes a brief and memorable cameo, as the kids attempt to secure her cooperation against the takeover bid by Logan’s enemies Sandy and Stewy. Caroline is an intriguing bait-and-switch of a character. Years of watching movies and TV have conditioned us to expect the estranged ex-wife of a billionaire bastard to be a saint, even if only by comparison, and that the jokes about her inedible food and distant demeanor cracked by her kids are ex post facto justifications for their taking their obscenely wealthy father’s side in the split instead of their merely extravagantly wealthy mother’s.

But as we saw in brief glimpses during Shiv’s wedding last season and get a much better look at now, Caroline is a huge fucking creep. Once it’s clear that her children have come to buy her cooperation, she makes them make their father an offer: She’ll take his side in exchange for either his $150 million summer house in the Hamptons, which he adores, or for the low low price of $20 million—plus having the kids at Christmas. She knows he’ll choose to give away the time with his family, which delights her because it forces her kids to see how fundamentally inhumane he is, and she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that setting up this choice indicates the same thing about her.

Caroline becomes even more unpleasant when she has a brief crossover appearance with Kendall, who—as he is wont to do—seems to spend his time in the episode appearing in another, much better show. When Sandy’s tabloids start encouraging the family of the cater waiter killed in the car accident from which Kendall fled last season to possibly sue the Roys for damages, Logan decides to bring Kendall along to a sitdown with the bereaved. Simply entering their house, seeing the place where they had happy times with their son, fucks him up royally, as it would anyone with even the vestiges of a conscience. (“Poor bastards” is about as generous as Logan gets in describing them.)

So when he makes it back to his mom’s place, he’s on the verge of confessing. When he makes it clear to Caroline that he wants to talk to her about something of grave importance, she—fresh from complaining about how everyone likes to point out her “emotional deficiencies”—hastily puts the conversation off till tomorrow, then blows the joint before any of the kids wake up just to get out of the conversation entirely. Actor Harriet Walter isn’t really anything to write home about in the role, but the role itself comes with some complicated notes—rare indeed on this power-chord dramedy.

Speaking of music, this is the first time I can remember that composer Nicholas Britell earned his paycheck after writing that piano-tinkle theme music. (Has any show in history ever overvalued a single line of melody more?) An insistent bass pulse and an almost electronica vibe help underscore the tension of Kendall’s dilemma, as well as the skin-of-the-teeth situation Greg finds himself in when Tom insists on destroying the copies he’d made of the incriminating cruise-assault documents.

When Greg’s attempt to surreptitiously record Tom doesn’t work, he covers his ass by literally covering his ass, snatching pages from the fire before Tom lights it and shoving them down the back of his pants. Oh, and there’s also a prison rape joke. It’s tedious! Cue the goddamn piano!

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 7 ("Return") on HBO Go