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Be aware: This text comprises spoilers for a number of Succession episodes, significantly season 4, episode two, “Rehearsal.”
Rehearsal, the second episode of the final season of Succession, is an episode filled with speeches, pitches, and, as all the time in Succession, energy performs. Everybody desires to show that they’re standing just a bit bit taller than their enemies, and to do it, they’re shifting in unfamiliar areas.
On the precipice of promoting Waystar to tech firm GoJo, Logan (Brian Cox) ignites panic when he unceremoniously drops by the headquarters of his information community, ATN. He’s “terrifyingly moseying” across the flooring of the newsroom, Greg (Nicholas Braun) tells Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), as if on the lookout for prey to kill. “It’s like Jaws,” Greg frets, “if everybody in Jaws labored for Jaws.”
But it surely’s laborious to not discover that Logan is a shark out of water. Logan within the cavernous ATN newsroom feels uncomfortable not as a result of he’s respiratory down everybody’s neck — although he’s — however as a result of the lights are too shiny, laying naked that Logan Roy is simply an extraordinary little man, the type who stands on prime of containers of paper to provide an awkwardly bombastic speech to the ATN workers.
“This isn’t the top. I’m going to construct one thing higher,” Logan vows to the ATN workers. He’s a soccer coach earlier than the large sport, and he’s going to steer ATN by way of a brand new, irrepressibly daring new age. He’s bursting with youthful ambition and a fervor to beat the world. You’d hardly imagine this was a person who was contemplating retirement again in season one.
And he makes an announcement that sends a shiver down each worker’s backbone: He’s going to be spending much more time at ATN.
He’s not the one one on this episode to roam in surprising locations. At one level, the Roy kids discover themselves in a dive bar. And later, all of them, Logan included, have an actual household assembly — the type that they need to have had throughout their publicity stunt of a household remedy session in season one — in a non-public room at a karaoke bar that resembles a spaceship, coloured lights dancing throughout the partitions in stark dissonance with the gravity of their assembly.
Connor doesn’t wish to be himself
If you happen to’ve ever puzzled what every member of the Roy household would sing at karaoke — a Rorschach check for somebody’s character — this episode offers not less than one reply. Connor (Alan Ruck), the eldest Roy baby, spends the eve of his wedding ceremony mournfully belting Leonard Cohen’s Well-known Blue Raincoat. Connor has determined to marry Willa (Justine Lupe), a former escort, and he’s morose after she has walked out throughout their rehearsal dinner, asserting, “I can’t do that.”
Connor desires to take pleasure in some escapism — it looks as if he didn’t actually have a bachelor get together — and desires to go to a “actual bar” with “guys who work with their palms” and “have blood of their hair.” They discover such a dive bar someplace in Manhattan. Connor, cosplaying the lifetime of a down-home dude, orders a “Belgian weissbier, however not a Hoegaarden.”
He desires to be somebody apart from Connor Roy, wealthy son of a good richer father, for the night time. Connor each attracts in and drives away Willa, who sees the usefulness of his wealth but additionally chafes at how a lot energy he has. It’s suffocating. Even on the bar, Connor is continually checking her location on his cellphone.
Connor has lengthy occupied himself in pursuits completely different from his youthful siblings. As a substitute of vying to take over the household enterprise, he’s flushing his inheritance away on a presidential bid through which he’s polling at a “mushy” 1 %. Connor has been on the fringes of the conflict between his siblings and father, however on this episode, he’s the stagehand ferrying these feuding characters from one surreal set to a different. After the bar, he implores his siblings to do karaoke with him — and even will get Logan to affix them.
True to the episode’s title, everyone seems to be liable to theatrics in Rehearsal. A lot of the Roys’ lives is a efficiency, with scripts and sometimes unconvincing line readings. It’s completely different from the same old deceptions they knowingly and typically gleefully commit. Typically it’s solely throughout the artifice of efficiency that folks can inform the reality. As Connor belts out Well-known Blue Raincoat — a music through which Cohen addresses a pal or a member of the family that he’s estranged from — he’s being extra trustworthy and weak than he might ever be within the chilly mild of day.
