Written elsewhere, pasted here.
Brian Cox has been consistent, in interviews, about saying that he believes Logan truly loves his children, and says such fascinating things about his take on Logan that I find myself believing it, even watching Logan in those horrifying final moments. He's obviously abusive and cruel, but at the same time, there's always a logic to his actions, and to his emotions too; he turns on his children at the drop of a hat, but there's always a reason behind the turning, and there's always just this sense that he wants them to live up to his expectations of them, and they never, ever do.
The cruel irony, of course, is that his children are all fucked up precisely because he treats them like that. They can't become what he wants them to become, and it's all his fault. And I get the sense that, at some point, he may have to face that as his reckoning.
You can diagnose him as narcissistic or sociopathic, but I feel like it runs deeper than that. He's just... capitalism, manifested as a human being. He's King Lear but the marketplace rather than the monarchy. It's what he says in that monologue: he does what he does because it works, and if he betrays your loyalty, it's because loyalty no longer works. Honestly, while the last scene was disturbing, I was far more disturbed by his meeting with Lukas Matsson, because of just how quickly he turned on all his seeming convictions when presented with a compelling argument. He gave a complete stranger what he refused to give his children, all because the argument was sound, and the person making it was able to just lay it out without weirdness. He is as loyal to his company as, well, the marketplace is loyal to anything. And he, like capital itself, is as capable of being fluid and abrupt as a tidal wave.
Incidentally, someone pointed out that, in episode 2, when Kendall talks about his vision for the company to the sibs, he lays out basically the same strategy that Lukas does. On some level, he gets it!
But Tom is the real star here. I remember really liking Tom back in season 1, when the prevailing attitude towards him was "he's a total piece of shit," and the things that got cited were both his abuse of Greg and the many extremely-cynical things he says about capitalism, business, and wealth. But those cynical things were part of why I liked him so much. Tom, more than any character apart from maybe Logan, gets it: he understands exactly where he is and what he's doing. Other characters despise him because he's so transparent about wanting power, wanting mobility, to the point that it's sometimes cringey, but Tom talks about that stuff because he knows it's the only thing that matters. I'd argue that he understands that even better than his wife does. Shiv treats business like it's politics, like it's a series of political plays and jockeying, but to her it's ultimately a game, which is why her "moves" consistently fall flat. Tom treats business like it's, well, business. The difference between his scene last season with the Hitler-loving newsbro and Shiv's this season felt really telling, I think.
And Tom's tragic vulnerability is, of course, his love for his wife, which is the one thing he doesn't see as a business strategy—whereas to Shiv it's just another game. A game that I think she thinks Tom is playing too, to the point that she genuinely can't see that Tom wants family and love in a way that she, coming from the family she does, just can't imagine. Tom still calls his mom up for legal advice, for chrissake! But Tom's also been rising in the company all on his own—there's the bit in this episode where it's mentioned that he's getting incredible results at Waystar-Royco, obviously in horrible ways—and Shiv has been going out of her way to remove even the littlest bit of loyalty and love that might keep Tom from making the move he knew he ought to make.
I don't think of Succession as a particularly bleak or nihilist show. It's a show about a bleak aspect of society and a lot of its characters are nihilistic, but for me, the defining thing about the show is how it balances a whole lot of viciousness against those few moments of vulnerability and realization that are so damn shocking, you suddenly (and against your will) see these people as human again. Jesse Armstrong and Mark Mylod, in HBO's "behind the scenes" bit about this episode, talked about creating that final shot, and about the importance of Shiv maintaining her mask with her husband even after the shock of realizing what he'd done, until he's behind her and her eyes finally reveal that astonishing, conflicting emotion. Ultimately, "just business" is destined to be in conflict with "being human"; humanity is both tortured and warped by this vicious game and threatens to be the one thing that might cause it to collapse.
In retrospect, this whole season was a weave of the three children each coming to an intensely emotional point, each in their own ways; I'm sincerely curious whether the next season gives us something similar out of Logan. Seasons 1 and 2 each gave us brief moments of that shocking behind-the-scenes humanness to him—I'm thinking of his swim in the pool in season 1, with all the scars on his back, and of his monologue in the car in Dundee, as he talks about his childhood and briefly verges on something ominous and dark and sorrowful... and then one of his kids talks to him, and he pulls back, and the sharp tongue and the lust for money comes right back out. Did we get anything like that this season? I'm not sure. But now, more than anything, I want Logan sliced open the way the kids have been, in part because I think that Cox has a point. Logan is at once a monster and deeply human, and I want the show to find the latter with him in the same way it's been able to find it in everybody else.
Also, it's always weird to me that people don't bring up The Thick of It more when they talk about Succession—the show's portrayal of Malcolm Tucker feels incredibly pertinent to how Logan Roy is written, in terms of monsters who also feel like they have no choice but to be exactly what they are. (And, while we're there, it felt clear to me from the start that Greg is Succession's equivalent of Toby: the same gag of "Here's the young bright-faced man who offers us some hope of decency and naïveté in this hellish landscooooooohhhhh nope he's just as much a piece of shit as the rest of them." Which I'm not complaining about whatsoever—it remains a deeply inspired gag.)
