Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers for Legacies Season 4 Episode 4, “The Honeymoon States.”
CNN
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After the shock there followed aftershocks, a power vacuum and, perhaps most importantly and impressively, laughs as Legacies pivoted to life after Logan Roy in an episode that finally revealed the title of the HBO show.
Logan Roy's sudden passing left his adult children and employees scrambling, each seemingly humbly offering themselves to fill the void while at the same time worrying about how the various candidates would play with the company's board.
At the same time, they mourned the enormous figure they had lost, considering that he had treated many of them horribly. And the fourth hour also marked the return of Logan's wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), in something of a “Marcia Strikes Back” twist, while his current and much younger girlfriend Kerry (Zoe Winter) was shown the door straight. (The latter brought back memories of the musical “Evita,” when the main character knocks on Peron’s mistress, who is singing about another suitcase in another room.)
More than anything else, this episode highlighted just how brutal and funny “Legacies” can be: Shiv (Sarah Snook) read her father’s obituary and mused, “Dad sounds amazing. I'd like to meet Dad,” while brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) hilariously translated the language with references to Logan being “a man of his time,” which equates to “racist.”
The episode also featured executives at Waystar Royco, who was anxiously wondering what to do with the document, which included not only Logan's posthumous wishes, but also handwritten notes that appeared to indicate who he wanted as his successor. They made half-hearted jokes about throwing the paper down the toilet, while making it very clear how much they really wanted to throw the paper down the toilet.
All the knives were drawn and Karl (David Rasche) brutally insulted Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), barely hiding the fact that he presented doubts about Tom's future as hypothetical.
However, there were also human moments amid it, as a tormented Kendall expressed his conflicted feelings to Waystar CEO Frank (Peter Friedman), saying, “He made me hate him and he died. I feel like he didn't like me. I disappointed him.”
“Succession” also highlighted the fragility of not only life but also corporate legacies, with public relations professionals discussing how to spin up and down Logan's involvement in his final years as a means of boosting the company and its stock price—a maneuver that Kendall ultimately secretly approved of, concluding that it was the kind of smart, ruthless move his father would have made.
Succession issues also appear to threaten the harmony Kendall, Shiv and Roman had achieved before Logan's departure, with Shiv remaining the odd woman out in the plan to take over as CEO just long enough to close the sale to GoJo. Trust doesn't come easy in series creator Jesse Armstrong's world, and when Shiv said, “I need to get my beak wet,” her brothers' reassurances clearly left an impression of how easily that beak can fail.
Ultimately, after the operating highs of the previous episode, the series successfully turned the page from grief to the next order of business. And it's also, as Kendall put it regarding Logan and the “bad dad” PR leaks, “it's what he would do.”
