The fear that Kendall might have drowned turned out to be misplaced, by the concern wasn’t: As the show’s third-season finale, “And the Bells Say,” makes clear, Kendall was actually trying to die by suicide, and it was only quick action by his publicist Comfrey that kept him alive.
Lili Loofbourow: I may have been off, but I was still reading everyone’s guesses! I have to admit I didn’t expect much from that cliffhanger—I thought Ken would live—because this season has pretty aggressively punished any expectation of plot payoffs.
All this show really cares about, for good or for ill, is the characters, and it will move them wherever it wants them to go, no matter what has to be invented or forgotten in order for that to happen.
Loofbourow: Yeah, I think the defense of some of the plot sloppiness has been exactly that: This is a show about character, not plot! I have to admit that distinction doesn’t make sense to me, since plot ideally creates the conditions that reveal character.
And while the Roy kids are playing out their Oedipal drama at full volume, it’s Logan’s assistant Zoe who slips into the next room and finalizes the killing blow, stripping Kendall, Shiv, and Roman of the holding company interest they could have used to block the GoJo sale.
Tom Wambsgans has been my favorite Succession character for a while now, which I admit is partly motivated by a perverse desire to disengage from the central, and to my mind, not very interesting question of which Roy will inherit their father’s empire.
That has definite pluses! For instance, that delicious, nine-minute scene in which the Roy kids finally unite and open up to each other in front of some trash cans—and Kendall finally confesses his guilt and is immediately absolved by his tenderly amoral siblings—was followed by what to my mind is the funniest moment in the whole season: a symbolically dead Kendall resurrecting.
I think there is something deep at the core of that scene, which is that as much as Kendall is repelled by his dad’s monstrousness, he also envies it—not because he necessarily wants to be bad, but because he wants to be something.
It almost makes you forget that he spearheaded the appointment of a fascist president! And Snook’s face as it dawned on her who had betrayed her—man, the revulsion and horror you could see in her, as someone who clearly married Tom because she thought he was safe, because she needed someone she could kick without fear of reprisals—I haven’t seen anything like it in awhile.
Adams: And we can’t talk about Tom without talking about Greg—or should that be the Gregweiler, or Sporus? He is indeed a lackey, but that gives him the kind of knowledge the power players in their PJs don’t have, and Tom is the only one in a position to connect the two.