Succession season 4 sets the board for life after Logan

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: This post discusses the plot of “Connor’s Wedding,” season 4 episode 3 of Succession, in detail.]

In its fourth season, HBO’s Succession had a promise to keep. As the final season of the acclaimed drama, the current stretch of episodes has the burden of fulfilling the promise of the show’s title. Someone has to take over for Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the patriarch of the Roy family and conservative media tycoon near the end of his life and career. After deciding against stepping down and naming a successor among his squabbling children more than once, it has become apparent that the only thing that will separate Logan from his company is death.

What makes “Connor’s Wedding” a terrific episode of television is how it makes Logan’s inevitable death still feel like a shock, thereby getting the audience invested in his childrens’ messy, complicated grief.

Logan’s passing is arresting in its sudden mundanity. In a show that likes to wring both heavy drama and laugh-out-loud comedy out of board meetings and glad-handing, Logan’s final moments are remarkable in how little weight they carry. He only has a few brief moments in “Connor’s Wedding,” asking his youngest son to let a trusted associate know she’s getting axed, and choosing to skip his eldest son’s wedding in order to secure a business deal.

This casual callousness is signature Logan Roy, perfected across three seasons by Cox’s performance and Succession’s writers. He then gets on a plane. The next we hear from him is when his son-in-law Tom Wambsgams (Matthew Macfadyen), the only family member on the flight full of cronies, gets on the phone with Roman (Kieran Culkin) to share the news that Logan went to the bathroom and had to be dragged out as the flight