Succession Season 4 Episode 7 Recap

As we get closer to the end, the Roy brothers can taste it so bad they go crazy. Kendall (jeremy strong) opens the episode by stating that his racist news organization is “making the world safe”. Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) continue to be incredibly toxic both together and apart, and Roman (kieran culkin) threatens to fire anyone who challenges his authority. Hell, even Connor’s (Alan Ruck) presidential campaign is up from 1% to 6%. Scammers unite! At least we got Connor back this week, we haven’t seen the man since he appeared in the wedding episode. “I’m getting on the digital battle bus,” he tells her before quickly leaving for lunch with her brothers.

This week, Greg (Nicholas Braun) is the most daunting member of the Roy family to see standing on the brink of total collapse. Once a brilliant and clumsy gentleman, he is now a Roy through and through. Earlier in this week’s episode, Tom has Greg tell 100 employees that they’ve been fired over Zoom. Greg is also sitting in a sinister dark room, for some inexplicable reason. But The Legend of Cousin Greg—where an innocent kid goes from theme park mascot to ATN executive—hasn’t been exciting Succession promised in the first season. It seems that Succession he has completely moved away from the possibility of a happy ending for Greg. He is now as complicit in WayStar’s worst controversies as anyone else.

But the main Roy brothers haven’t stopped being conniving jerks either. The company asks Roman to try to convince his older brother to drop out of the presidential race at the election party, but Connor won’t budge. “Everyone in this room thinks you’re a fucking joke,” Roman tells him. Rude! Then Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) arrives. The gangs are all here. as we learned in episode five, Matsson is simply the worst, so he’s likely to screw things up on his own. He also has Shiv playing both sides, and she wants a major post-buy role should the GoJo deal actually go through. None of her double crosses have really worked on Succession beforethough, so I figure whatever happens somehow cuts her off once again.

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My hunch pays off immediately. Matsson’s communications director tells Kendall and Roman that their “numbers are bullshit.” (As Kendall so memorably puts it.) “There’s a small issue we’re looking into with the subscriber numbers,” the GoJo CEO tells Shiv when she questions him about it. “We discovered a metrics error that was exaggerating our subs in India… like if there were two Indias, it would make sense.” The deal for GoJo to buy WayStar has now become largely illegal in the eyes of the SCC and the DOJ. If it somehow happens, all It’s fucked up. But our main characters are far more concerned with their own selfish problems to really care tonight. In what feels like their worst fight yet, Shiv and Tom yell incredibly bad at each other. Meanwhile, Roman can’t earn Gerri’s forgiveness, and Kendall schemes a way to go “reverse Viking” by having WayStar buy GoJo without involving his brothers.

It’s all… incredibly sad. Earlier this season, I saw a potentially right path for almost every character. The Roy brothers were finally realizing that becoming their father it would mark their destruction, but now, they are fighting anyway. Redemption may still be on the cards, but I don’t think anyone can do the work necessary to get there in just three episodes. The question now may not be who succeeds, since that’s already happened, but who walks away from the final episode a slightly less horrible person than everyone else. Personally, I don’t care who runs the company, or if this deal goes through. It’s not real, of course. But if I’m interested in the characters, I’d love to see them grow into something that they weren’t in season one, episode one. These poor souls need to finally be at peace or be absolutely punished for their sins. Take your pick, readers, because (hopefully) we’ll get one or the other very soon.

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Josh Rosenberg is an assistant editor at Esquire and maintains a steady diet of one movie a day. Previous work of his can be found on Spin, CBR and on his personal blog at Roseandblog.com.