Succession’s unprecedented twist will transform how we think about TV

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season four episode of Succession, Connor’s Wedding.

In an audacious turn that will shake the Richter scale of pop culture and go down in television history as a stunning plot twist, Logan Roy, the fictional media magnate at the centre of Succession, was killed off without warning in Monday’s episode.

The best show on television, the scathing black comedy about privilege that had revealed itself as a wrenching drama about familial trauma, exited the character that everyone else orbited around. It is an unbelievable gambit, a profound decision for a series that rightly draws obsessive coverage.

Few saw it coming – on screen or off. This is the fourth and final season of Succession, which in its very title set up the question of who would succeed Brian Cox’s tyrannical corporate titan. The obvious expectation was that the 10th and final episode of this season, scheduled for the end of May, would be where we would see something as definitive as this. Monday’s episode was just the third, with the pieces seemingly being put in place. The table was supposedly being set, now it’s been completely upended.

The possibilities were both enticing and dramatic. Would the forever dubious alliance of his children – Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan, a.k.a. “Shiv” (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), actually find a way to defeat the patriarch who divided and conquered them for decades? Would one of his courtiers stab him in the back? Would one of Logan’s plans, based on his gut instinct, finally blow up in his face? Turns out we were looking at it wrongly.

The episode, titled Connor’s Wedding, was written by Succession’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, and if nothing else it proves that Logan Roy was not indestructible. The creator of “boar on the floor”, the dispatcher of US presidents, and the possessor of the most ferocious banter on Wall Street, got on a corporate jet to go to Sweden, strong-armed by his own blood and major shareholders to extract a slightly better price from the Swedish tech mogul buying the entertainment assets of the Roy family’s company, Waystar RoyCo.

Gerri and Roman meet again.

The billionaire was ageing, and in the show’s very first episode he’d suffered a stroke that left him hospitalised, but his recovery – fuelled by a punishing unwillingness to cede power or take a backwards step – had been purposeful and near complete. In the previous episode Logan had delivered a fighting speech to the staff of ATN, the Fox News-like cable news network that he was keeping hold of, but early in the flight he reportedly collapsed and his heart stopped beating.

Armstrong’s decisions throughout the episode were crucial. Viewers learnt what had happened as Logan’s children did. Assembled for the wedding of the oldest Roy son, Connor (Alan Ruck), they received a terrified phone call from the flight. You never saw Logan’s fall, you never saw his face again, even as Shiv’s soon to be ex-husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) held his phone to Logan’s ears so his offspring could speak to him as CPR was administered.

The first response was disbelief. Another near-death experience for Logan? Season three had also featured a cliffhanger that suggested a distraught Kendall drowned in a swimming pool. That time Succession stepped back from the brink. Not this time. It was a minute-by-minute experience, defined by panic and shock. The words spoken had a tragic honesty: “You’re going to be OK,” Roman pleaded, “because you’re a monster.”

Nicholas Braun plays cousin Greg.

“You think there’s anything after all this?” a maudlin Logan had wondered in the season’s first episode, and the answer was clearly no. His body was an out-of-focus form in the background. Logan Roy was no more. No final words, no deathbed derision. Death is a mainstay of scripted television, the break-the-glass storytelling option, but no major show has ever so coolly and completely removed an essential character. It feels unprecedented.

The focus for the show’s remaining episodes is now the children. It makes sense. Logan Roy had shown us who he was time and time again. He believed “money wins” and couldn’t change. The character was a constant – a terrifying, compelling constant – and he provided the gravity which held everyone else in painful place. Without him, and Cox’s towering performance, the program’s boundaries are for better or worse broken.

“I love you, but you are not serious people,” were Logan’s final words to his children-slash-adversaries, incongruously delivered in a private karaoke room after a failed attempt at rapprochement in the previous episode.

We’ll find out if he was right over the next seven episodes. And whatever eventuates from this staggering development, it’s clear that Succession’s conclusion is not about who wins. That’s always been a facile reading. Succession is about who survives. And Logan Roy didn’t.

Every week The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald will be recapping the latest episode of Succession. You can listen to our recap podcast here.

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