I’m worried for my man, Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong). There's a real concern that Kendall might not make it to Season 4 of Succession. He’s not in a good state, and when we last saw him, he was dozing off to sleep in a flooding pool with a beer bottle that left his hand. He really should not have gone to Tuscany. He should’ve stayed home. And where the heck is Naomi, who was his bed rock at the end of season 7, when his birthday party crashed and burned (though unfortunate, it was expected that his party would ultimately be a disaster)?
Kendall is in Tuscany with his kids, but he doesn’t seem to have any adult allies in his corner. He’s also depressed, on the losing end of his fight with his father, and that’s not a good recipe at all for him. He should be concerned about his mental health, and people close to him should be worried about him if they care about him at all.
For most of the episode, Kendall sought his father to have a big sit down meeting with him. As expected, it didn't go well for him. His own father has blocked him from his phone. His father doesn't even trust him enough to send him a plate of pasta, and he has Kendall's son taste it for him to make sure it isn't poisoned. Kendall's treated like he's only a member of the family in technicality, but it feels as if he's been disowned in every other sense of the word. After being on the losing end of the fight to his dad, Kendall wants out of the company, but his dad won't let him. Kendall will be tied to Waystar Royco until he dies or quits, it seems.
He’s not a perfect person by any means. At the end of season 1, he accidentally killed a waiter by wrecking his car into a pond while swerving from oncoming traffic after he and his newfound friend (the waiter) were high on drugs.
Kendall is a man that has been beaten down, and has gotten back up many times before. He’s survived verbal abuses from his powerful father, Logan Roy (played by the brilliant Brian Cox), drug addiction, and he is one quirky individual that is fond of parties. He had the cringe-worthy rap in which he rapped about his love for his father (which looks weird and ironic now), and he also had the equally disastrous 40th birthday party that was hailed as “the Notorious Ken: Ready to Die” party.
There’s something really tragic about him. He’s habitually had problems with drug addiction, he’s lost a big fight and case against his powerful father in Season 3 where he sought to take him down in their cruise ship’s harassment case, and he’s been tumbling down into depression, ever since his siblings went behind his back to try to do a deal with Lukas Matsson (played by Alexander Skarsgard) at his birthday party in order to finish a business deal. Add insult to injury, not only does his brother Roman Roy (played by Kieran Culkin) sneak into the treehouse without Kendall’s permission, Roman insults Kendall to his face and pushes him just as Kendall is on his way out of the party.
One of the subtly more tragic things is the supposedly funny headlines at Kendall’s birthday party about his family’s demise, but we’ve come to know that none of that will happen to them. Instead, the very real demise could be Kendall’s own, as he was depressed, drunk, and fell asleep in his pool at the end of Episode 8’s Chiantishire, and he is at the risk of drowning and dying in the very next episode.
Jeremy Strong is a very good, yet has been since as a mercurial and intense method actor. He’s one of the best actors most people don’t really know about, but if Episode 8 was the last episode we see Kendall Roy alive, the greatest sendoff for him would be if he wins an Emmy for his strong performance of Kendall in Season 3 of Succession.
Kendall Roy was supposed to be the most woke Roy, if there was a thing. But as the show has progressed, that may not be necessarily good for him. He’s an idealist at heart in a world full of cold, calculating business people, and he is essentially like a big fish in a sea of sharks. He took a big chance by calling out his father at the end of season 2 by calling him a malignant figure, and he was willing to take down him and his company, Waystar Royco to try to expose their company’s cruise ship’s corruption scandal.
However, he really struggled to give his side of the case at the deposition when he was with his then lawyer, Lisa Arthur. As a result, Kendall had a meltdown immediately afterwards, and his meltdown led to Lisa's chagrin, which disagreed with Kendall. In turn, Kendall's meltdown and his public firing of Lisa Arthur doomed any chance of him winning against his father or the company. As a result, Kendall was basically surrounded by enablers, and he didn't stand a chance to win the case once he fired Lisa, who was a powerful lawyer who remained objective throughout the process.
For most of the show, I’ve felt cousin Greg and Tom to be more or less the voice of the commoners in a land of the rich and powerful, and we need them to be heard more. Unfortunately, cousin Greg has made some very questionable choices in season 3, as he decided to sign an agreement with Logan Roy and Waystar Royco, and he lost his inheritance from his grandfather to Greenpeace. He ended up planning to sue Greenpeace, and he’s strayed further and further away from seeming to be the common man.
Roman Roy has been one of the more intriguing, oddball characters on the show. He’s showed business acumen and savvy by being able to rope in his political candidate, Jerryd Mencken to get his father’s seal of approval, and he also managed to get Lukas Matsson back in talks with his company to try to get the merger done. But every time he makes a step to be Waystar's future CEO, he does something odd and really strange that makes me think that he won't be. Roman's perverseness and oddball quirks have taken him sideways, and he ended up sending NSFW photos of his junk that went to his father, and that could result him getting fired from his company, or at the very least ostracized and humiliated.
Lastly, Shiv Roy has gone a 180 from working for a very liberal politician to really wanting the CEO position at her father’s company. Of all of the Roy siblings, she might potentially the shrewdest and the coldest sibling of them all. She went with Roman to try to do a business deal at Kendall’s birthday party even when he explicitly told them not to. I wanted to naively believe that she was one of the most progressive of the Roys in the family, but that has been proven to not be the case at all, and she has been ruthless in pursuit of a higher position at Waystar Royco.
Shiv did help expose Roman for his photo gaffe to his father, but she also tried to push her interim CEO, Gerri around to use their secret relationship as leverage so she could gain a higher role within the company. Lastly, she claimed to remember her mom leaving when she was 10, but her mother told her that Shiv was 13 when she told her mom that she wanted to live with her father, Logan.
We’ve always known Shiv wanted to be the CEO, but the lengths she goes to is far more than most would be willing to go to get there. While her mother seemed to make Shiv try to become a mother via reverse psychology, I’m still not convinced Shiv wants kids, and her husband Tom desperately wants to have them. At some point, Shiv is either going to have to decide whether to have kids and get what Tom wants (Tom, who always seems to be emasculated by his wife and never gets what he wants), or to not have them and potentially leave Tom altogether.
Anyways, those are my thoughts on the show Succession for now. Thanks for reading.
Side Note:
For those of you who don’t know who Jimmy Darmody is, he was a central character on the HBO show, Boardwalk Empire. Spoilers are below.
Jimmy Darmody was a main character on Boardwalk Empire that was played by Michael Pitt in season 1 and 2. Jimmy Darmody was a protégé and surrogate son of Nucky Thompson, and he was a former soldier that came back from war. He was born after the Commodore had forced himself and impregnated his mother, Gillian Darmody (in which the affair had been arranged Nucky). When I watched the first season, I thought that Jimmy would end up supplanting Nucky to be his heir apparent to run the mafia, but that did not turn out to be the case at all.
Jimmy’s life was a very tragic one. His mother seemed to have a stunted emotional maturity of a child, and Jimmy and his mother seemed to have an incestuous relationship. Jimmy enrolled at Princeton, but was kicked out after getting into a fight with his teacher after his teacher wanted to date his mother. On top of that, he was burdened by memories of war,
Jimmy worked for Nucky, but then later worked for the Commodore, and after he didn’t call off a hit on Nucky, he ended up getting killed by his surrogate father Nucky Thompson at the end of season 2, who more or less disowned him by then.
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