Connor is looking for “some pie” to support his father, and Shiv’s suggestion that he take a show on a Waystar food channel called Gourmando doesn’t nearly fit the bill. Yet it’s somehow worse than that: Her title is functionally meaningless.Īnd worse still, the first guy to point that out is Connor, the primo family dipshit who has been even less engaged in Waystar than Shiv over the years. But Shiv has stayed out of official company business for her entire adult life, so naturally she wouldn’t get the respect of a seasoned executive anyway. That coronation was ruined by Kendall piping “Rape Me” into the event.
It’s clear her father and other Waystar muckety-mucks found it useful to send her, a woman of the Roy family, out to be the public face of this new, softer, more understanding “We get it” version of the company.
After all, that’s what the Trump presidency was all about.Īs much as Shiv relishes the opportunity to force Tom to do her dirty work - even as she has to feign concern over his legal situation, she does a poor job hiding her pleasure in giving orders - she bumps up hard against the limits of her new title. But the effect of a diminished empire is to make its principal players more anxious to lash out and do harm to the less powerful. It’s quite likely the entire family dynasty is shriveling before our eyes, which would befit a media empire that has been a lumbering, dysfunctional family business since the first season of the show and is only getting worse. And the results are often humbling in the extreme: Just as Tom’s bullying privileges over Greg are on the wane, the weaknesses of all the Roys get thrown into sharp relief. Nearly every scene is about the assessment and exercise of power with each character either contemplating how much of it they have or putting the screws on someone they perceive as below them. Power has always been a central theme in Succession, but “Lion in the Meadow” articulates it with stunning comprehensiveness. This is awful news for Tom, who resorts to desperate measures - from the provocative (a story about Nero’s relationship to the slave boy Sporus) to the merely petty (knocking over a coatrack). Greg decided to use his tiny bit of leverage to get a management position in the parks division, so no pressure from Tom was needed. However, when he arrives at Greg’s office, he’s crestfallen to discover Logan has already done his job for him. Even in his current weakened state, he has the pleasure of escorting his young charge to the sort of windowless storage room given to Stephen Root’s character in Office Space. Abusing Greg under the guise of corporate mentorship is Tom’s favorite sport. Shiv needs him to pressure Greg to abandon his weak alliance with Kendall (“I’m a sturdy birdy”) and fall in line with Waystar Royco’s joint legal-defense team. The second seemingly odious task is actually a gift for Tom. And this at a time when the wags are calling him “Terminal Tom” because, in his words, he has “cancer of the career.” And he will have to do it because Tom is acutely aware that his wife is suddenly above him on the corporate organizational chart and that everyone will know she’s, to put it delicately, taking advantage of him. This is a horrible task he knows will result in failure and humiliation. As the perfectly named Tom Wambsgans contemplates the minutiae of prison time - like maybe he can go to FCI Otisville, the “Jewish jail” upstate with the kosher vending machines - he gets a dispiriting visit from Shiv, who asks him, at Logan’s behest, to direct ATN’s prime-time fascist Mark Ravenhead to adopt a more critical tone about the president in a bid to pressure him into supporting her father.