Nothing fills me with as unique a combination of excitement and dread as the image of Kendall Roy on a stage. And no one knows quite how to capture that image as perfectly as Lorene Scafaria.
Sunday night brought us on one last ride with this perfect pairing, in Succession’s sixth episode, “Living+.” An episode that started with a real jump scare: Logan Roy, back from the dead.
Okay, not really back, but appearing in archive footage of a green-screen-backed advertisement he’d filmed before his death to tout Waystar Royco’s latest product line, Living+. The opening scene is of his mildly annoyed delivery of his lines over complete silence immediately sets an eerie, uncomfortable stage for what’s to come. He’s divorced from context until we finally see that Kendall and a few members of his team are watching the rough cut in preparation for their product launch. This context becomes a bit painful when Logan, in anger at the production crew of his video, shouts, “You’re as bad as my fucking idiot kids!” But Kendall’s heard this all before, and appears unfazed. The launch marches ahead.
One person unhappy with the launch is soon-to-be Waystar Royco owner Lukas Matsson, who sets a clandestine private jet meeting with Shiv to try and convince her to stop it. He thinks “land cruises” are a dumb idea, and once again I hate when he’s right! After the GoJo retreat, there was some ambiguity around where their business dalliance might be headed, but Shiv makes it clear that she’s loyal to her brothers. She sends his shoeless butt off her plane with no promises.
Shiv does get one important piece of information from Matsson though — he tells her about Roman’s meltdown on the mountaintop in Norway (which I, for one, found justified even if it was bad from a business leadership perspective… Matsson was being cruel, even in Succession standards!). When she arrives in Los Angeles, where the senior team has gathered to prepare for the Living+ launch, she finds her brothers spinning the opposite story: that Matsson is the one who had the breakdown. The pieces click into place, and she confronts them after the meeting: she knows they’re trying to tank the deal, and that they kept her out of the decision. They try to make it seem like it was for her own protection, but the trust is already broken.
After an awkward hug, the Roy siblings go off on their own small missions. For Shiv, this is to her private conference room that she scheduled to be able to cry for 20 minutes. Even Tom finds this heartbreaking when he accidentally walks in on her sob session. “You’re scheduling your grief?” he asks in somewhat mild disbelief — it is kind of something that Shiv would do. In that vulnerable moment, though, one thing (a hug) leads to another (a kiss), and the Tom & Shiv situation is suddenly even more complicated.
Roman’s side quest is a lunch meeting with Joy Palmer, a Waystar Studios executive, where he offers her buckets of money to make the studio successful via streaming and franchises. Hearing him just throw around entertainment buzzwords… he is in charge of so many creative people’s fates with so little understanding of what they actually do, it’s painful! Instead of accepting the money, Joy pushes back on the damage of ATN’s connections to the ultra right-wing Jeryd Mencken given the studio’s association with the network. This tiny bit of pressure rattles Roman so much that he fires her right there, over lunch. Roman is so clearly spiraling and in pain, he seems hellbent on destroying everyone in his path just to be as ruthless as he thinks his father would want him to be. Cruelty is all he knows.
Finally, Kendall is back in his manic community theater director mode. He has a vision — a model Living+ house with actual clouds overhead, all to be constructed within 24 hours on the investor launch stage. “No one can say no,” he says with a deranged smile, immediately triggering my unresolved trauma from being a prop designer for student-directed college theater productions.
That night, Tom and Shiv are attending a swanky investor party that looks right out of Selling Sunset, and they look extremely out of place. They really are East Coast people. After their little post-cry smooch, they’ve amped up their insult-driven flirting even more — Shiv telling Tom, “You were The One after The One, and that’s hard.” Me? I would never recover from hearing that, personally. She then suggests that they play Bitey. You know, that totally regular game everyone plays where you bite each other until it hurts too much? But Tom is game! They roll up their sleeves and get to biting, until Tom eventually wins. “Tom Wambsgans finally made me feel something,” Shiv marvels as my jaw finds its way back from the floor.
Kendall and Roman are still at the office, trying to come up with an idea that will spark such “unbelievable growth” in Waystar Royco’s stock that Matsson will no longer be able to afford it (or want it). Their big plan? Integrate technology into Living+ that will slow down the aging process. It’s almost a skill, how bad at their jobs they are.
They don’t have much time to ideate, though, because Gerri angrily pulls Roman aside to berate him for firing a studio executive in a way that practically begs for a lawsuit. He tries to pull seniority and demand her respect, which she immediately shuts down by reminding him that he’s not his father. The magic words. He responds in the only way he apparently can now — firing Gerri too. He insinuates that they’ll hang cruises on her (Logan’s original plan), and the way J. Smith Cameron hisses, “I am good at my job” — chills!
