‘Successon’ Season 1 Episode 7 Recap: Retreat! Retreat!

Let’s make like the Roys and cut this particular therapy session short, shall we? “Austerlitz,” the seventh episode of Succession‘s first season, centers on a family retreat cum PR initiative, designed to mend fences between Logan and his children — Kendall conspicuously excluded — so the world can see them as a united front. This is a business proposition, since Logan’s trying to buy local TV stations at a time when the stock is tanking, Kendall is suing, and protesters are hitting him with balloons filled with piss as he walks into work.

It falls apart quickly. Logan hates it and doesn’t care to hide it and blows up at everyone for calling him on it. Shiv leaves to meet with the show’s Bernie Sanders figure about a job offer, then fools around with his campaign advisor. Connor takes the therapist to the hospital when he jumps into the pool and knocks his teeth out on the bottom. Significant others Marcia, Willa, and Tom don’t count. Kendall, already under suspicion of being back on drugs due to stories planted by his own dad, flies out to Connor’s New Mexico compound to confront them all, but winds up getting royally fucked up first instead. There are fun cameos from Eric Bogosian as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bernie and Griffin Dunne as the therapist. Alright, let’s break for refreshments.

Back? Now let’s talk about why, once again, this didn’t, and maybe just doesn’t, work. It comes down to the show (written in this case by Lucy Prebble and directed by Miguel Arteta) just not seeming to understand who it’s dealing with. Take Marcia. In this episode, for the first time, the mask of poise drops a bit, as she chats with Willa and Tom about something other than the family or its business for the very first time on the show so far. Turns out she’s kind of a dingbat! She asks pointed questions about Willa’s work as an escort without seeming to realize that they’re pointed, then drops an anecdote on her out of nowhere that a Parisian sex-worker acquaintance of hers wound up getting murdered, following up to add that the murder had nothing to do with the sex work.

It’s a funny bit, but this is our introduction to how this character thinks when she’s not thinking about Logan and company? Given everything else we ever see or hear her do, in this episode and all the others, it reads less like a revelation and more like a mistake — or, to ride an old hobbyhorse of mine around a bit more, like characters in comedies are primarily joke-delivery mechanisms, and that consistent characterization in the way we think about such things in drama must needs fall by the wayside when there’s yuks to be had.

As for Shiv’s assignation with her ex-boyfriend turned new colleague Nate, everything I said about it last week still stands: Sex between ciphers is definitionally not hot. Note that this is different from saying sex between strangers is definitionally not hot. When you don’t know someone, the element of anonymity and mystery involved in watching them fuck is erotic. We know Shiv and Nate just fine, and that’s the problem, since there’s nothing to know. They’re not idealists, that’s for sure. Nor are they monsters like Logan or scoundrels like Roman or just repulsive like Tom. They’re barely pragmatists, since that would imply goals, and we don’t have any clue what attracted them to politics since they express no actual political viewpoints. Shiv says whatever will get a rise out of the person she’s currently trying to act tough toward and reverses course without compunction when the need passes, hence going to work for a guy she jokingly called Stalin and less jokingly called too radical within about five mintues of meeting him. Nate himself comes right out and says, “I don’t believe in anything.”

Nate and Shiv are dull, the way only people who are handed everything in the world and can’t be bothered to use the spare time to develop even the most rudimentary and idiosyncratic beliefs or personalities can be dull. Under normal circumstances? The lay-it-on-the-line, “I want to fuck you, here’s where and when we can do it” transactional flirting, the all-business hand-down-the-pants initiation of intimacy—whoa nellie. Here it’s like watching the weather report. I’m supposed to get hot for this? Heroes, villains, rogues, by all means have at it, but orgasms for bores I will not abide.

Certainly I’d rather watch Logan have sex than be forced to sit and listen to a sob story about him. The episode ends with a shot of Logan swimming in the pool, which we’d been told was impossible because he can’t swim. (“He doesn’t even trust water, it’s too wishy-washy,” says Shiv — I guess she’s not all bad.) If the idea were that this is symptomatic of his desire to keep himself at arm’s length from his kids, to the point of pretending not to be able to jump in the pool with them all their lives, that would be something to chew on.

Instead we discover he just never takes his shirt off around them for any reason so they won’t see the scars on his back from the severe lashings his ranch-hand uncle gave him growing up. This, too, could be a compelling bit of business, if the idea is that he’s ashamed of it, or that he wanted to spare his own kids the pain of that kind of knowledge. But he’s thoroughly shameless and far from above exploiting personal suffering for public gain, and he’s never spared his kids any other kind of pain.

Unless it’s discussed again we can’t say for sure, but I feel that the corniest reason — he refuses to show weakness of any kind — is likely the correct one. For him, anyway. For the show, it’s to milk sympathy out of us for a completely unsympathetic man, one whose personal and political awfulness multiple characters, including himself, spent the rest of the episode describing. In response, I literally made the jack-off hand gesture at the screen. Probably not a great sign.

I’ll tell you what works here, beautifully and unequivocally, or rather I’ll tell you who works: Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy. Watching him handle the prodigal son’s near-instantaneous collapse of sobriety (aided and abetted by his dad planting stories that he was running through the street muttering about a coup; now we know the plot purpose of his otherwise unnecessary dash through the streets) is gripping stuff. Once he makes the decision to leap off the wagon, he’s in it all the way. He’s determined to have a great time, and so he does, whether he’s chatting with the locals, calling his brother with the firmness of purpose of the incredibly high, disrupting the family gathering, goading his father into near violence, or just kicking back in the wilderness enjoying the coke and the view.

Strong handles all of this with restraint and without cliche, from the anger, frustration, and feigned toughness as he takes the plunge to the chemical relaxation and goofy good cheer that follows. The irony is that in the ease of his interaction with the local burnouts, whom everyone else in his family would (and in Roman’s case, does) treat like sentient dogshit, you can see him find even more ways to convey Kendall’s innate, if relative, decency. In fact, when one of the methheads gives Roman shit in turn, Ken sticks up for him, too. It’s like watching a performance from Deadwood show up on Petticoat Junction. On this show there’s Strong and then there’s everyone else.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Succession Episode 7 ("Austerlitz") on HBO Go