Brian Cox as Logan Roy in season 3 of Succession. Photo / HBO
Warning: contains spoilers
Succession was always meant to orbit about Logan Roy’s legacy. What it never intended to consider was his staying power. We remember now that a foreshadowing stroke on a helicopter sent him into hospital in the first ever episode. Jesse Armstrong has told us the show’s whole plan was for season one to entail his death – not the death of a cater-waiter we’ve barely met in the astonishing 10th episode, but the fall of the father.
What a different show it would then have become. We’ll get a belated sense of that now, for the seven episodes left: how soon will backstabbing replace mourning? Which of his children has the killer hunger, and does a single one have the survival skills, for the top spot?
These questions have always been the bait, though – not the real meat. This banquet needed Logan there, still firmly heading the table. It’s a crafty reversal of the show’s ambitions that a threatened power vacuum kept being filled by the very man who was supposed to be doing the vacating. If Logan – played indomitably, furiously, and with an absolute refusal to suffer a single moment of fool behaviour by Brian Cox – was not ready to snuff it as early as Armstrong once assumed, you can surely blame the incompetence of his children for that.
“I love you, but you’re not serious people,” he tells them in their last ever encounter – the most gently damning judgment of all those he’s delivered to these wayward brats since birth. Each season saw him hefting himself back up again to safeguard Waystar Royco’s interests, because all anyone else was watching out for was their own. There was only so much holding down of the entire fort that he could manage.
The first glimpse of Cox we ever saw – that credits-ending shot of his back at the boardroom, in a trademark cable-knit cardigan – summed up his burden. You can already feel the weight on him, which no one is doing a great job easing or sharing. There’s a sense of him entrenched in the hot seat, like a limpet, refusing to budge.
When we see that same back unclothed, for an outdoor swim in S1E7, what’s unveiled is quite a backstory. It’s riddled with what look like childhood scars. We know that his upbringing in Dundee was rough, but not, in detail, how rough. His widowed mother sent him and two siblings to be raised by an uncle, Noah, in Quebec, who beat him viciously and often – the presumed cause of his injuries. At some point the sister, Rose, died, for which Logan continued to blame himself. His surviving brother, Ewan (James Cromwell) emerged with almost diametrically opposite values, and despised everything Logan came to stand for.
His rise to become the head of a monstrous, fraying media empire, the middle act of Logan’s life, is what the show gets away with skimping on – because we all know the Rupert Murdoch story. Personality-wise, a hair-trigger contempt is the end result. It’s always been most bitterly, swearily channeled towards his children, who show no attempt to understand the impecunity of his beginnings, and even mock his sob-story origins. He does unforgivable things to them, but fundamentally can’t forgive them either, for the crime of not being him.
It’s a crucial irony of the show that he’s given all the junior Roys the world on a silver platter, and manages to hold this against them, while also hating himself because they’ve had it so easy. Their lack of grit and initiative at all times makes him combust – and perversely, keeps him alive. We learn that he, in his own turn, physically abused Roman at least once as a child – but this is a rare lapse. Verbal abuse is Logan’s withering forte, and becomes Roman’s entire mode of communication in adulthood. At times he’s like Logan’s court-jester Mini-Me.
Logan’s relationship to Kendall, whom he understands inside and out as a hopeless case, is one of torturer to victim. Shiv, meanwhile, is treated as treacherously as he treats every woman close to him – pulled into all-consuming allegiance, then shoved away, while he pulls Tom closer instead.
We know little about Logan’s first wife, except that his rejection of her carries on down to his view of Connor, the eldest, as a delusional pinhead who barely counts. Third wife Marcia is long gone (we suppose), while Logan’s last act is to kick Gerri, his sympathetic general counsel, brutally to the kerb. Even Kerry, the former PA who is his sort-of-girlfriend at the end, has seen a taste of his medicine, in having her promised role as a news anchor cravenly retracted.
Logan dreams of an inner circle as loyal and loving as Kent, Gloucester and the Fool. (He gets the likes of Karl, Frank and Karolina instead.) Brian Cox has naturally acknowledged the Lear-ishness of Logan, but thinks another Shakespearian king is even more key to understanding him – Henry IV. Like that ruler, he sees no child or successor worth his salt, least of all Kendall. They’re lowlifes, degenerates, with their dick pics and petty rivalries.
No wonder that crown has proved so constantly hard to dislodge. “It’s like Jaws, if everyone in Jaws worked for Jaws,” observed Greg, as Logan prowled the newsroom in the previous episode. He’s been a Great White Shark all along – practically unkillable, a creature of minimal mercy and primal goals. But also an endangered species, and an increasingly lonely specimen. When his children aren’t around because they’re scheming to gazump him, he needs all the court sycophants to drop the act and have a go at roasting him – “I’m being fun!” he terrifyingly insists.
In his interviews, Cox has mentioned that a couple of flashbacks still await: Logan could have secrets yet to spill from the grave, a baby on the way (?!), or a few last droplets of venom to spit out. But his attempt to make peace with the clan, in last week’s karaoke scene, clearly failed, and there’s no coming back from that now. The last true friendship he seems to value is the one with his bodyguard, Colin. “You’re my best pal.”
While the empire teetered, the emperor boxed himself away and just held on, because no one else was good enough.
Succession is available to stream on Neon and Sky Go
Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charity work.