Succession episode 8 recap, ‘Chiantishire’: Dick pics, bad mothers and poisoned mozzarella

Dick pics are generally not a great idea, but they’re particularly bad if you accidentally send them to the one person who would approve the least.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SUCCESSION EPISODE 8, “CHIANTISHIRE”

The Roys are in Tuscany for Caroline’s wedding to a seat-sniffing bankrupt. The sun’s out, the libations are flowing, and everyone is looking chic in linen outfits.

But the idyllic setting only gives way to dramatic developments because anywhere the Roys go, betrayal and pain – and not-yet-accepted marriage proposals – follow.

Meanwhile, holy crap. The Succession moment that made you jump out of your seat is the one that sunk Roman so low into it he may as well be dipping his toes into magma.

When it comes to errant dick pics, that’s one he’ll really regret sending – and Logan reacted in exactly the way you’d expect, which is to say, like a sea witch. Note that he tried to sexually shame two of his sons this week. Dad of the year.

“Chiantishire” was a totally wild episode that had pivotal moments for all the key characters so, this week, we’re going to break it down into character arcs.

ROMAN

The youngest Roy son had the most rollercoaster ride of the Tuscany-set episode – or maybe it’s more like the Tower of Terror where you’re dropped precipitously with a couple of small bounces before getting off at the very bottom and having to line up behind throngs to people to get back up.

That’s where Roman is at now – at the back of the line. At this point, even Karl would probably pip him.

That chair doesn’t sink any lower, Roman. Picture: Binge

He started off with his stock high at the beginning, bringing the GoJo deal with Lukas Matsson to his dad, but it’s not before he has to run interference with the eccentric technology prodigy.

The deal is essential to Waystar, it’s the only way the company will stay relevant in a media landscape that is swinging away from broadcast and traditional publishing towards digital services such as streaming and sports-betting. GoJo will help Waystar scale where it needs to, instead of wither and die on the vine as a relic of a bygone era.

But the Elon Musk-esque Matsson has other ideas, so he goes on a tweet spree which includes, among others, an eggplant emoji. Everyone loses their minds in trying to decipher them – again, just like when Musk is let loose – and the tweets have the desired effect, sending GoJo’s market cap so high, it’s now worth about the same as Waystar.

Roman is dispatched to Switzerland to meet with Matsson, only just a chopper ride away from Tuscany and he manages to figure out what Matsson is really after – a merger of equals, not a buyout.

Lukas Matsson is loose with the tweets. Picture: Binge

Roman sells the idea to his dad even though it would be a significant dilution of the Roys’ value in the company, but Roman says that Logan could still run the company. And the alternative is they don’t have a company to run at all.

Just as he’s about to blush from the “good work, old chap” praise for setting up a viable deal, he decides to send Gerri a dick pic as some kind of victory lap. Because that’s a thing guys do? I can’t relate.

But a slip of the finger means the offending picture, accompanied with a message telling Gerri to “eat it”, is sent instead to daddy. And there’s enough detail on the screen for everyone to know that Roman wears Calvin Klein undies – and, uh, some other stuff.

That cringeworthy moment he realises is the most Roman has ever looked so haunted.

“Are you a sicko?” Logan asks Roman, as the scion awkwardly tries to explain why he sent the dick pic. He’s obviously very erudite and insightful – “people just send each other pics of their dicks”.

Logan is far from impressed. Picture: Binge

Roman being confronted by his dad to explain his many sexual proclivities and repressions is some of the most uncomfortable moments of this show, punctuated only by Logan’s casual misogyny (“What happened to that nice piece of tail you were with?”).

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Logan is more annoyed that his youngest son has what he considers to be unusual sexual appetites or that he didn’t know about it beforehand.

“You’re a laughing-stock, oh go on, f**k off,” Logan growls.

From his perch high up on the Tower of Terror, Roman is now in the pits, covered in the piss of his dad’s disdain. Not even the retired janitors of Idaho can clean him off now.

Haunted. Picture: Binge

SHIV

Which brings us to the calculating Shiv, who immediately pounces on the Roman fracas to propel herself into Logan’s orbit.

After an earlier conversation with Tom in which she resolves to do whatever it takes to gain control of the company, she sees her opportunity to push Roman down several rungs. She’s the one who puts into Logan’s mind the word “disgusting” to describe Roman’s fascination with Gerri, which the old man spits back at his son moments later.

But as bad as her behaviour is towards Roman, what she does to Gerri is worse. Under the pretence of care, “this must be so hard for you” or “that’s my concern for you here”, Shiv basically threatens Gerri by laying it out that unless she reports Roman’s acts as harassment, it could be construed that Gerri encouraged him.

Let’s recall that earlier in the episode, Gerri specifically told Roman to stop sending the pics.

For Shiv, she thinks she’s neutralising both Roman and Gerri in one swoop, clearing the path for her own ascension. And it is perilous for Gerri but Gerri has been around for a long time and she’s a lawyer to boot, so she’s not giving Shiv anything for now.

It’s such an illuminating scene that further undermines any idea that Shiv might act out of care for others or, heavens forfend, the sisterhood.

These scenes follow two other revealing scenes about Shiv, and gives the audience a lot of insight into her childhood in that cold, cold family.

During Caroline’s hen’s night in Cortona, Shiv and her mother have the closest to a heart-to-heart as you’re ever likely to get in Succession.