Brian Cox has been consistent, in interviews, about saying that he believes Logan truly loves his children, and says such fascinating things about his take on Logan that I find myself believing it, even watching Logan in those horrifying final moments. He's obviously abusive and cruel, but at the same time, there's always a logic to his actions, and to his emotions too; he turns on his children at the drop of a hat, but there's always a reason behind the turning, and there's always just this sense that he wants them to live up to his expectations of them, and they never, ever do.
The cruel irony, of course, is that his children are all fucked up precisely because he treats them like that. They can't become what he wants them to become, and it's all his fault. And I get the sense that, at some point, he may have to face that as his reckoning.
You can diagnose him as narcissistic or sociopathic, but I feel like it runs deeper than that. He's just... capitalism, manifested as a human being. He's King Lear but the marketplace rather than the monarchy. It's what he says in that monologue: he does what he does because it works, and if he betrays your loyalty, it's because loyalty no longer works. Honestly, while the last scene was disturbing, I was far more disturbed by his meeting with Lukas Matsson, because of just how quickly he turned on all his seeming convictions when presented with a compelling argument. He gave a complete stranger what he refused to give his children, all because the argument was sound, and the person making it was able to just lay it out without weirdness. He is as loyal to his company as, well, the marketplace is loyal to anything. And he, like capital itself, is as capable of being fluid and abrupt as a tidal wave.
Incidentally, someone pointed out that, in episode 2, when Kendall talks about his vision for the company to the sibs, he lays out basically the same strategy that Lukas does. On some level, he gets it!
But Tom is the real star here. I remember really liking Tom back in season 1, when the prevailing attitude towards him was "he's a total piece of shit," and the things that got cited were both his abuse of Greg and the many extremely-cynical things he says about capitalism, business, and wealth. But those cynical things were part of why I liked him so much. Tom, more than any character apart from maybe Logan, gets it: he understands exactly where he is and what he's doing. Other characters despise him because he's so transparent about wanting power, wanting mobility, to the point that it's sometimes cringey, but Tom talks about that stuff because he knows it's the only thing that matters. I'd argue that he understands that even better than his wife does. Shiv treats business like it's politics, like it's a series of political plays and jockeying, but to her it's ultimately a game, which is why her "moves" consistently fall flat. Tom treats business like it's, well, business. The difference between his scene last season with the Hitler-loving newsbro and Shiv's this season felt really telling, I think.
And Tom's tragic vulnerability is, of course, his love for his wife, which is the one thing he doesn't see as a business strategy—whereas to Shiv it's just another game. A game that I think she thinks Tom is playing too, to the point that she genuinely can't see that Tom wants family and love in a way that she, coming from the family she does, just can't imagine. Tom still calls his mom up for legal advice, for chrissake! But Tom's also been rising in the company all on his own—there's the bit in this episode where it's mentioned that he's getting incredible results at Waystar-Royco, obviously in horrible ways—and Shiv has been going out of her way to remove even the littlest bit of loyalty and love that might keep Tom from making the move he knew he ought to make.
I don't think of Succession as a particularly bleak or nihilist show. It's a show about a bleak aspect of society and a lot of its characters are nihilistic, but for me, the defining thing about the show is how it balances a whole lot of viciousness against those few moments of vulnerability and realization that are so damn shocking, you suddenly (and against your will) see these people as human again. Jesse Armstrong and Mark Mylod, in HBO's "behind the scenes" bit about this episode, talked about creating that final shot, and about the importance of Shiv maintaining her mask with her husband even after the shock of realizing what he'd done, until he's behind her and her eyes finally reveal that astonishing, conflicting emotion. Ultimately, "just business" is destined to be in conflict with "being human"; humanity is both tortured and warped by this vicious game and threatens to be the one thing that might cause it to collapse.
In retrospect, this whole season was a weave of the three children each coming to an intensely emotional point, each in their own ways; I'm sincerely curious whether the next season gives us something similar out of Logan. Seasons 1 and 2 each gave us brief moments of that shocking behind-the-scenes humanness to him—I'm thinking of his swim in the pool in season 1, with all the scars on his back, and of his monologue in the car in Dundee, as he talks about his childhood and briefly verges on something ominous and dark and sorrowful... and then one of his kids talks to him, and he pulls back, and the sharp tongue and the lust for money comes right back out. Did we get anything like that this season? I'm not sure. But now, more than anything, I want Logan sliced open the way the kids have been, in part because I think that Cox has a point. Logan is at once a monster and deeply human, and I want the show to find the latter with him in the same way it's been able to find it in everybody else.
Also, it's always weird to me that people don't bring up The Thick of It more when they talk about Succession—the show's portrayal of Malcolm Tucker feels incredibly pertinent to how Logan Roy is written, in terms of monsters who also feel like they have no choice but to be exactly what they are. (And, while we're there, it felt clear to me from the start that Greg is Succession's equivalent of Toby: the same gag of "Here's the young bright-faced man who offers us some hope of decency and naïveté in this hellish landscooooooohhhhh nope he's just as much a piece of shit as the rest of them." Which I'm not complaining about whatsoever—it remains a deeply inspired gag.)