With season three of Succession now in the books, Vulture is returning to where it all began with weekly recaps of season one. Rewatch along with us and check back every Sunday night for the next pair of episodes.
Tom: “Greg, I’m having the time of my life.”
Greg: “This is nightmarish.”
This exchange happens toward the end of “Prague,” right after Tom has told Greg about a sexual encounter in which fellatio was performed on him, and then, as a finishing touch, he was made to swallow his own load. He believes it’s “hot” and that there’s a name for it. (It isn’t and there isn’t.) This is a bachelor party for the type of rich guy Tom aspires to be, and so it must be the time of his life, even if his own semen is precisely as appetizing as a fried songbird. That’s the difference between Tom and Greg: Greg isn’t so status obsessed (yet) that he couldn’t honestly say he’d prefer a quiet evening at home, perhaps heating up some leftover Cajun linguini from California Pizza Kitchen. For Tom, however, this is what success tastes like.
“Prague” is about as purely pleasurable an episode of Succession as we’re likely to get, and it speaks to one of the show’s fundamental appeals. It would be absolutely intolerable to watch a show about loathsome rich guys enjoying whatever their unlimited supply of money buys them. What makes Succession palatable is that the characters can all get into a secret party, “a fucking sandpit for emergent behavior,” and not a single one of them has a good time. (Save for Stewy, who loves twisting the knife.) It can be reassuring to see the “Money doesn’t buy happiness” cliché validated in art and for people like the Roys to share in the miseries perpetuated by their empire.
Then again, it’s not so simple. As fun as it is to watch this nightmarish all-nighter unfold, the abuses suffered by the Roy siblings at their father’s hand draws much of the focus. The crucial pivot point here is Roman talking about the childhood “game” where his big brother Kendall kept him locked in a dog cage, possibly with a leash attached, and he had to eat out of a bowl to get out. Roman is still in that cage, traumatized and weak despite his phony swagger, pretending that he’s unhurt by his father’s emasculating assessment of his business acumen and also pretending that he’s not messed up sexually. Kendall questions the integrity of his brother’s story, but when Connor tells him that Logan encouraged this behavior as a way of punishing “the weaker dog,” it turns something in his mind. He doesn’t want to freelance in different ventures or take a half-billion-dollar buyout from Stewy. He wants a more sweeping form of revenge, even if it means throwing in his lot with two men, Sandy and Stewy, who have themselves deceived him.
As the bachelor party rages on, Shiv is out following her new candidate, Gil, around to various speeches and press engagements, arguing that maybe he should frustrate his base a little more and lay off the family business. When Gil goes into the ATN lion’s den itself, he’s predictably mauled by an interviewer who won’t let him get off the topic of his wife’s suicide 18 months earlier. (That Logan darkly suggests later that Gil murdered her sounds like the type of conspiracy that gets circulated in far-right fever swamps.) But when Gil finally breaks out of this rhetorical stranglehold and goes on the attack against Logan, he immediately brings up the fact that Logan’s only daughter is working for him, which should say something about her father. Whatever skill Shiv might have as a political consultant — which seems limited given that she considers getting a liberal elected in New York a triumph — her name is more useful to Gil.
Of course, it cuts both ways. Shiv hates Gil’s politics. Class warfare is “jejune” to her because it threatens her pocketbook, and, really, the entire business of political consultancy is about strategy, not ideology, which is why the opposites-attract narrative between James Carville and Mary Matalin is actually the story of two operatives with everything in common. In her conversation with Logan here, Shiv admits to being hurt that her father has chosen to give Kendall and Roman their shot over her. He feigns regret and talks about bringing her into the fold, but the tacit negotiation here is about Shiv leveraging her rebellion to get a seat at the Waystar table. When that negotiation breaks down, Logan counters by backing out of Shiv’s wedding with Marcia citing health concerns.
Back at the party where money doesn’t buy happiness, money doesn’t acquire cool art ventures, either. Kendall never likes to consider himself part of the stodgy, evil Roy dynasty, and so he’s willing to open up his wallet to acquire hip assets like Vaulter and now Dust, a boutique for selling the work of independent artists. And so earlier in the day, he blasted DJ Shadow, slipped on a conspicuously expensive new pair of designer sneakers, and pitched himself to Dust’s leader, Andrea, as a financial backer. Beyond the absolutely excruciating open (“Cool earrings. Very Bauhaus. Big fan of what you do. Fuckin’ sweet chile sauce.”), Kendall probably wasn’t wrong when he talked bluntly about what Dust does: “Basically, you buy a painting from some art student in a basement, jack up the price, sell it to some Morgan Stanley sex pest, and you, me, and the student all get rich. Right?” But what he discovers at the party is that Andrea found him repulsive, likening a partnership with him to being “Mrs. Hitler.”
For the crime of not finding him a chill dude who belongs in her world of coke-snorting hipsters, Kendall orders Frank to put word out that the Dust women are sluts and junkies “shooting seed capital up their arms.” This after tearing through so many lines of cocaine that Greg, tasked with looking after him, snorts four lines like a soldier falling on a grenade. (Tom’s reaction to Greg’s surprising binge is fantastic. When Greg asks if he should puke, Tom replies, “Not unless you can puke out your entire bloodstream.”) Nobody enjoys the coke. It’s not the kind of party where people are there for a good time.
Pity the Fly Guys, who never make it to Tom’s bachelor party, despite flying all the way in from Minnesota. They probably imagined strippers and shots with their old buddy Tom and surely knew better than Roman how to show him the time of his life. But Tom leaves his former life behind in “Prague,” breaking “the Fly Guy” code. He chooses a dark tunnel instead.
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• “I’m the asshole who can be your Warhol,” says Kendall at the Dust meeting. A grueling comparison, made worse by him saying that, hey, he knows a thing or two about art, after all.
• Nice small moment in the scene between Greg and Logan where Greg complains about the culture at Parks, which “borders on the personally abusive at times.” Logan is surprised to hear it. For the first time, Tom has his respect.
• Kendall describing the various moves he’s been making out in the cold, after his “no confidence” vote failed, yields some fascinating bits of word salad. (“I’m rebalancing from crypto into eco.”)
• Incredible advice from Connor on seeking out willing young women: “A little tip: Ask them where they were on 9/11. If they don’t know, they could be under 21.”
• Tom turns his worries about crossing the line with Shiv — who’s out there crossing it repeatedly with Nate — into a creative justification for his gross tryst: “It’s cool because it’s like I didn’t cheat, ’cause all the sperm stayed in my own body, like a closed-loop system.”
