‘Succession’ Season 3 Finale Recap: “All The Bells Say”

First, let’s climb off some of the cliffs the last episode of Succession, “Chiantishire“, left us hanging on: Kendall lives. (If you can call that living.) In an offscreen scene, Comfry apparently found him floating in the pool and got him to the hospital, and now that he’s been discharged, everyone is trying to be very normal about it: Roman is offering her cash to let Kendall drown next time, and Kendall himself is reviving his grandiose plans to take down Waystar by hiring new lawyers and posting his personal papers to his Instagram. (To quote Shiv in “Mass In Time Of War“: “Unsubscribe.”) What will even be left to take down, though? A huge fine from the DOJ is imminent, and GoJo now officially has a higher market cap than Waystar does…

…which we hear from Gerri — who survived her brush with Roman’s dick pic, yet another cliffhanger resolved. Roman is also still part of the GoJo talks, though Logan tells him on the way to Matsson’s that if Roman has sexual issues to work out, he should “straighten” them out (hmm) and adds, “I don’t want to know.” Inflicting them on people who don’t want to know seems to be an intrinsic element?

Anyway: the “merger of equals” Matsson previously suggested is no longer on the table. He sees the upside in a GoJo/Waystar marriage, but now thinks he should be the person to run the resulting company. Roman — who, like his siblings, regards Waystar as his birthright — is horrified to see that Logan isn’t rejecting the idea out of hand. But even though Logan flatly says, of Matsson’s notion, “this is not happening,” Roman must know what it means that Logan stays to talk about other business, sending Roman back to the family. Is pure denial the reason he doesn’t tell Shiv what happened, or is he just too focused on joining her and Connor in conveying to Kendall how much they all really don’t want him to end his life? Kendall is immediately suspicious — “What is this. What’s the angle” — and will not accede to their requests that he “stop trying to kill Pop.” They mean it metaphorically (I think?), but Kendall’s got a lot of truth to tell the world about Logan! Even if Comfry admits to Shiv that while there have been talks with Vanity Fair, it’s mostly been her calling them.

Roman continues not telling Shiv the particulars of the Matsson meeting in the moments before Caroline’s wedding, as he worries anew about her pre-nuptial agreement. Shiv promises there is one, repeating what Caroline had said at her bachelorette party about an apartment of Logan’s that Peter wanted, which would require reopening Caroline and Logan’s divorce settlement. Phew, everyone has got to be relieved that Caroline is going to be protected from this grubby arriviste!

Logan is not going to make it to the wedding; he’s too busy working with Frank and Karl and a whole villa’s worth of lawyers. But his absence doesn’t go unnoticed by his children, who try to piece together what may be happening using clues from Gerri (who knows a financier is in town) and Greg (who’s getting intel from “Lackey Slack”). Finally, Roman tells Shiv about Matsson’s proposal. When Shiv ignores Kendall’s insistence that he won’t participate in their scheming, he gets serious about his mental state: he feels disconnected from his children, and disappointed that his attempt to extricate himself and his siblings from Waystar came to nothing: “I don’t know. I’m not a good person.” He really has had an epiphany of some kind; he’s been saying exactly the opposite all season. Roman distractedly tells Kendall, “Well, whatever, you’re fine.” He’s not: “I killed a kid.”

At first, Shiv and Roman are…as horrified as you’d expect any normal person to be, but (a) Shiv is also dealing with the business crisis so she can’t really focus on the waiter she remembers dying at her own wedding, and (b) the more Kendall describes the circumstances, the less serious Roman and Shiv actually think it is. “This sounds like the story of a hero to me,” says Roman. “I’ve killed a kid too, big deal. Shiv! You’ve killed a kid, right?” “Uh, yeah,” she chirps. As relieved as Kendall surely is to have two fewer people from whom he’s keeping this secret, I feel like he might get closer to figuring out how to honor his victim and find peace in himself if he hadn’t chosen to disclose it to two known monsters?

