Summary: The Roys head to Norway to meet with Matsson. The entire team is brought along as Matsson wishes to assess everybody. He meets with Kendall and Roman and gives them an extremely generous deal of $187 per share (the minimum they were looking for is $144) but this also includes Matsson buying ATN. Kendall and Roman handle negotiations poorly and are uncertain about giving away Logan's legacy. Later, Kendall and Roman try to get more money onto the deal but it doesn't work. Tom and Greg try to gain favour with the GoJo team but it goes poorly. Kendall and Roman decide that they will try to tank the deal. Matsson meets privately with Shiv and opens up about a potential public scandal that could emerge with ex-girlfriend Ebba who he sent litres of his own blood to as a joke. Matsson connects with Shiv and they form an alliance of sorts. The next day, Kendall and Roman meet with Matsson who realizes that they are trying to blow up the deal. He threatens to go around them to the board and Roman lashes out at his viciously. On the flight back, Frank gets a call from Matsson saying that he is offering $192 per share. They then learn that much of Wayster's team is going to be let go. Shiv reconnects with Tom and tasks him with firing Cyd.
The Good: 5 episodes into the final season and finally "Succession" unleashes Matsson into the main story. I've been anticipating his return the entire season, and the show has done very well to hold him back for so long to make his eventual arrival feel so much more exciting and interesting. As such, this episode was immediately engaging and I was interested to see how the Roys handled Matsson. Alexander Skarsgard delivered throughout the episode. Matsson was every bit as impressive, unpredictable, friendly, and aggressive as you would expect someone like him to be. He commanded every scene he was in and I thoroughly enjoyed watching him interact with everybody. I like that this episode forced the Roys to come to Norway, providing yet another gorgeous and unique setting for negotiations. The beauty in the setting is probably one of the most understated yet important aspects of "Succession" that make it such a great show. And the answer was that they handled him so very badly. Kendall and Roman felt the hype around themselves early in the episode; their arrival at Waystar and the applause Kendall got is telling enough of how big this is and how powerful they feel. And immediately, they get in their own heads and completely screw up negotiations with Matsson when this should have been the moment for them to rise up and prove their worth. All their lives, Kendall and Roman have played second fiddle, negotiating with Logan or preparing their opposition to meet Logan. But now that they are the big fish, they look utterly clueless in how to handle themselves. All they have learned to do is spitball with numbers, and they look foolish, awkward, and unprepared as Matsson tries to socialize with them. They take forever to get what he's saying, and they don't know how to respond when they figure it out; they're amateurs in every sense of the word. The most striking thing is how they have failed to learn anything across the last 4 seasons and are every bit as woeful as we remember from "Lifeboats" when they were last in charge. They prepare for one specific possibility and are lost puppies the second the conversation goes elsewhere. They are too busy getting in their heads that they need to emulate Logan's no-nonsense approach to the point that they lose any strengths that they have as individuals. And they continue to ignore advice from their senior execs at every turn, so it's no surprise that they get completely screwed over. These two were amateurish and incompetent, and Matsson preys on them at literally every turn. He controls the conversation, he takes the high ground, and he is the one who can make fun of the Roys for the dumb things they say. The episode's resolution is perfect in how it encapsulates all that happened. Kendall and Roman make the braindead decision to screw Matsson over, not even thinking about how a genius businessman like him would immediately catch on to their ploy. Kendall and Roman aren't even allowed to get off the ground floor in their plan as Matsson exposes them and insults them immediately, making it clear that he's a step above them and that they are embarrassing for how they handled this meet. The worst part is that after all we've seen, Matsson is absolutely right. Going into this episode, I was eager to see how Kendall and Roman had grown and to see them prove their mettle at a difficult negotiation. But they were utterly disappointing and I had to accept that even though I was rooting for them, Kendall and Roman deserve the worst because of how poorly they performed here. The most we got was a brilliant cathartic moment as Roman lashed out at Matsson, the most decisive and impressive he was all episode (see: Best Moment), but even that backfired on them at the end. The episode's conclusion is wonderfully ironic as Kendall and Roman are praised for getting such a great deal, when the reality was that the one time they succeeded was because they were trying to fail. That pretty much sums up these Roy children in a nutshell, doesn't it? Shiv surprisingly had the best episode out of all the Roys. It quickly became clear that Shiv was screwed over with the deal in the previous episode as she is already being left out of the loop. Roman