Press "Enter" to skip to content

That Major Logan Twist In ‘Succession’ Was Like A ‘Lobbed Grenade’

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Succession season four. It’s the fourth and final season of HBO’s critically acclaimed corporate drama Succession and there were bound to be bombshells but not even the cast was fully prepared for the events of episode three, “Connor’s Wedding”. If Logan Roy is really dead in Succession, it means Kendall, Roman, Shiv, and Connor are emotionally in freefall and there are big questions as to what it means for their business dealings as well.

For those who aren’t familiar with the series, Succession, which premiered in June 2018, follows the moneyed Roy family, who own a global entertainment and media conglomerate known as Waystar RoyCo. When Succession begins, the future of their company is up in the air after family patriarch and aging founder, Logan Roy, experiences some health issues that leave shareholders questioning his fitness to lead—Logan even suffers a stroke in the pilot episode. His four adult children waste no time when it comes to sharing their opinions on who should helm the company in their father’s place but in episode four, which aired on April 9, 2023, they’re remarkably stripped back as they grieve.

Is Logan Roy really dead in Succession?

Is Logan Roy really dead in Succession? Yes, after two near-scrapes with death, the Roy family patriarch passed away in episode three of season four due to heart failure. In the episode, Logan chooses to close the Waystar Royco-GoJo deal instead of attending his eldest son Connor’s wedding, a high-profile event attended by the other Roy siblings. Somewhere over the Atlantic, Logan goes to the bathroom of his private jet and emerges in a “bad way”, as described by Tom Wambsgans to his estranged wife Shiv over the phone. He collapses and chest compressions are administered until the plane can land and he’s pronounced dead.

Fisher Stevens, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook

Fisher Stevens, Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook. Courtesy of Warner Media/HBO

Logan’s death is told almost entirely off-screen, with details relayed via a phone conversation from the jet to the Roys on the ground. “Even in death, Logan is unobtainable. He’s unreachable, he’s untouchable, he’s at arm’s length, still, to the siblings. There’s an unreal quality to it, because we’re not there, and we can’t really talk to him,” Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv, told Rolling Stone, explaining that the news of Logan’s impending death came as a shock to her and the rest of the cast. “There was a Zoom meeting early on in the season that I thought was going to be more of the Covid protocols, and then turned out to be more of a grenade lobbed in of revelation.”

Logan’s death happens as it so often does in real-life, without ceremony and different to how you expect. “Big events don’t happen in a perfect way, do they? They always happen sometimes in a hum-drum way. And this idea of taking away all the television cliché’s of the kind of perfect TV death I thought was really brilliant,” the episode’s director Mark Mylod said on HBO’s official Succession podcast. He wanted the audience to feel “hijacked in the exactly the same way the siblings are when they hear the news, so we’re immediately parachuted into their emotional experience.” Audiences were indeed shocked Logan’s death happened so soon into the season, even Brian Cox who plays the media magnate. When showrunner Jesse Armstrong told him, Cox told the New York Times: “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s fine.’ I thought he would die in about Episode 7 or 8, but in episode 3, I thought … ‘Well, that’s a bit early.’” He added, “Not that I was bothered.”

He continued that Logan’s death “does change the stakes. The main protagonist is gone. And the kids are having to deal with it, or not. I think it’s going to be hard next week for a lot of the audience because they’re going to miss Logan. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing — I think that’s actually quite a good thing. Logan was coming to a rest point anyway. He realized that his children were never going to be — he’s got that great line when he says, ‘I love you, but you’re not serious people.’ And I think that is so fundamental. The whole premise is really about entitlement and the rich and the fact that he’s plowed this particular furrow. And the consequences of that plowing are these kids and how [expletive] up they are, not necessarily because of him, but because of the wealth. They all suffer from entitlement in one form or another. And they behave like entitled spoiled brats a lot of the time.”

Then again, the reason for his death is in the show’s title. “The explanation was that the reason was obvious. It’s about succession. You need a corpse. If it was a different kind of show, it could have gone into a more mysterious frame — Is Logan dead? That kind of stuff. But I think Jesse realized it had to be the way it had to be, and he made the decision to do that,” Cox told Vulture. He also recalled what it was like to film Logan’s death scene. “I just lay there and had the phone by my ear. That’s why I think there was a very strong contention and very strong reason to think that maybe he’s not dead at all. Maybe it’s all a ruse! If you think about it, the last image is a body bag. Anybody could be in that body bag … There’s a possibility.”

Succession is available to stream on HBO Max with new episodes dropping each Sunday. 

StyleCaster Shopping Newsletter Sign Up

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission from the sale.


Source: Stylecaster.com

Be First to Comment

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *