HBO's Succession - Season 2 and Beyond

(emotionally crushed under the weight of their own power, of course)

xp

So, did Jess (after her encounter with Greg) tip off PGN to Tom's involvement in making the call?

Hunter Harris: "That shot of her typing on her phone lasted a few moments too long to make it seem insignificant to me: a moment later, Tom is damn near on a wanted poster for slitting the throat of democracy?"

That makes sense. I liked the shift from Tom insisting that he makes the calls to "it's your call", and it does seem like he potentially has the power to shift the blame on to K & R (of course they have plenty of leverage over him too).

Jess is a good guess, but I also assumed Ken or Rome told one of their minions to tip PGN off after the conversation about how they'd "take care" of Tom after Shiv told them how awful he was.

I hope it was Jess. That scene with her and Greg was chilling.

Agree with gyac about Ken’s motivations… consistently he’s had this “I think I should be the one… what do you think?” approach to negotiating his power with his siblings; him learning that Shiv has been a double-agent for Matsson must’ve crushed him

It was interesting, it’s been so many hours (and weeks) that the audience has been aware of the Shiv-Lukas collusion that it felt a little bit like “yo Ken you didn’t know?” when he put it together

I loved the conversation between Shiv and Tom (the baby revelation)— the acridity of previous eps fight seems to have cleansed Tom of any desire to participate in Shiv’s sparring, he seems broken and stronger for it

“Is this a tactic?”
Damn Tom

somehow even more hateful than what he said to shiv last week

shiv's reaction is incredible, like, simultaneously aghast that anyone especially tom would ever say that about her yet knowing that her past behavior has caused someone to say that about her

she's trapped in hell

it kills me whenever any of the kids evinces a modicum of self-awareness. kendall asking shiv if he’s a bad dad (“i think the poison drips through”) was one and shiv’s facial expression after tom said that was another

as a tonic, just a nice moment of them actually kinda sorta caring about each other: ken telling tom to shut the fuck up when tom was calling shiv “hysterical”

The Ken/Shiv conversation is incredibly painful when juxtaposed with the ending. The “poison dripping through” line when she is specifically using Kendall’s shaky conscience about what electing a fascist means for his daughter, because in the moment it’s not the dripthrough of bad parenting that will most hurt his daughter and others far less privileged than her; it’s the white supremacist frightening the child on the street that he won’t protect her from, not his own monstrous inadequacies as a father. And Shiv gets that!

I also took “the poison drips through” as a self-indictment of the family after Roman’s going on about how they might as well fuck the world

it’s in the Roy bloodline

Shiv turned into Samuel L. Jackson in her scene with Greg ("Do you find me attractive?")

That “across the road” “…and into the bar” between Roman and Mencken felt like a Proud Boys-type nonsense oath.

Good misdirect with the bodega sushi, thought someone would get sick and then they hit you with the wasabi & La Croix in the eyes.

risking seeming on-the-nose in a way the show has mostly avoided. But also how could they not, in a way

I wish they had not, to be honest

I mean lots of good lines in this but I don't want this show crossed with US politics, I liked the last episode better when it was clear that US politics, a thing which really affects hundreds of millions of people, was for the characters on this show just another backdrop for their internal struggle. I guess in some sense that was still true of this episode, but not really. I think Roman authentically likes Mencken and Shiv authentically hates him and you also directly see other characters reacting and caring about what happens in the election. It's hard for me to articulate why this doesn't work for me in the context of this show, but.. it doesn't.

I was reassured to find a Twitter thread explaining that if thousands of ballots were arsoned in Wisconsin they actually would know whose ballots they were and courts would almost certainly not just decide those votes were zeroed out.

That's good, speaking as a Wisconsinite. I was still shuddering to think about the next '00-style ballot issue in the post-Trump era though.

I totally get what you're saying, but I did like the cognitive dissonance spectrum when it came to real world vs corporate politics. To Roman the real world is still an abstraction, and on the other side there's Shiv who understands that there's a world outside of the company, she can dip in and out of it. Kendall of course is struggling in the middle.

the kids are still driven by their own petty personal shit. shiv wasn't willing to sacrifice her deal with matsson to potentially derail a mencken presidency, kendall thought it was more important to screw over shiv than make a world where his daughter feels safe

I drank things that aren’t normally drinks.

couldn't i get a sniff of even a little guy? organize a little coup down in old peru? put me in a van to tajikistan? couldn’t I just be our fun guy in uruguay?

alas, kentucky, willa. alas, vanity.

Almost forgot about Con's concession speech, a different kind of brutal

I thought it was clear with both Shiv and Darwin saying they knew exactly which votes were destroyed because it was the city and they vote democratic. That’s how most elections are called so early.

They know that the votes are from Milwaukee and are therefore predominantly Democratic. But I think the question is whether those votes would be enough to overcome the lead that Mencken has without them.

In the show, they say they don't know who exactly voted and how many ballots there were, which would make it difficult to remedy the situation with, for instance, a do-over vote. But in reality, they would know this because the envelopes are scanned once they're received.

Yeah absentee ballots are the most trackable ballots of all.

(as we kept being reminded in 2020 in response to all the nutty absentee-ballot conspiracy talk. absentee ballots would be really hard to commit vote fraud with.)

the scene between greg and jess was so quietly good. jess seemingly trying to get greg to delay just a few mins, so that maybe someone else will call it but greg goes ahead anyway - partly because he thinks he's going to get in trouble if he doesn't, but also because he actually just loves having that power to sway things in that moment. greg was always a villain, but feels like his transformation into a Roy villain is complete here.

wonder if this is the moment where Jess finally quits on Kendall. That might actually be worse for Kendall than losing his kids - Jess is the only person who's stuck by him throughout everything so far.

