14 times Succession broke our hearts

Logan Roy is a monster full stop. He’s essentially the villain of Succession, and the show never backed away from that. It did, however, occasionally remind us that he didn’t get that way all by himself. Throughout the series there are hints that Logan had a difficult childhood. We don’t know the full extent of it until his funeral in the penultimate episode, but we see the physical evidence of it in the episode “Austerlitz.” After everyone leaves Connor’s ranch in New Mexico following a failed attempt at family therapy, we see Logan wading into the pool as Marcia encourages him on. His back bears the scars of the abuse he received at the hands of his cruel uncle, who took him in when he and his brother were sent away from their home in Scotland during World War II. It’s not an excuse for his behavior towards his children, but it does put it into perspective.

Any therapist would have had a field day analyzing Kendall’s over-the-top birthday bash and what it said about his damaged psyche. If you have to specifically say up front you don’t want it to “feel like an asshole’s birthday party,” maybe you should take a moment and really consider that. Kendall’s not in a place to think about anything other than himself at this point, though. After having a meltdown over losing a present from his kids, he just wants to go home with his date, Naomi Pierce. On the way out he runs into Roman, who’s riding high on a temporary wave of approval from his dad and has been acting insufferable all night. “You’re not a real person,” Kendall tells him, which prompts Roman to invite him to take a swing at him. Instead, Kendall turns his back, but Roman shoves him so hard Kendall falls to the ground. If anyone deserves to be brought low at their own birthday party it’s Kendall, but the sad scene is pitiable all the same.

Marcia was one of Succession’s most enigmatic characters. She genuinely seemed to care for Logan, yet she also made some savvy moves to consolidate her control over him and the company. She was already suspicious of his close working relationship with Rhea Jarrell before the big celebration in his hometown, but when he named her as his new CEO without consulting her, that was the last straw. Feeling blindsided, she tells him in no uncertain terms that it’s over between them. “You broke something here,” she says. They have an argument which leads to her walking out on him before the unveiling of a commemorative plaque bearing his name. “Oh, God forbid I will miss the plaque,” she snips. “Right? Your shiny little gravestone.” We don’t feel sorry for Logan often, but that was pretty cutthroat.

There were points in the series where it looked like Kendall really could be the one to succeed his father as CEO, and points where it seemed like an impossibility. Kendall never stopped wanting it, though. After the end of season one and the death of Andrew Dodds he was forced to accept that it wasn’t going to be him, and you can see how much that breaks him here. In the final scene of “Safe Room” he admits as much to Shiv when she asks him how he’s doing. He asks for a hug, which really throws her off. We didn’t get to see the Roy siblings exchange genuine sympathies often, so those moments when they did were all the more effective. With tears in his eyes, Kendall asks his sister to take care of him. “If dad didn’t need me right now I don’t exactly know what I would be for.” His brutal honesty and raw emotion here is harrowing.

In a panel at the Argestes conference, the three siblings are asked about the whistleblower account of sexual misconduct on the company’s cruise ships. Trying to position herself as the one to bring change to the company, Shiv says it’s time for a “good old-fashioned dinosaur cull.” This doesn’t go over well with Logan, but it’s Roman who bears the brunt of his father’s wrath. “You tortured the old dinosaur. You barbecued him live,” Roman jokes. Then Logan turns and smacks him in the face hard enough to knock out a tooth, shouting, “Don’t fuck with me!” Kendall jumps in to protect him, and we get the feeling that is not the first time this has happened. Which actually explains a lot about Roman and why he is the way he is.

Kendall had a rough time in season three, and heading into the finale things seemed to hit rock bottom. First, there’s a nasty dinner with his father, in which he tells Logan to his face what an evil person he is and begs him to buy him out of the company. It ends with Logan taunting him about Andrew Dobbs and leaving in a snit. Later, we see Kendall floating aimlessly in a pool, drunkenly nodding off until his head slips under the water. Many of us who watched the episode live thought it might be the end of Kendall, and maybe some part of him wished it were. The fact that he survives doesn’t make it any less heartwrenching.

The death of Andrew Dodds on the night of Shiv’s wedding continued to reverberate through the show, even up to the series finale. In the seventh episode of season two, Logan has to personally smooth things over with the Dodds family, who are publicly calling out his bullying behavior at the wedding as the cause of his death. As some form of punishment or penance, he makes Kendall come along and forces him to come inside. The illusion of “no real person involved” evaporates before him in the face of family photos and the evidence of their grief. Logan knew exactly what he was doing. It’s not enough to pour salt into Kendall’s wounds, Logan has to throw in some ground glass too.

