This article contains spoilers for Succession Season 4, Episode 4, “Honeymoon States.”
Succession has given us every bleak event on the Roy family calendar: cynicism-choked weddings, power-play birthday parties, Thanksgivings punctuated by child abuse. And now, an episode after Connor and Willa’s big day was derailed by Logan’s sudden death, comes yet another piece of putatively happy news drained of all its joy: the confirmation that Shiv is pregnant, presumably by her estranged soon-to-be-ex-husband Tom. It’s quite an achievement to mine the unsentimental side of life’s precious moments so ruthlessly.
If “Connor’s Wedding” delivered its shock via time-release capsule, with Logan’s life force fading out over an extended phone call, Episode 4, “Honeymoon States,” opens with another trajectory-determining plot point pinging over a cell tower. Only this phone call is charged with life-giving adrenaline. It’s Shiv’s doctor with good news: Baby Wambsgans-Roy is healthy and rounding 20 weeks.
Shiv Fucking Roy is Shiv Fucking Pregnant. And if my timeline crunching is correct, it’s fair to assume that that night in Italy, when Shiv vengefully declared “Let’s have a baby” to spite her mother, proved prophetic, as did Shiv’s sexy-time proclamations to Tom that “I don’t love you” and “I’m out of your league.” She’s kept the secret for months, even while heading back to the home she no longer shares with Tom in search of long jackets and wide-legged pants. (Soon she’ll have to start carrying a “ludicrously capacious”’ purse to disguise her midsection.)
Shiv’s doctor assures her, “There’s nothing I think we should be concerned about,” but after the call ends, Shiv sinks lower into her bed and rolls onto her side. Her expression, oscillating shock and fear, suggests that for Shiv there is everything to be concerned about, and no one to trust with the news.
Pregnancy isn’t always synonymous with joy. In fact, it’s more often mired in vulnerability—and Shiv doesn’t do vulnerable. When Logan advises Tom how to poison the well of top-shelf New York divorce attorneys so they’re all conflicted out of representing Shiv, she tells her siblings, “I got Mommed.”
To tell Tom he’s going to be a father is to invite the snake back into the garden; to tell her corporate bro siblings is to torpedo her chances of being considered one of the power players in the “coronation demolition derby” that is the next 48 hours. She’s stuck in the middle, with a top button that’s about to go pop.
As family, friends, and Waystar’s familiar cast of corporate characters converge on Logan and Marcia’s apartment to pay their respects, it’s clear the death of the king has reanimated the primitive ambitions of the court. Merry widow Marcia is just there to cash out. The mercenary matriarch coolly pivots to selling off the apartment to Connor for a cool $63 million with a spit and a handshake before Logan has even been interred. Later, she’ll dispense with a sobbing Kerry in similarly dispassionate style, taking bitter pleasure in the knowledge that Logan’s assistant/mistress wasn’t clued into the inherent value of cash in hand over promises of future recompense.
While Connor is investing in real estate, his three younger siblings are uncharacteristically tight, ready to link arms and rush Waystar’s C-suite to take control. As they plan, Tom appears in the foyer, alone—the image reflecting his neither-here-nor-there status. He and Shiv exchange a glance. Tom slips into the room adjacent, where Logan’s hired hands, Frank, Karl, Karolina, and Gerri, are plotting a coup of their own.
Shiv turns her head, registering her upset, her eyes bulging with the effort needed to blink back whatever she’s got brewing inside, a shout or a sob. The angled head turn is one of Sarah Snook’s signature moves, a tic that telegraphs the way in which we understand the personal toll it takes to be the public face of Shiv Roy.
If Shiv seems different, a tad more vulnerable, her estranged husband is too, only he’s acutely aware of his tenuous circumstances. He moves through the apartment like a free-floating barnacle in search of a whale.
Tom has never looked oilier, more like a fusion of Uriah Heep and Becky Sharp. His characteristic giddiness is muted on this most solemn occasion, one in which he finds himself being completely screwed by his monstrous ambition. Set adrift and apart, he methodically traverses the apartment, pitching his value to Waystar hard-liners and later to his brothers-in-law Kendall and Roman. Wherever he is and whomever he is with, he repeats his humble mantra: I’m here to serve. No one, however, is looking for such fickle hired help. Kendall says he’s always liked Tom but offers him only a patronizing “good luck.”
The only one who gives Tom any traction is Shiv. The couple converges on the apartment’s elaborate staircase. Tom’s coming down (naturally) and Shiv’s plunked in the middle, plotting her ascent with Roman. She and Tom meet in the middle. “Let me show you some kindness,” he says, moving from the step above her to a step below, granting her an opportunity to look down on him. (Tom’s subordinate status has always been his real appeal to Shiv.)
Shiv grants Tom a moment to take a full swing. Not because he needs it—Shiv doesn’t do pity—but because she does. She’s angry, angry at what has happened, that Logan will never meet the child she’s going to have and the part she may have played in her father’s death, because if she and her siblings hadn’t conspired to put Waystar’s sale on hold, Logan would not have been on that plane. (And if she and Tom didn’t have that damn hurtful open-marriage deal between them, Tom wouldn’t have felt compelled to call her and accidentally tip them off about the PGN deal.) It’s that fictional vision that compels her to sit down on the stairs, overcome by the weight of what she’s lost.
Tom gets to work fast, pitching himself not as the chancer he is but the historic servant he was, the guy who put her back together when she fell apart in France. (The full story of Shiv’s breakdown remains untold.) Tom soothes her feelings about their present-tense estrangement and reminds her of the first blush of their coupling, the handwritten notes he penned to her.
He’s not the first lousy ex who’s tries to paint over his crimes with some misty watercolored memories of times when things were good, but nevertheless it brings tears to Shiv’s eyes, if only because of the reminder of how back then, as now, she was “having such a hard time” and that it was Tom who put her back together.
Are we watching a potential renewal of their unloving chemistry, which has now borne fruit? With Tom and Shiv, Succession hasn’t just breathed into vivid life every single toxic marital dynamic; it’s revealed in clear-eyed fashion how need can be a more powerful force than love. Willa and Connor at least managed to openly acknowledge the bargains their relationship was based in before tying the knot. For Tom and Shiv, it’s the secret they keep from each other; it’s also the weapon they use to club each other, like cartoon antagonists.
It’s not a done deal that Shiv, Tom, and baby will make an unhappy family, but this episode, when many old habits and patterns reemerge, pushes it towards grim inevitability. Like Kendall’s pitch for CEO, a pathology for him at this point, surely, this may be same-old Tom and Shiv but with a new baby banner.
That same-old do-over becomes more likely as Shiv’s position, like Tom’s, rapidly changes thanks to Logan. A stray, undated document among Logan’s papers names Kendall as his preferred CEO, which puts the kids back in competition mode. The tight little trio marginalizes the girl and enshrines the two boy wonders. Kendall and Roman come through as the company’s leaders, and Shiv walks away with a promise that she’s really on the inside even though she doesn’t have a formal role. Ask Kerry how reliable those promises are.
At the beginning of the episode, Shiv is ascendant, climbing those stairs to the top. By the end, she’s tumbling down three small steps thanks to a treacherous high heel. It’s an embarrassing public fall, but Tom is there to pick her up. Again. We know how that works out.