Never mind: there’s a business deal to halt! Kendall — recovering quickly from his soul-shredding admission, in my opinion — is ready to confront Logan, because Kendall’s in favor of any action that may wound his father. Shiv is fired up because she’s always had a lust for power. But Roman, who has always had the most uncomplicated love for Logan, needs some convincing. Shiv explains that Logan’s taking the deal will mean he doesn’t think any of his children ever could or should take over the company; also, Logan won’t give Roman the top job because he believes Roman is a sicko. But Kendall explains that Logan legally can’t make the sale without the approval of the children he had with Caroline: one of the terms of that divorce settlement involved the creation of a holding company that gives them outsized power on the Waystar board, and Logan would need their sign-off to get the supermajority required to approve a sale. So if they act in concert, they can force Logan out of the company. They all allow themselves a little giddy excitement about how things might go once they’re in charge…and it’s this moment of joy that should tip us to the impending disaster.

But first, they have to spend the rest of their drive over to the deal HQ shoring up their position: Kendall checks on the holding company by-laws while Shiv tells Tom how ATN should message Logan’s retirement, for health reasons. “And where do I fit in?” asks Tom. “Well, high up, Tom, I don’t know,” says Shiv vaguely.

Tom hangs up and gravely tells Greg he may have a new job for him, as Tom’s “attack dog,” which would move him from the morass where he is to “the bottom of the top.” Is Greg ready to make a deal with the devil? “What am I gonna do with a soul anyways?” Greg crows. “Souls are boring!” Would Greg still have one if his safety net weren’t being willed to Greenpeace? Or did he actually lose it as soon as he started working at Waystar? We’ll never know!

After one last check that they are, this time, definitely presenting a united front to Logan — not like…all those other times they got close to pulling off a coup like this, including EARLIER THIS VERY SEASON — Kendall, Shiv, and Roman confront Logan, who is utterly unsympathetic to their whining about what they would do in a post-sale GoJoWaystar without Logan’s protection; Logan feels that if they want their own billions, they should go make their own, and you know what? Good point!

Logan then tries to divide and conquer by pulling Roman away, reminding him that Matsson already said in their earlier meeting that Roman would be crucial to integrating the two companies: “You can trust me.” “You can’t trust him,” Shiv intones. Roman tries one more time to ask Logan not to sell the company to GoJo…

…but requests soon turn to threats. Empty ones, as it turns out: Logan has Caroline on the phone — from her own wedding reception — to confirm that they’ve renegotiated the divorce settlement: the holding company that gave the kids their trump card has been dissolved in exchange for the apartment and political assistance Peter wanted. “Mom, you just slit our throats,” says Shiv. “Dad? Please?” Roman asks impotently. Logan would like to know what Roman is bringing to the negotiation. “I don’t know,” Roman mumbles. “Fucking love?” A bit rich for Roman to fall back on that one when they all came in planning to slit his throat with their board supermajority: “You should’ve trusted me….I. Fucking. Win.”

As Gerri calmly tells Roman she’s only making decisions on the basis of shareholder value, Shiv wonders who could have told Logan they were coming…

…but she doesn’t remain in suspense for long. “You okay?” Tom asks, innocently. Tensing up, Shiv lies that she’s fine. I know Greg’s just taken a job as Tom’s attack dog, but he’s probably the one who should protect his neck in Season 4.

Margin Calls

• Connor Getting Married?: Connor has a mini-breakdown of his own, at the siblings’ breakfast, over Kendall’s moping about the position he expected to enjoy at Waystar by virtue of being “the eldest son”: he reminds Kendall that, actually, Connor is the eldest son, and also that he’s been through some shit in the family; he didn’t see Logan for three years after his mother and Logan divorced, “but your spoon wasn’t shiny enough.” Bitterly, he adds that none of them has congratulated him for his engagement to Willa. Speaking of whom: when Connor is still in a sour mood about his siblings on the way to the wedding, she decides, at last, to give him an answer on his proposal: “Fuck it….Come on, how bad can it be. Right?”

Seems like she realizes immediately how much it’s actually going to suck.

• Logan’s next round of kids: Connor finds more grounds on which to needle his siblings when he finds maca root, which he says Kerry has been putting in Logan’s smoothies, to increase the potency of his sperm in order to get Kerry pregnant: “I guess he really doesn’t rate you guys.” Part of me wants to say Logan is too old to contemplate having another generation of children, but then again, he probably wasn’t any more attentive to his kids when he was more vigorous than he would be now.
• Greg’s Girls: Greg is still hoping to trade up from Comfry to the contessa or princess or whatever she is. NO ONE CARES. Quit it with the Greg goof plots and start turning him into a full American Psycho in Season 4, I say — and I’ll see you all there!

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.

Watch Succession Season 3 Episode 9 on HBO Max