‘Succession’ Recap, Season 2 Episode 9: Babes in Royland

The chickens have sailed home to roost. Written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by series mainstay Mark Mylod, this week’s episode of Succession sees the long-simmering cruise-ship sex-abuse scandal storyline bear fruit, as the Roys and their lackeys are called to testify before the Senate to answer for their crimes. Now, this is Succession, so you know ahead of time nothing will come of it. But the Roys are generally at their most compelling when they’re forced to pretend to be normal humans during the rare occasions when other people have a leg up on them, and this is one of those occasions. It’s worth taking a little time to savor.

The hearings themselves are mostly a showcase for Eric Bogosian as Senator Gil Eavis, the Bernie Sanders stand-in who’s been an on-again off-again foil for the Roys throughout the series. There’s a good deal of pleasure to be found in his refusal to make another deal with Shiv to tone down his rhetoric like he’d done last season. There’s a great deal of pleasure in watching him make awful, awful Tom Wambsgans squirm by producing receipts that prove he knew that the head of the cruise division was a sex creep, that he destroyed documents, that he involved Cousin Greg in the scheme, and that he uses human beings as footstools. (His lame word-salad response: “Senator, I use a variety of target-oriented incentives to enhance optimal performance.”)

The worst of the crisis passes thanks to intervention from Shiv, who manages to secure a summit with a victim who planned to testify. However Shiv actually feels about the grotesque culture of abuse that flourished at her dad’s company, or at her family’s complicity in covering it out, is more or less irrelevant, as she freely admits: She wants what’s best for her, she tells the frightened victim—just like everyone advising her to testify.

It’s the fact that Shiv maybe, just maybe, really does care about sexual harassment that makes her all the more loathsome at this moment. We know that her promise to destroy the men who did all this is bogus, since those men include her own husband. In effect, she’s leveraging her true feelings to lie more effectively. It’s grotesque to watch, and sharply so, in a way that the more two-dimensional caricatures like Logan and Tom and even Kendall fail to be.

It’s too much for Rhea Jarrell, who despite being a practiced bullshit artist herself is aghast at what she signed onto by accepting the CEO gig upon Logan’s retirement. She refuses to accompany Shiv to the meeting with the victim, and quits the job entirely afterwards, ending her romantic relationship with Logan in the first place. “I don’t know if you care about anything, and that scares me,” she tells him, seemingly sincerely—though Logan is almost certainly right when he says she knew what she was getting into when she hooked up with him in the first place. At least she has the courage to walk away; not even Cousin Greg, who had 250 million reasons to bail on his grand-uncle thanks to his grandfather’s offer, can say that about himself.

Returning to the subject of two-dimensional caricatures for a moment, Roman Roy and a pair of dudes from the inner circle spend the episode being held hostage in a hotel in Turkey, as their would-be Azerbaijani angel investor gets strongarmed by his autocratic government’s gun-toting agents. The long and short of it is that if the Roys need it, it looks like they’ll have unaccountable Central Asian dictator money to take them private, remove them from the shareholders’ crosshairs, and save them from a hostile takeover in favor of, well, a less hostile takeover.

Speaking as an inveterate Succession disliker, there was very little here that made me want to pull my own hair out as per usual. Sure, creator/showrunner/writer Jesse Armstrong throws around the word “fuck” like an eight year old who’s just learned the word; worse, he indulges in that awful twee compound-cuss schtick beloved in certain parts of the #Resistance internet—”fuck-knuckle,” anyone? But he cleans up his act by the end of the episode, or at least gets more inventive: “How does it feel to be married to a man with two assholes?” is a pretty good diss as far as it goes.

And other than having Senator Gil Eavis ask how to pronounce Tom Wambsgans’s last name as if he wasn’t the husband of one of his top advisors—Tom himself gets dinged hard for denying knowledge of Cousin Greg, as a counterexample—there wasn’t any screaming illogic in the plot as far as I could see. No rapping Kendalls, in other words. (Though how you square that version of Kendall with the character who shut down a Senate inquiry with tough talk is beyond me.)

So what we’re left with is a portrait of a dozen or so completely loathsome people, reducing years of sexual abuse and even murder to a political football they kick around no matter who gets hit in the face with it. This kind of easy-to-follow My First Satire shit isn’t for me as a rule, but this time, at least, I didn’t want to shove it away in disgust. By the Roys’ own standards, that’s a victory.

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.

Stream Succession Season 2 Episode 9 ("DC") on HBO Go