Material Event: Unpacking That Pivotal 'Succession' Episode

In her 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five emotional stages of people at the end of life: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kübler-Ross’ model has since been popularly applied to the grief process. The implication is that all of us who live, love and die are in this way the same.

“Succession” appears to have done its psych homework. In the tour-de-force episode “Connor’s Wedding” — spoilers begin here — the Roy siblings learn by phone of their father Logan’s fatal collapse, while he is on a jet crossing the Atlantic, and begin racing through Kübler-Ross’ stages.

One part of the show’s genius has always been its portrayal of the superwealthy Roys as both deeply human and alien. As it is in life, so it is in death. The Roys’ reactions are, broadly, familiar to anyone who’s ever gotten similar news. It’s in the particulars that this family is very different.

Let’s start with denial. In one sense, Logan’s death may be the least surprising big surprise in HBO drama history. His health has always been shaky, and the show’s very title asks what or who will come after him. But when the inevitable suddenly happens, instinct still kicks in: This can’t be real.

“Real,” as any viewer of “Succession” knows, is a key word for the Roy family. It’s a measure of worth, separating people who are “real” — important, worthy of concern — from those who are merely numbers on a ledger.

It’s also a fraught term for characters who grew up in a, shall we say, low-trust environment. “Is this real?” Shiv (Sarah Snook) asks, with good reason, when Logan (Brian Cox) offers in Season 2 to let her take over his media empire. It’s the series’ refrain: This deal, this promise, this expression of love — can I take it to the bank?

So when Roman (Kieran Culkin) manically refuses to accept the news — “What if it’s a big [expletive] test?” — yes, he is being irrational. But he is also operating by the logic of the only reality he has ever known. What isn’t a test with Logan? His last words to Roman were to order him to fire his lieutenant Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), with whom Roman had a bond (and occasional rounds of masochistic sex chat). When Roman hesitates, Logan asks, “You are with me?”

About Logan’s death, Roman keeps repeating, “We don’t know.” And the episode, written by the creator, Jesse Armstrong, and directed by Mark Mylod, cleverly puts the viewers in his position. We can see inside the plane, but we can’t see much of Logan, only the crew performing compressions on a body. Only when Shiv spills her frenzied last words into his cold ear do we finally see his face. I will admit to having wondered if Roman was right. Yes, it would be insane for Logan to fake his death. But a side effect of growing up Roy is learning to read your most intimate family moments as potential plot twists and fake-outs.

Anger and bargaining, in Roy World, tend to operate as a team. There’s anger at Logan, of course. Each Roy child sputters a word salad of love and hurt and fury into the phone. But anger is also a reaction to helplessness. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) demands to have “the best airplane medicine expert in the world” brought onto the call, growing frustrated and incensed, as if he could cheat death by demanding to speak to its manager.

From the beginning of the phone call to when we cut to the corporate-response discussion aboard the plane is less than 20 minutes, and Armstrong packs a lifetime into it.

Every line, every image, speaks to the moment and to decades of family trauma and relationships: Roman’s forcing himself to say that Logan was a good dad, then handing off the phone like it’s radioactive; Shiv’s becoming at once a terrified girl and a furious grown daughter; Kendall and Shiv’s holding hands as they go to break the news to their half brother, Connor (Alan Ruck), on his wedding day. (Ruck has done spectacular emotional work with comparatively little screen time, and he does it again here: “He never even liked me.”)

By the time we return from the plane to the wedding yacht in New York, depression is creeping in. And acceptance — well, that too has a different meaning in this family.

The Roys live in an environment where everything is personal and nothing is entirely private. Your family is your family, but it’s also a business. Your father’s death is your father’s death — bound up with a lifetime of resentment and thwarted love — but it is also a “material event” that requires disclosure. (“Succession” is known for its clever, filthy dialogue, but it also has an ear for the bland brutality of business-speak.) Your emotions may be complicated and genuine, but their expression is inevitably tactical. As Kendall says, “What we do today will always be what we did the day our father died.”

Your father is the man who loved you or hit you or molded you or disappointed you, but he is also an expensive corporate asset, an asset that has now failed. And its failure must be announced and adjusted to, even as you adjust to the fundamental reordering of the universe.

The dialogue shifts seamlessly from shock to grieving to maneuvering. The firmament has shattered. God — or the devil, or both — is dead. That vacuum must be filled, and the deluge prepared for, whether you are family, staff or, like Shiv’s estranged husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), an unhappy bit of both. “I have lost my protector,” he says, like a “Game of Thrones” bannerman realizing that his head may soon part company with his neck.

It’s a bold and potent move for Armstrong, who has one of TV’s greatest actors in Cox, to give us none of this from Logan’s point of view. We don’t know what he was thinking at the end. We, like his children, don’t know what he felt or if he heard their last words. There is no closure, no satisfaction. He will forever be a question mark at the center of the universe.

Instead, a scene from the season’s first episode amounts to his last testament. Restless and unsettled at a birthday celebration that Kendall, Roman and Shiv have chosen not to attend, Logan ends up at a diner with his body man, Colin (Scott Nicholson), whom — is it possible to pity Logan Roy? — he calls his “best pal.”

To his wary companion, Logan launches into what now sounds like a deathbed monologue. “What are people?” he asks Colin, and then answers his own question: “What is a person? It has values and aims, but it operates in a market. Marriage market, job market, money market, market for ideas, et cetera.” And while he is a winner in the judgment of the market — “a hundred feet tall” where most people are “pygmies” — he doesn’t seem to feel like one.

At last, he asks Colin whether he believes in the afterlife, and again, Logan supplies his own answer. “We don’t know,” he says. “We can’t know. But I’ve got my suspicions.”

Those suspicions were confirmed or denied on an airplane floor thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a most appropriate choice for “Succession.” The series is about people untethered to place, who move from vehicle to vehicle, from one antiseptic luxury space to another.

So this is a most fitting end for Logan Roy — to die in no country, in the expensive no-space of a corporate jet, his last moments relayed to a yacht docked off the financial district, where the market will weigh and digest his death as it does all human effort and sorrow. As Roman says, a plunging chart line on his phone indicating Waystar Royco’s share price: “There he is. That is Dad.”

There is one vehicular transfer left for Logan Roy.

We end the episode at Teterboro Airport, where his shrouded body is deplaned and loaded into an ambulance. Kendall looks on, taking a private, pensive moment before what comes next: The period when his father’s passing becomes a news event, and most likely, a contest.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance belong to us all. But for a Roy, there is a sixth stage of grief: ambition.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.