In “Lion in the Meadow,” the Roys take a break from scorching the Earth and get back to more subtle power plays, using schoolyard insults and small gestures of disrespect to needle each other.
Later, when he’s asked to talk with Logan briefly on a private airstrip tarmac, before they both meet up with a nervous Waystar investor, Kendall zooms off to get to the meeting first, leaving the message, “Tell Dad, ‘Meep-meep’ … It’s from ‘Road Runner.’” For the most part, that’s the level of the attacks and counterattacks this week.
The investor in question is Josh Aaronson , who owns about 4 percent of Waystar — a holding which, he complains, has lost 10 percent of its value since Kendall started giving news conferences.
There’s another reason Josh invites Logan and Kendall to join him at his sprawling estate.
As they sit side by side in their matching black baseball caps — with Logan saying he can still see his son in charge of Waystar someday, and Kendall lovingly calling his old man “geezer” — they almost seem to be playing roles they wish were real.
Later, as they walk back to the main house through some exhaustingly bumpy hills, Josh leaves the two behind and they start making threats, each insisting the other is playing with a weak hand.
The first cue that these three weren’t on the same page came earlier in the day, when Kendall called the Beatles a “great band” and Josh and Logan both said they’re just a “good band.” The lines were drawn then.
He keeps getting distracted by his beverage, calling it “strong for a man” and reflecting on the hard-drinking olden days, saying, “I don’t know how you did it back in the ’60s.
There’s a good contrast between the Logan/Kendall/Josh scenes — featuring three guys comfortable with flexing — and the much sillier confrontation in this episode between Tom and Greg.
While Kendall and Logan are strutting by the sea, Shiv is back at the office hustling to execute some of her dad’s big plans.
He nixes Shiv’s idea that he become a host on one of Waystar’s travel and cuisine shows, because he still has presidential ambitions and he doesn’t think that spitting out wine on cable TV is going to help his numbers in the Rust Belt.
Once he gets past that, he suggests a particularly nasty way to take down Kendall: By locating “Tattoo Man,” a down on his luck guy his brother once paid to tattoo his initials on his forehead, while the siblings were on an “ironic” New Orleans bar crawl.