always advocates for her involvement, but Kendall seems to not care about her at any moment, and by the end of the episode he has convinced Roman to ignore Shiv with the degrading line "do you think Pinky can dance?". Well as this episode has shown, she can certainly dance better than these two dopes! It's nice to see Shiv get a chance to shine after being left in the dust for much of season 3. As someone with a background in politics, Shiv is excellent at handling individuals like Matsson and she excels in these personal conversations where Kendall and Roman failed. Shiv's scene with Matsson is fantastic and very nearly the highlight scene of the episode. She understood that to handle Matsson, she would have to meet with him at his level, doing the same kind of jokes and talking frankly without ever playing games. She plays it perfectly to endear herself to him and to form a strong alliance. Plus we get an amazingly funny story about Matsson sending frozen bricks of his blood to his ex-girlfriend, with Shiv giving the most frank and most hilarious advice to Matsson ("step one: might be hard for you, but stop sending people your blood" and "deniability might be difficult when she has so much of your blood"). By the end of the episode, it looks like Shiv has placed herself well with a new ally as she laughs with Matsson by sending pics of her dejected brothers to him. I'm excited to see where this alliance goes and what kind of drama we'll get when Kendall and Roman realize that Shiv has sided with Matsson. Tom and Greg have a solid episode. Poor Tom spends much of the episode in silence, listening to everyone talk about him and what they are doing. Tom is completely adrift at this point and seems to have nobody on his side. He tries to make a play to join in with Matsson and make some new friends, but it goes absolutely terribly. Leave it to Greg to make him look less awful as Greg's arrival and attempt to convince everyone that he reads "The Economist" goes hilariously poorly. Everyone talking about him in Swedish is hilarious, especially if you listen closely and pick up the words "incest" and "Hapsburg" which tells you all you need to know about what was said. Tom and Shiv had a surprisingly good scene at the end of the episode. Tensions remain between them, but it's clear that Shiv did feel bad for him as he tried to get close with Mattson, and it appears that she may have talked with Matsson to save his career (see: The Unknown). I'm curious to see where their relationship goes this season. Frank and Karl wearing compression socks after what happened to Logan was really funny. Hugo had some lovely moments throughout the episode as well. The Bad: I know the Roys are quite incompetent and bad at what they do. But in this meeting with Matsson, they are almost comically bad, as if they have lost all semblance of what skills they displayed in previous seasons. Roman especially falls victim to this, and he seems to have lost all of the guile and intelligence that he displayed last season. The episode does eventually make it clear that this is because of Roman's struggle to process his dad's death, but it does feel awkward in the early phases of the episode when Roman is incapable of matching with Matsson's energy while Shiv is somehow able to do it way better than he does. On rewatch, I'm sure that this will work better as Roman's character inconsistency is explained, but on my first watch it was a bit confusing and I was concerned that the Roys were being written as caricatures of themselves, being incompetent at literally everything. The Unknown: Will the board take Matsson's extremely generous deal? Are the Roys going to allow this to happen? Has Shiv thrown in her lot with Matsson? How long will it be until Kendall and Roman find out? What consequences will she face for her decision? How bad is the Ebba situation? Could this stuff coming to light bring down Matsson? Will Shiv help him keep it under wraps? Or could she maybe manipulate him and bring it to light? Are Hugo, Frank, Karl, and the others on the kill list going to lose their jobs? How was this kill list decided? Did Shiv play a role in this? It's very suspicious that Tom was allowed to stay on, and I suspect that this was Shiv's involvement. Best Moment: Roman lashing out at Matsson was a terrific scene, wonderfully realized by Kieran Culkin. It's clear that Roman has taken Logan's death the hardest, and after all of his grief denial, his emotions finally pour out in this tremendous moment as he spits venom at Matsson. The moment feels great as Roman gets to speak out about every annoying thing Matsson has done, but it's a tremendous blunder for the Roys as it gives Matsson the ultimate motivation to have this deal go down: to ruin the best laid plans of these spoiled assholes and win. This scene is acted brilliantly and the satisfying feel of the scene combined with the business blunder makes this a unique and excellent watch. We know Roman is making a mistake but can't help but egg him on as he does it. Character of the Episode: Matsson. Conclusion: Another excellent episode. Negotiations with Matsson were tremendously fun and had a lot of excellent character exploration. Then add on the great setting, some terrific jokes, and a masterful moment between Roman and Matsson. In the end, this episode is a definite winner that will only get better with every watch. Score: 72
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|