When Roman reports back to Kendall about his latest executive action, the older Roy brother has a moment of shock (“Shiv’s godmother, Gerri?”), but then is surprisingly very cool with it. Their understanding of leadership is so toxic that they both view anything aggressive and bold as positive. As always, “It’s what dad would have done.”
Bitey apparently worked, because the next time we see Shiv and Tom, they’ve just slept together. These two are chaotic. She admonishes him again for betraying her and choosing Logan, and then Tom reveals, finally, what we’ve all known — that his biggest motivator for being with Shiv was money. He likes the wealth and lifestyle being with her affords him, and it seemed like the path to maintain those things was stronger with Logan. He also knows that these material things are just as important to her, and puts her to a test he knows she’ll fail. “Come and live with me in a trailer park,” he offers. “I’d follow you anywhere for love, Tom Wambsgans,” Shiv replies. And then they break out into laughter, knowing just how false the statement is.
It’s finally time for the big presentation, Kendall having spent the night pressuring his analysts to cook the numbers and getting Greg to go on a mysterious video editing mission. Not everyone is as hyped as Ken, though. In fact… no one is. The members of the Waystar Royco senior team think (rightfully) that he has gone full nut-nut, to borrow his own phrase. Roman and Shiv seem the wariest — “He’s got that gleam in his eye” — so Roman decides to confront him. He tells Kendall that he won’t be joining him on stage; and while he tries to disguise his real motivation by saying it’s Kendall’s idea so Kendall should own it, Ken can see through it, and knows this is a vote of no confidence. With this conversation floating over his head (unlike the failed onstage cloud effect), he encounters his final pre-show trial: Karl. The CFO is aware that Kendall is fudging the data on how lucrative the new and improved Living+ idea will be, and he in no uncertain terms tells Kendall that he’ll take him down if he receives any of the blowback. Ken just responds with that queasy, faraway — yet knowing — smile. He’s so gone.
Kendall Roy hasn’t shied away from backing out of a performance. He ghosted Ziwe. He canceled his own Billy Joel karaoke show at his own birthday. With all of the uncertainty swirling around him, I fully expected him to crack — but he walks out onto that stage, rap music blaring.
What occurs next is quite possibly the most cringe-inducing scene of this entire series, and those are big shoes to fill. Big shoes. “Big shoes,” as Kendall keeps repeating, over and over, referring to Logan’s. Just when you think he’s truly broken down, he pivots to an even worse gimmick. He has managed to get some poor editor to doctor Logan’s Living+ advertisement, and enters into a full conversation with his deceased father on the screen.
The Waystar Royco team, seated both backstage and in the theater balcony, are all positively reeling (as was I). Kendall finally moves onto actually talking about the product he’s launching, but it’s not much better. He shares that Living+ offers three things: security, fun, and “forever.” For a moment it seemed that he was genuinely about to claim that Waystar Royco’s version of The Villages actually permanently extends life, but he cracks a smile and clarifies that they are merely extending health and happiness through privileged access to medication and health procedures. Which is a thing that already happens in the U.S. so… big whoop!
During his talk, Matsson takes things into his own hands to derail the launch — he tweets a deeply offensive joke about one of Waystar Studios’ animated properties, Doderick. The comms team scrambles to alert Kendall, but it’s too late — a supposedly “friendly” journalist asks him to live react to the tweet. And somehow… Kendall does okay? He says he certainly wouldn’t have tweeted that, casts some doubts on Matsson, and ultimately turns the presentation back to Living+ before giving himself a swift exit, bringing Tom on to do an Oprah routine (“YOU are an ATN citizen!”). Back in the green room, Kendall is celebrated by the senior team — including Gerri, who seems to be simply ignoring her firing and continuing on working. When Hugo tells him his performance was special, Kendall cheerfully ad libs, “Houston, we have special!” And this is why I can only lose 99% of my respect for this man: for that 1% of time when he’s just deeply goofy.
The CE-Bros end the episode in drastically different moods. Roman, in his car back to the jet, listens on repeat to a video Kendall had doctored from the Logan ad footage, which has their father sexually insulting the youngest brother. Even in death, Logan can get Roman to accept his abuse.
Kendall, on the other hand, goes to the beach. He draws a “#1” in the sand, and then floats blissfully in the ocean. Unhinged behavior! He may have won this battle, but he’s clearly losing the war against his own mind.