Kerry desires to be a TV star
Again at ATN, past reminding his little employee bees how a lot of his cash they’re losing, Logan is visiting for the crucial mission of securing a job for his assistant/girlfriend, Kerry (Zoe Winters). Kerry has aspirations to change into an ATN anchor; Tom and Cyd (Jeannie Berlin) lie by way of their enamel, telling Logan that Kerry is deserving of a slot on the community. In actuality, Kerry is clearly uncomfortable in entrance of the digicam: She garbles her phrases, smiles sinisterly as she reads off dire headlines, and might’t work out what to do along with her arms. Logan goes by way of the motions of pretending he’s not laying a metric ton of strain on Tom and Cyd, however he’s by no means been an moral chief. “She’s my assistant. It might be very unprofessional of me to become involved,” he sighs.
Everyone seems to be laughing behind Kerry’s again as a result of someway everybody has gotten maintain of her audition tape (together with Logan’s kids). Courting a robust man like Logan comes with its perks, clearly, however one wonders if it’s definitely worth the unrelenting humiliation. Kendall (Jeremy Sturdy) muses that Kerry being made an ATN anchor is an simple signal of his father’s “whole lack of judgment and management.” However in distinction to the bellicose pep discuss he offers at ATN, in terms of romance, Logan is a coward. As a substitute, Greg is left with the duty of making an attempt to persuade Kerry that being an ATN anchor can be far more bother than it’s price, however he fails spectacularly as a result of, in contrast to the Roys, Greg could be very unhealthy on the artwork of manipulation. His superpower is getting folks to assume the precise reverse of what he desires them to assume.
That GoJo sale is completely occurring (besides possibly with a tiny delay)
Logan hasn’t gone completely mushy — he’s nonetheless an apex predator. Rehearsal sees Kendall, Shiv, and Roman feeling the fallout of their showdown with their father over Pierce International Media within the final episode. Logan isn’t one to let an insult go; his kids stole PGM from him, so he revokes their entry to the corporate helicopter. The trio doesn’t uncover that they’re grounded till they’re already on the tarmac, working late for Connor’s rehearsal dinner. It barely even registers as a shock; after all their father reacted vindictively, that’s his everlasting nature — would you get offended at a storm for pulling down timber?
However that’s not the one means Logan is sniping again. Shiv finds out that his father helps Tom, her soon-to-be ex-husband, battle out all the perfect divorce attorneys in New York so none of them can symbolize Shiv.
This newest affront drives Shiv to make contact with Sandi Furness (Hope Davis), a Waystar board member, the day earlier than the board will vote to approve the sale. Sandi and Stewy (Arian Moayed), one other board member, imagine that Logan is promoting Waystar to GoJo for a criminally low worth — they need the children to vote in opposition to the sale with them to allow them to return to the desk for the next worth. It’s, in any case, what their father would do, and in enterprise they need to all naturally emulate Logan.
Shiv acts like she’s abruptly serious about squeezing extra money out of the deal — that’s simply good enterprise sense — but it surely’s not a convincing act. As standard, the true driving pressure is that her emotions are wounded, and delaying the sale is a means she will be able to get again at Logan for the divorce lawyer ploy.
Shiv’s brothers aren’t on board with delaying the sale, although — who cares about an additional billion or two? Kendall and Roman are prepared to scrub their palms of Waystar and gather their assured payout tomorrow. However Sandi and Stewy, and now Shiv, wish to pressure Logan “again into the ring for one final spherical.”
They spend many of the transient time they spend at Connor’s wedding ceremony rehearsal dinner bickering backwards and forwards about it, whereas Connor is stuffed with anxiousness over the place Willa is. She ran out of the dinner proper as she was about to provide her speech. Willa, regardless of her obsession with being taken significantly as a playwright, can’t plaster on a pretend smile and skim her ready traces like the remainder of the household.
What adjustments Kendall’s thoughts about delaying the Waystar sale is when GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) enters the stage. He calls Kendall, ostensibly to ensure the children aren’t pondering of blocking the sale tomorrow. He takes a threatening tack. “Don’t push me,” he says, claiming that in the event that they return to the desk, he’ll stroll away. For some cause they’re on a video name, and Kendall can see that Matsson is up late ingesting soda and consuming junk meals — it’s not simply Stewy and Sandi who’re harassed about the opportunity of leaving cash on the desk, Matsson is extra harassed than he’s letting on, too. As he rambles on, Kendall has the dawning realization about Matsson’s present of aggression. It means he’s fearful, and there’s completely room to drive the value larger. It’s additionally another alternative — possibly the grand finale alternative — to explode one among Logan’s offers. Shiv means that possibly Logan has really misplaced his contact if he’s getting taken benefit of by Matsson.
