NOTE: This article is a republication- Source: Vanity Fair (by Richard Lawson).
Warning: Spoilers for Succession season 4, episode 3 to follow.
We didn’t really think that Logan Roy, the bellicose media tycoon at the center of Succession, would get a tearful deathbed goodbye, did we? Jesse Armstrong’s series, while certainly soapy at times, is just not that kind of program. Blunt and mean as Logan could be, it’s fitting that his death—which finally came in season four, episode three—was just that, too: off-camera and ignoble and sudden, as so much death is in the real world.
Logan didn’t even make it to the penultimate or final episode of a series that has, arguably, revolved around him for four seasons now. Which is shocking in the best way, especially as Logan, so shrewdly played by Brian Cox, seemed to be gearing up for yet another existential struggle to secure his legacy. As it turns out, there will be no new Logan era at ATN, no protracted campaign to sell his company, no uneasy reconciliation nor ultimate disowning of his needy and vexing children. He’s just dead on a plane, having collapsed in a bathroom on his way toward another battle.
That’s certainly a more realistic end for someone his age whose health has been a question since the premiere of the series. Death is often quick and inconvenient, a sentence cut off without punctuation. There is something artful in Armstrong’s choice, then, a kind of Euro indie-film sensibility toward the comic harshness of the world. Logan was there one minute and then he was gone, disrupting (or, really, destroying) his eldest and most-mocked (but perhaps most loyal) son’s wedding as one last “fuck off” to his frivolous family.
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