An Unlikely Contender Emerges on 'Succession'
As Season 2 of Succession chronicles the renewed battle for control of fictional media superpower Waystar Royco, the comparisons between the cutthroat musical chairs of corporate America and Game of Thrones’ Westeros are more striking than ever. That's why every week, BAZAAR.com is watching the throne and naming the winners and losers in the battle for Waystar Royco. Here's the verdict for Season 2 Episode 3, "Hunting."
The Loser: Tom
This season began with Shiv and Tom cutting their honeymoon short at the snap of Logan’s finger, and this episode cuts short their honeymoon phase. Last week, Shiv told Tom about her new position as the Waystar heir apparent, thereby snatching his dream job away for herself. This week, she adds insult to injury, sending Tom into Logan's gaping maw for his worst humiliation yet.
Logan's dusted off an old obsession and refurbished it as a plan to save his flailing company: Buy Pierce, the “biggest name in news,” and fold it into his portfolio. Pierce isn’t just any news organization, but the vanguard of the mainstream media, of “real” news, the kind people like Logan’s bleeding heart brother Ewan watch. It’s a $20 billion acquisition, and Logan believes it’ll make Waystar too big for Stewy and Sandy to take over. Shiv tells Tom she thinks the deal will ruin the company, and maybe take the whole industry down with it. “If we own all the news, I do actually wonder where I’ll get my fucking news,” she says. “Because at some point, someone actually needs to keep track of what’s going on in the world—who went where and who wore a hat.” So Shiv sends Tom to the Waystar executive retreat—which she can’t attend, since she’s still playing silent successor—with a mission to talk Logan out of it.
It’s a terrible idea for a number of reasons. On his best day, Logan doesn’t take Tom seriously, and this isn’t Logan’s best day. The retreat, boar hunting on the grounds of a Hungarian castle, is the setting for Logan’s most fearsome meltdown yet. His paranoia is getting worse, possibly due to a new medication mentioned in passing at the top of the episode. It’s aggravated by a journalist poking around his inner circle for an unauthorized biography. (Cousin Greg, of course, seems to be the only one poking back.) Then Logan learns someone leaked his latest plan to storm Pierce to the Pierce family, putting the whole operation in jeopardy. When Tom tries to have a quiet conversation with Logan at the post-hunt dinner, the word “Pierce” sets him off like a match dropped in kerosene in an under-regulated Waystar-Royco firework factory.
Logan locks everyone in the cavernous dining hall and turns it into his own personal circle of hell. He hurls accusations of treachery at every executive in the room—Gerri, Cyd, even former legal counsel Frank, whom he just lured back to the company for his connections to the Pierce family. When that doesn’t work, he forces Tom, Cousin Greg, and poor Karl to their knees for a game of “Boar on the Floor.” He roars at the three men to snort, oink, and wrestle over two links of sausage. “No half-hearted oink,” Logan bellows. “I want full-hearted oink. On the count of three, the last piggy to eat the sausage is a mole.” It’s a baroque tableau of abject humiliation, so of course Roman gleefully captures it on his iPhone until Kendall wrestles it out of his hand. Kendall mercifully puts an end to the game by pulling up emails on Roman's phone proving he revealed Logan's ploy in a harebrained attempt to make contact with one of the Pierces. Logan reams out Roman, declaring him a “moron.”
The next morning, Tom tries to feign ignorance by way of an alcohol-induced blackout, but nobody’s buying it. His rival, ATN head Cyd, needles him over the breakfast buffet as he waves away some sausage. “I’ll eat your sausage, Tom,” she says gleefully, spearing a hunk of meat in his face. Back at home, Shiv delivers the knockout punch to her barely-standing husband: She slept with someone else while he was away. Her fling is within the boundaries of their marital arrangement, but it’s still too much for him to bear. His face falls, but he still opens his arms to her. Tom’s officially taken Kendall’s place as the resident neutered hound dog of the family.
The Winner: Connor
Anyone caught in the radius of Logan's nuclear meltdown walked away a loser, leaving Shiv and Connor, Logan’s two unemployed (or in Connor’s case, unemployable) children, as the only ones safe from its fallout. Who'd have thought Shiv would be taken down by the sheer weight of Connor's idiocy?
With the rest of his goons en route to Hungary, Logan tasks Shiv with shutting down Connor’s presidential ambitions. It turns out Connor's been “beta-testing” a surreal video announcement that looks like an bizarro-AOC livestream. He’s leaning against the Austerlitz kitchen counter with an unopened bottle of red wine in his hands, pledging to cut taxes “down to zero within a decade or so.” He fumbles an appeal to the everyman—“I ranch, I ride, I earn, and I give—just like you. But ding-dong! Who’s there? Uncle Sam. And where’s his hand? In my pants”—before vowing to quit paying taxes altogether. “And if you wanna arrest me? Go ahead. No, really. Go ahead and try.”
In so brazenly announcing his untouchable privilege, Connor confirms he's as much a monster as the rest of the Roys, though perhaps a relatively toothless one. There probably won't be consequences if he stops paying his taxes, but by broadcasting it, he’s inviting scrutiny and jeopardizing the tax schemes the Roys already have in place. “You don’t go shouting about tax,” Logan grumbles to Shiv. “We have arrangements.” Shiv tries to make Connor see his hypocrisy in the exorbitant hotel suite he and Willa rented out. “Do you think that maybe if you’re looking down on the elites from this penthouse,” she tells him, “it’s indicative of something?” She appeals to Willa too, but neither tactic works. Connor posts the announcement anyway, immediately making headlines.
Maybe Connor has some bite to him yet. Comparing him to Trump is too easy—Don Jr. is more apt—but he could inflict real damage on the Roys, Waystar, and the country if he isn’t managed. For the first time, the family eccentric is wielding a winning hand—or at least cluelessly bluffing one—and he might bring down the whole operation like a house of cards.
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