Yes, Roz. Have to wonder what Jesse Armstrong has planned for a character named almost after himself that's been a part of this from the beginning.

idk if that really figures into it though. the actress who plays Jess mentioned in an interview a while back that she ended up getting called back and getting more screentime because Jeremy Strong is so method that he asks for Jess to be present in scenes that she wasn't written in lol

surprised no one has mentioned Connor's (I think) hitherto unrevealed campaign slogan: "Connor Roy: Enough Already!"

What I want to happen is for the election to recede into the background for the rest of the show because, like so many other things that seemed momentarily of import, the Roys don't actually care about it. Like, there will be a couple of lines of dialogue in one of the final two episodes where somebody mentions that a court ordered a revote and Jimenez won.

What I don't want is for the show to end on Roys Realize Too Late That They Ruined America And Are Bad

i was worried they were going to have a west wing style liberal deus ex machina bit until the last 10 minutes

I mean, it sure looks like the next episode will be pre-funeral and the finale will be the funeral, so I'd imagine the election will still hang significantly in the background.

the Roys don't actually care about it.

Kinda ridic that they've crammed so much between Logan's death and the funeral...I thought they might just not feature the latter at all and have characters just start referring to it in the past tense. Maybe they'll drop the casket.

Something oddly compelling about the performance of Mencken tho so I'd wanted to see more of him (and the dark bromance with Roman) before now.

What I don't want is for the show to end on Roys Realize Too Late That They Ruined America And Are Bad

What about the Roys Realize Too Late That They Ruined America And Are BadDon't Care Because They Are Rich?

couldn't i get a sniff of even a little guy? organize a little coup down in old peru? put me in a van to tajikistan? couldn’t I just be our fun guy in uruguay?

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, May 15, 2023 6:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i appreciated roman acknowledging that the rhymes were good

wonder if this is the moment where Jess finally quits on Kendall. That might actually be worse for Kendall than losing his kids - Jess is the only person who's stuck by him throughout everything so far.

― Roz, Monday, May 15, 2023 10:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

he would just hire someone else cmon

justin kirk gives mencken some real dark vibes, the whole "clean and refreshing" thing was so off-puttingly creepy, i feel like it was way beyond any fire and brimstone shit.

curious to see where the uncertain election stuff ends up (looks like the next episode is the funeral, since it's the day after the election) but roman and kendall succeeding is contingent upon a mencken victory so idk. lots of focus on a deflated, not confident Darwin, and Tom being hung out to dry by PGN saying it was his call to claim a mencken win.

clean and refreshing and his whole speech was text book fascism

For a minute when they were running through the WI, AK, and AZ results, I thought they were setting up an electoral college tie if WI was flipped for Jimenez, which would have been lol.

i was expecting alaska to go for jimmenez because con overperformed or something

jesse armstrong already did the electoral college tie story with veep

nvm he was less involved with veep than i thought

i think having the big election episode was a cool and interesting choice, the show depicts the world from the families pov of wealthy solipsism their rich bubble, ordinary people are seen bringing them expensive food that they never eat, even executives at their company barely register outside a handful of inner circlers, and the election was really no different they were just in their offices making self interested decisions, except that the familiarity of election night tv hit home more for us as viewers, the fact that their power affects the world was made clearer while sticking to the basic forms of the show

i personally found it pretty uncomfortable, i wasnt totally stoked to think about all that stuff, but its good art so i have no choice to tip my cap, i am once again glad that this is a show about something rather than just a stage for interpersonal drama, particularly in the context of so many prestige tv complex antiheroes its refreshing (and clean) to see some real life monsters depicted, and theyre not inhuman theyve got the childhood trauma and whatnot, but they are actually bad, real real bad

the fact that terrible cable news is how we experience our elections is so fn dire man never really pondered that before

Yeah clean and refreshing is like removing the word “ethnic” from “ethnic cleansing”, it’s barely a cover at all. I liked how they forced Kendall’s perspective (I may have made these exact points yesterday but who cares, nobody reads this thread)

Oh yeah I don’t think I posted that. Some other things about this:

- Also a good thing about how there are so many people who enable and enact fascism: the leaders (Mencken), their thugs (the burned down counting centre), their propagandists (ATN), the people who go along with it for personal betterment (Tom, Greg), the nihilists who are beyond human connection (Roman), the weak libs who don’t do enough (Shiv) and the weak soft conservatives who don’t find them gruesome enough to withdraw support (Kendall)

- yeah it really was pretty cold-eyed about libs who do politics based on vibes rather than convictions, gg

- - Kendall knows what has happened even to a child as privileged (in one way) as his daughter and still puts his beef with Shiv above the greater good- there’s a reason they focus on him having to watch that gloating Mencken speech. This is what you did, this is what you did. It’s unclear that he cares though.

- Roman jokes to Shiv that their rivalry gets “spicy” cos if his side wins they’ll shoot hers; Kendall’s daughter being pushed by a Nazi in the street gets a lot more time than his children have had in seasons. Even if you are arguing they are kind of incompetencing their way into it, the show doesn’t let them escape the consequences. Mencken is not shy about what he is.

- the show has never shied away from the political implications of the Roys’ power; you can see the title sequences showing stories that get more unhinged over time, Ravenhead is in s2 etc, there’s that part about Logan keeping the former President waiting. Not even a show about power, but about who has this power, in their world and ours.

- basically (again I may be repeating) the show deciding to do a big huge zoom out into the big picture, and all those very human characters are fucking monsters, exactly the same as they were all along, except when you take the big picture view you are forced to see all the normal people whose existence isn’t even remotely considered by the characters.

the fact that terrible cable news is how we experience our elections is so fn dire man never really pondered that before

it's still so weird to me that they have the power to call elections...Biden had clearly won in 2020 days before the networks made the call, but nobody celebrated until that Saturday