Yahoo News Succession may have already revealed how the series will end
Succession spoilers follow.
It’s nearly time to say goodbye to the back-stabbing, dysfunctional and mega-rich Roy family as the blackly comic drama Succession starts its fourth and final season.
Fans are already trying to guess how it could all end, and the first episode of the new season may have just given us a hint of what could happen – to one character, at least.
The season opens with a party to celebrate patriarch Logan Roy’s birthday at his luxurious Upper East Side home. He doesn’t look particularly thrilled by all the people who have gathered – “all these little piggies stuffing their mouths, why is everyone so f**king happy?” – and while son Connor, son-in-law Tom and cousin Greg are there amongst the Waystar Royco staffers, there are a few people notable by their absence.
Logan’s estranged wife, Marcia, is AWOL – “She’s in Milan, shopping. Forever,” explains assistant Kerry – and his three children Kendall, Shiv and Roman (whom Logan now refers to as “the rats”) are also unsurprisingly absent, plotting their own acquisitions after effectively being disinherited by their father at the end of season three.
Throughout the episode, it is subtly underlined that Logan is now, for all intents and purposes, alone.
Yes, he has his assistant/mistress Kerry, and simpering flunkies like Tom and Greg (who, despite their outward bravado, are both secretly scared of him) and employees Frank, Gerri and Karl, but he has no real friends, and at the first opportunity Logan wisely flees his own party with his security guard Colin to take an evening stroll in Central Park.
It’s when Logan and Colin are at a café together that a glimpse of what may come to pass later on in the season is revealed.
“You’re a good guy. You’re my pal,” Logan tells his employee. “You’re my best pal.” That he has decided a man who works for him, who is on his payroll, is the best friend he has just shows how alone Logan must feel. You almost – but not quite – feel sorry for the grumpy old guy.
“Everything I try to do, people turn against me,” he continues, and you can see him looking as old as he ever has at the table as he adds, “Nothing tastes like it used to, does it? Nothing is the same as it was.”
Perhaps Logan is finally facing his own mortality – he is in his eighties, after all – and he realises that despite the wealth he has accumulated, he is now a lonely old man whose family relationships are broken, perhaps beyond repair.
Fans have often wondered whether Succession will end with the death of Logan, and the next few minutes of the episode are the best indications we have had so far that this could be the case.
“Do you think there is anything after all this? Afterwards? I don’t think so. I think this is it,” he tells Colin, musing on whether there is an afterlife.
“We don’t know, we can’t know. But I’ve got my suspicions. I’ve got my f**king suspicions.”
When Logan returns to his home, he is distracted by the news that he is bidding against his own children to buy the Pierce business he has been trying to acquire for years – and his reaction when he loses the bid to them shows that, if this is to be his last year on earth, he’ll be raging at the dying of the light as he goes.
Finally agreeing to speak to Shiv, Roman and Kendall on the phone, he snarls: “Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you f**king morons.”
That stuns his kids, who had been celebrating their win over their dad until that moment, and hints that if Logan does die before the end of Succession, there is a good chance that none of his offspring will end up inheriting the spoils of Logan’s many past and present wars.
Succession airs on HBO in the US, and Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK.
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