If the final season of Succession has recently shown the Roy children at their most sympathetic, Sunday’s episode, “Kill List,” shows them at their abrasive. Starting off, as he did in the show’s pilot, blasting hip-hop in the back of his limo, Kendall inaugurates his tenure as Waystar’s CEO by going toe-to-toe with Lukas Matsson, the tech entrepreneur who was bidding to buy the company from the late Logan Roy. Kendall and Roman, Waystar’s new COO, are determined to bid up the sale price by a few dollars a share, and Shiv thinks she’s with them until she realizes that neither her brothers nor Matsson see her as essential to the process. But it’s clear from the beginning that whether there’s two of them or three, the Roys are hopelessly outmatched by Matsson, and that without the man who put the Roy in Royco, the company his children are running looks bloated and ossified next to Matsson’s young and spry GoJo.
Aboard their first flight since Logan’s fatal embolism, his deputies Karl and Frank nervously pull on compression socks to lessen the chances of following suit. Suddenly all of the old guard are feeling their age, especially once they’re mingling with GoJo’s athleisure-sporting staff at the company’s Norwegian mountain retreat. Hugo gets dinged for piling his buffet plate with carbs, and they’re all seized by the fear that they’ve been summoned only so that Waystar’s soon-to-be owners can evaluate which of them are dead weight. Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be: nearly all of them.
One of the nagging frustrations of watching Succession has been the way it casts its protagonists as masters of the universe while failing to present much evidence of them actually being good at anything. They’ve held impressive titles and run corporations and political campaigns, but beyond taking meetings and boarding helicopters, it’s been tricky to pinpoint what they actually do. But for this episode, at least, that absence turns out to be a feature rather than a bug. Removed from both Logan’s shadow and the umbrella of his reputation, Kendall and Roman promptly shit the bed (figuratively this time), exposing themselves as overconfident idiots who get shredded the moment they’re faced with a real competitor. Matsson is both a jerk, forcing them to fly across the ocean while their dad is still being measured for his casket, and a creep, sidelining Shiv to ask if she has any advice on how to deal with the female employee to whom he’s been sending jars of his own blood. (Shiv, who never hesitates to torch her feminist principles in service of her own advancement, happily obliges.) But it’s hard not to savor the way he makes Kendall and Roman look like the spoiled punks they are, so comically wrong-footed that even Matsson is taken aback at how easy it is to expose them as fools. “Maybe you haven’t done this before,” he taunts them midnegotiation, “but how it usually works is I say something, and then you say something.”
I can’t lie: I get a kick out of watching them squirm. That was true when I first watched the episode several days ago, and it’s more true now that this is the week when Elon Musk was praised for launching an exploding rocket and BuzzFeed gutted its Pulitzer-winning newsroom. It often seems as if the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people have no idea what they’re doing and, what’s worse, that it doesn’t matter: Power breeds power, money makes money, and accountability is only for people who fly commercial. But this episode gives us the satisfaction of knowing that at least someone notices. For all the immaculately crafted barbs that filled up my notes—Shiv calling her brothers “the B-roll boys” or casting their macho posturing as “majestic stags sparring with memory-foam hard-ons”—the most cutting was Matsson referring to Kendall simply as “Vaulter guy.” As Kendall confidently proclaims his ability to run his father’s crown jewel, the news network ATN, Matsson reminds him of the last time he took the wheel of a media property, back in the show’s second season, and promptly steered it into a mountain. Kendall knows how to talk like a CEO, to bluff and bluster and flex enough muscle to scare off the small fry—and of course, he has the power to gut companies and destroy people’s livelihoods without breaking a sweat. But put him in a world where you have to do more than sweet-talk investors who are all friends of a friend, and he’s instantly exposed as a jargon-spouting airhead. A graduate, as Matsson puts it, of “Hanna-Barbera Business School.”
Idiots can be sad too. Even noble, as Roman is when he stands up to Matsson for dragging them away from their father’s still-warm corpse as a naked power play. But he’s still foolish, baited into admitting that he and Kendall have decided to tank Matsson’s bid for all of Waystar, ATN included, without first running it by the corporation’s board—a violation of securities law. Matsson may have started off insulting them as a strategy, but it’s turned into genuine and mutual dislike, and the B-roll brothers have made an enemy they can’t just fake their way past. Kendall has been surreptitiously trashing Logan’s reputation in the press, and Matsson makes clear that he wants to destroy the right-wing echo chamber that Logan spent his life building. (Shiv, at this point, is fine with letting it go. “Let’s just keep one of his old sweaters,” she suggests. “Less racist.”) It seems unlikely that Logan Roy’s legacy will survive the end of Succession’s final season, and it’s ever more clear that his children are incapable of building one of their own.