Little hen’s night D&M. Picture: Binge

But not before a little titbit about the other families in their terrible world – Shiv’s soon-to-be stepsisters apparently exported her address book while offering to take photos for her. What a crazy move. These people kind of deserve each other.

Despite a plea to not snipe, the “spotty mother” and “sh*tty daughter” go in for each other immediately.

Shiv says to Caroline that it was probably best that “you let dad take us” and Caroline replies that she gave Logan custody so that her kids could keep their shares, and that she was just protecting their interests.

It’s very on brand for Logan to threaten his kids’ futures to gain advantage in a divorce. We’d almost be disappointed if that’s not what happened.

Caroline says Shiv chose her father, but Shiv reminds her she was only 10 when it happened. Caroline shoots back, “you were 13 and you knew how to twist the knife, you knew then and you know now”.

And then she says what probably many parents wish they could say to their kids, “You were my onion, you are my onion”.

A moment of begrudging understanding passes between them before Caroline vocalises another thing parents are never allowed to say but some probably feel, “truth is, I probably should never have had children” and then praises Shiv for choosing not to.

Caroline also gave the most insightful thing we’ve maybe heard about Logan this entire series when she explains why she could never have had dogs around Logan, “He never saw anything he loved just to see if he could kick it and see if it would still come back.”

Shiv and Caroline are each other’s onions. Picture: Binge

On the promo tour this year for the third season premiere, Brian Cox said that Logan does love his children but that they disappoint him. If we are to take Caroline’s assessment of her ex, it lines up with what Cox said. The Mills Brothers were really onto something.

Drunk on chianti and emotional trauma, Shiv returns to the hotel room to tell Tom she wants to have a baby – because Caroline basically told her she’d be a bad mother – only to semi-backtrack the next morning by talking about egg-freezing and revisiting it in 10 years.

Not the anchor baby Tom was hoping for, but he’s got other issues to ponder in his bag of insecurities about their marriage. Shiv’s idea of talking dirty during sex is to tell Tom “You’re not good enough for me” and “I don’t love you”.

Verbal aphrodisiac? Maybe. More likely is that Shiv doesn’t actually love Tom but needs a convenient ally. He’s always suspected it, in the deep, dark recesses of one’s mind that we never plunge because the horrors to emerge from it is too hurtful.

So, for Shiv to actually say it, even under the guise of sexual role-play, it’s all just a little too real.

KENDALL

After his emotional breakdown last episode, Kendall is a subdued and shorn man when he arrives at the Tuscan villa with his kids. Seeing his mother doesn’t help when she tells him that he needs to sit out some of the itinerary at the request of his father.

That Caroline would acquiesce to her soon-to-be-husband who’s starstruck by Logan’s presence, rather than think of her oldest child is no surprise.

Kendall is uninvited to many of the festivities. Picture: HBO/Foxtel

He eventually corners Logan and proposes a sit-down tete-a-tete to hash things out – in private. So naturally, Logan brings his bodyguard and Kerry.

Kendall jokes that Logan is scared that he’ll be poisoned during the meal, but the old man is actually a little paranoid, or is he? It’s hard to know what to make of Logan asking his grandson to taste his mozzarella first because surely no one is so heartless as to risk his grandchild just to stick it to his son?

Maybe he figured if Kendall really did do something to his food, he’s not going to let Iverson eat it. Or he just wants Kendall to know that he doesn’t trust him.

What is it with this family and toxins? Remember the doughnuts from episode two?

When you use your grandson to test for poison. Picture: Binge

Logan dismissively warns Kendall he’ll leave if things are not “civil” and by that he means he doesn’t want any sort of emotional showdown or catharsis because obviously having feelings makes you weak.

Kendall very honestly says to Logan, “I’ll be broken when you die” and it’s about the truest thing anyone has said this whole episode. He also says he doesn’t know where his life goes from here, but he knows it’s not going to be with Waystar. He’s conceding defeat in this knife fight.

But defeat is still costly. He wants to take Logan’s $2 billion buyout offer from the previous episode, as well as a “chunky asset”. For that he’ll give up his board seat, his inheritance and the chance to speak at Logan’s memorial. “I’m a ghost, we’re done”.

Logan says he needs to think about it because the offer in the birthday card was “for fun”, because emotionally abusing your son on his 40th birthday is the funniest!

Logan doesn’t really want to see the back of his son, no matter how angry he is right now, because if he agreed to Kendall’s terms, then he no longer has any control over his second son. And Logan is all about control.

Kendall desperately wants to be a good person. Picture: Binge

It’s a bruising but understated scene as the camera increasingly pushes in closer on the two Roy men, as Kendall tells his dad that he’s kind of evil and has monetised resentment while Logan weaponises the one thing that wrecks Kendall.

When Kendall insists “he’s a good guy”, a conception of himself that seems integral to his mental state staying intact, Logan asks Kendall, “how long was that kid alive?”, referring to the Chappaquiddick moment from season one in which Kendall killed a caterer during a car accident (which is also referenced earlier in the episode, possibly to set up a later plot development, or to lay the foundation for Logan’s barbs).

It’s the incident that kept Kendall under his dad’s thumb for the second season and Logan knows it’s Kendall’s kryptonite. He even throws some spurious sexual accusations in there for good sport because, as mentioned above re Roman, Logan loves to sexually shame his sons.

Must be a reverse Oedipal thing – if you never let your sons become full humans, then they can’t replace you.

When Kendall says for the second time, “I am a good person”, he believes it less.

Succession is available on Foxtel On Demand with new episodes on Mondays at 1pm AEDT

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