Again on the bar, Roman will get a textual content message from Logan, and his siblings are aghast. Roman reveals that he texted his dad glad birthday. It might have been unhealthy sufficient if he’d replied to a textual content, however to ship a number of unsolicited texts to their father? “We stated no contact till he apologizes,” Shiv says in an totally scandalized tone. “So, then, by no means?” Roman retorts.
It’s an attention-grabbing revelation, even when it isn’t completely shocking. After a lifetime of abuse, it’d be comprehensible in the event that they selected to haven’t any contact with their father eternally. However what they’re on the lookout for isn’t an exit; it’s for Logan to bend the knee. Shiv and Kendall attribute Roman’s disinterest in stonewalling to his worry of battle, not as a philosophical distinction on what traces to cross or not cross while you’re offended at household.
The Roys do a music and dance
The Roy siblings take their argument to the subsequent vacation spot: a non-public karaoke room in Manhattan’s Koreatown. To be clear, for all their aptitude for the dramatic, the Roy siblings should not karaoke folks. They’re solely right here as a result of, in some recess of their hearts, they really feel unhealthy for his or her oldest brother, who could or will not be getting married tomorrow.
They don’t pity him for lengthy. Connor drops a bombshell: He advised Logan about their plan to puncture the sale, and Logan is at present en route to fulfill them.
More often than not, a non-public karaoke room is absolutely the worst place to have an essential dialog. However the Roys (plus Kerry) have a critical heart-to-heart. Logan waltzes in with a conciliatory, nearly remorseful tone. “I assume I wished you there at my get together,” he says, referring to the celebration that Kendall, Shiv, and Roman skipped within the final episode. Does anybody imagine this masks for even a second?
His kids don’t. They drip with sarcasm and bile. “Holy shit,” Kendall says. “Did Dad simply say a sense?” Shiv tells Logan to chop the shit; it’s clear he’s right here as a result of he wants them to not torpedo the vote tomorrow. However their father tries to play a siren music, proposing a future the place they’ll coexist, the place they’ve moved past the fixed cycle of preventing — he’ll run ATN, they’ll run Pierce, and their relationships might be more healthy. It’s an entire fairy story. An excessive amount of has been stated and finished to so simply untangle the knots of their resentment and wounds. Kerry tries to advocate for Logan, which is a mistake. Kendall, Shiv, and Roman flip vicious on her.
“Look,” Logan says. “I don’t do apologies. But when it means a lot to you, then sorry.” There’s a second of deafening silence. “There’s nothing you might say to me now that I might ever imagine,” Shiv replies.
Roman asks the actual query: What’s he even sorry for? They squabble backwards and forwards, with Logan making an attempt to gaslight them, Shiv citing his support to Tom of their divorce, and Kendall dragging out outdated skeletons within the closet round how Logan has handled all of them.
Logan’s endurance wears out ultimately. They’re not serious about seeing sense — his model of what’s clever, not less than — they only need an airing of agonies. “I really like you,” he says earlier than he makes his exit, “however you aren’t critical folks.”
And that’s the present. The curtains fall.
Epilogue
Afterward, Shiv and Kendall crow about how exhilarating it was to verbally beat up their father. But it surely looks like they’re simply papering over what they actually really feel — shaken, unsure, and realizing that damage and anger are nonetheless embedded deep even after what was alleged to be their cathartic, climactic second. Connor calls his youthful siblings “needy love sponges,” and asserts that he’s made peace with an absence of affection. “The advantage of having a household that doesn’t love you is you study to dwell with out it,” he says.
Besides nobody actually learns to dwell with out love. They solely develop coping mechanisms. On the automobile journey residence, Shiv stares at her cellphone, considering calling Tom. Connor, regardless of his declarations, returns to his place and is relieved to seek out Willa already there. Roman, in the meantime, goes to Logan’s residence. Logan desires his youngest son to return with him to go to Matsson in Sweden tomorrow — the day of Connor’s wedding ceremony. He dangles the carrot of Roman changing into head of ATN. However extra persuasive than the job is Logan’s reply when Roman questions if he actually desires him to guide the community. Logan tells him that he wants his son.
It’s all his kids have ever dreamed of.
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