After a season of bitter fighting and separation, the siblings finally rally together near the end of the season three finale to stop their dad from selling Waystar Royco to Lukas Matsson. There’s something about seeing them all on the same side for once, teaming up against the man responsible for most of their trauma, that makes us want to root for them. They bravely tell him to his face that they won’t vote for the deal, but there’s a twist. Logan already has a contingency plan in place thanks to a renegotiated divorce settlement courtesy of his ex-wife. He saw them coming, and when Shiv catches Logan giving Tom a friendly shoulder pat on the way out she figures out exactly how. The look on her face, the sobbing breaths she takes in, as she faces away from Tom, left us with chills.

Logan gets a lot of flak for being a bad father—and he really, really is—but let’s not forget that the three youngest Roy siblings also had Caroline for a mother, and she was no picnic either. Devoid of any kind of maternal instincts, she let Logan take the children to New York after their divorce and barely looked back. It’s one thing to suspect that your mother was unfit to bear children, but to hear her say it to you point blank, as Shiv does in “Chiantishire,” that’s a different kind of hurt. “The truth is, I probably should never have had children. You made the right decision. Some people just aren’t made to be mothers. I should have had dogs.” Like many of the moments on this list, it’s made all the more emotional by Nicholas Britell’s beautiful, melancholic score.

Shiv did Tom dirty on their wedding night, waiting until after they tied the knot to tell him she wanted an open relationship. There wasn’t much Tom could do other than quietly stew over it for an entire season. It’s not until the season finale that he finally makes it clear to Shiv how much she hurt him. Her pursuit of a threesome aboard the family’s fancy yacht is the last straw. “I don’t think it’s cool what you did,” he tells her as they sit together on a private beach. “I think a lot of the time, if I think about it, I think a lot of the time I’m really pretty unhappy.” She doesn’t get it, so he elaborates with an emotional gut punch. “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Even after that, they stayed together for another season before talking seriously about a separation and divorce.

Not long after Kendall’s possible suicide attempt and what passes in the Roy family for an intervention, Shiv and Roman are back to focusing on the business. They pull Kendall aside at their mother’s wedding reception to bring him up to date on Logan’s business dealings with Matsson. Despondent and self reflective, he falls to the ground and spills everything in an emotional confession to his siblings. He tells them he killed a kid and explains what happened with Andrew Dodds. “It’s fucking lonely. I’m all apart,” Kendall cries, and Jeremy Strong’s intense performance really sells it. Roman tries to lighten the mood with jokes and he and Shiv both reassure Kendall that he’s not the killer he thinks he is. It’s everything he wanted from his father and didn’t get without strings attached. The image of the two of them placing their hands on Kendall while he sobs uncontrollably is one of the most indelible in the entire series.

Kendall spent his entire life hoping for a hug or some show of support from his father, and he finally got it here under the worst possible circumstances. Let’s not forget that earlier in this episode, Kendall was orchestrating a takeover of Waystar Royco via a bear hug offer. It might have worked, too, if Kendall hadn’t given into his darkest impulses and gotten into that car with Andrew Dodds. The fatal crash that followed handed Logan an opportunity to seize on Kendall’s weakness with false paternal concern and a promise to make it all go away, for a price. The look on Kendall’s tear-stained face when his father tells him this “could be what it should be—nothing at all” is devastating. And then comes the kicker, “You’re my boy. You’re my number-one boy.” This scene showed us early on what Succession could be when it really cooked, and remains one of Strong and Cox’s best scenes together in the entire series.

We could probably fill this list with scenes from the final season, but to make room for others we’re picking the two that stand out as the most heartrending. Of all the siblings, Roman seemed the most unaffected by his father’s death. He attributed it to “pre-grieving” but we all knew it was bullshit. Faced with the reality of his father’s coffin as he’s about to give what should have been a star-making eulogy at the funeral, Roman crumbled into a sobbing heap. “Is he in there?” he mutters. “Can we get him out?” Keiran Culkin gives an Emmy-worthy performance in that scene, dipping into Roman’s deep well of grief in the most visceral way.

As terrible as he was, Logan had a powerful effect on the lives of everyone who knew him, and his death was a seismic event that shook the world. From the second Roman takes the fateful call from Tom with a flippant, “Fucky-sucky brigade. How can I help you?” the episode becomes a pageant of wall-to-wall heartbreak. We can’t single out any particular scene or moment as the saddest; they’re all soul-shattering. As the siblings take turns talking to their father over a bad connection, without knowing whether he can hear them, they start to come to terms with the fact that he might not make it off that plane alive. When death comes for those we love, even the richest, most powerful people in the world can’t escape, and a loss like that can make even the worst people in the world seem relatable.