Succession Recap: Season Two, Episode Two – Sadism Is All Around!

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Succession season two, which airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched episode two

‘It’s Kendall’s baby and now we’re going to burn it’

“You must have a hard time finding a happy medium between worshipping him and wanting to kill him,” says Shiv to Kendall, who is finding the road to redemption full of holes and humiliations and subject to a perma-shower of teasing brickbats from his father. But it’s Kendall who this week digs deepest for dad’s approval in an episode that sees the hopes of his siblings dented. For the time being, Logan’s leadership of the family is undoubted and undimmed.

We begin at a theme park, where disappointed visitors are being turned away. Logan has arranged for the place to be closed so the Roy family can have the run of it for Kendall’s daughter’s birthday (Lord forbid our heroes should have to jostle with commoners). In shades, shambling along like the pariah of the group, Kendall receives a hug from his daughter for arranging for a ride to go faster. He doesn’t really do hugs, however, as noted tauntingly by Roman.

Logan calls Kendall and Roman for a meeting – “Beavis and Crackhead”, as Roman sneers – while Shiv affects surprise to be asked along too. Tom looks on after her with a silent, “Hmmm”. At the meeting, Stewy is on TV talking down Waystar Royco. “Kendall Roy is no longer relevant,” he says, a remark that cuts Kendall quietly and deeply. Shiv urges that they come back with a “salty refrain” rather than sit on their hands. Logan agrees. Conversation then turns to the new media website Vaulter. Believing he might have been “suckered” by the troubled site, he dispatches Kendall and Roman to look into it. “The one who fixes it gets a cookie.”

At Tom and Shiv’s new place, Tom is feeling somewhat pumped up by his new job at the news channel ATN, full of his own importance and testosterone, a king in whose eyes “everyone else looks two feet tall.” He proposes a “cheeky breakfast bang” with Shiv. (Did “banging” not go out with “bonking”?). She has to take a moment behind a screen to get away from him.

At Vaulter, Kendall explains to Lawrence that to allay their father’s suspicions they need to check the books. He has to endure backchat from Lawrence and his own brother, who openly contradicts him and asks for a separate office to work in from Kendall, one that’s “better than his.”

Introducing himself at ATN, Tom brings Greg with him, who expresses qualms about the dubious “values” of the station. Tom, who regards qualms the same way he would regard petticoats, urges him to “man up”. A meeting with the head of ATN is initially cordial – “The peach, the legend!” enthuses Tom – but quickly turns frosty as Tom reveals his own disdain for the news network, especially its demographic, whose median age is 68.

Maybe he could shake things up? “He (Logan) sends me one of you every four years,” retorts the head. They part with mutual fuck you’s; Tom immediately orders Greg to “body shame” the company, find excess, “snuffle for waste”. Eventually, Greg discovers that the company runs entirely on an analogue basis. Digitalisation could save Waystar 50 “skulls” – Tom’s lovely phrase for fired staff.

Despite having to work alongside ex-lover Nate, Shiv is on the up with Senator Gil Eavis. His polls are looking good, especially now that he is well in with Logan. At an event for his team, he offers her a job as Chief of Staff, food for thought a good deal more appetising than the pizza he is serving. Not all is rosy with Shiv, though: at a meeting with her father, it becomes clear that the offer he made her last week will take three years to materialise, with a management training course included. She is affronted; would he ask such a thing of Roman? That’s the way of the world, says Logan – but as Shiv observes, it’s a world he had a part in making.

‘Find another chicken coop’

Roman and Kendall return from their audit of Vaulter to present their findings to Logan. Roman had looked on from his own office with suspicion at Kendall deep in the books, “doing stuff”, stuff if which he is incapable. Instead, he tries to blag info, first from Gerri, then by taking Vaulter staff out for a drink. Kendall says that having gone through the books he has found a lot of mess, but believes that the company still has the potential to be “our lodestar”. Roman, however, says the firm should be gutted, not least because he’s discovered staff are planning to unionise.

Logan goes with Roman; another humiliation, compounded when he asks Roman to join him in the proxy battle against Stewy and co, while Kendall must go carry out Roman’s recommendations. However, his visit to Vaulter is relatively amicable, and despite continuing taunting from Lawrence, its head.Kendall tells Lawrence that he can, with some cooperation from the Vaulter staff, still persuade his dad not to shut the site down. They could “cool it” on the unionising, for a start.

Meanwhile, Connor is hosting an event at a large hotel, the base for his presidential bid, which Roman, for one, still can’t take seriously. Is it, he asks, a “natural progression from never done nothing, never, to president?”

Unable to contain herself, Shiv tells Tom about her dad’s offer back at the Hamptons, albeit playing it down and trying to accommodate Tom’s own gargantuan ambition. He is stunned, congratulatory but, like a centrist Labour MP learning in 2017 that Jeremy Corbyn has done rather better than expected at the general election, can’t conceal all his emotions. “This is … a modification of the plan … quite a big modification,” he blusters.

There follows an awkward dinner party at Roman and Tabitha’, where Tom is teased for his poor dress sense; he cuts it dead with a “fuck off, Shiv”, that reveals his latent begrudging of her success. Later, she tries to placate him; he advises her, in order to avoid being destroyed like Kendall, to keep options open. Her next move, however, is to abruptly pick a fight with Gil and quit his campaign.

Meanwhile, Kendall returns to Vaulter, rocking up in black riding pillion on a motorbike, which gives him the an assassin’s air. In a brief address to the staff, who he had previously given a pep talk to asking them to come up with ideas for the site, he tells them they are all fired with immediate effect. That earlier meeting had merely been to buy time and stop them unionising, as well as harvest their ideas. Despite his belief in the company, Kendall takes great pleasure in telling Lawrence to “find another chicken coop.”

Having partied in celebration at the apartment he has lent to Greg, Kendall reports back to his dad that the deed is done. He is rewarded with a role in the proxy battle in lieu of an aghast Roman, who had held out high hopes of being the successor. Serves the little sod right. As for Kendall, he calls in at a dime store and casually steals some batteries, only to throw them in the bin, simply because he can. His own inner demon is back like a mojo.

The heir apparent?

Abused by Roman as a “broken robot” and a “paedo on parole” and seemingly snubbed by his father, Kendall seems to have understood that shutting Vaulter was a test for him; one he has coolly passed. And now, albeit with a zombie-like devotion, he is at the right hand of his dad.

Notes and observations

• Kendall says that Vaulter might function better if there were “grownups in the room” but what’s striking in the behaviour of the Roy siblings is their childishness; theirs is the code of 12-year-olds in the school playground, a world of petty sadism, taunts and masked insecurity, of which this episode is chockful. Tom is both perpetrator and victim, whether mocking Greg for his mooted Staten Island move, or being mocked at the dinner party. Roman is perpetually at it. It’s a psychological consequence of being in the shadow of a patriarch who asserts his continued dominance by refusing to acknowledge the adult-ness of his offspring, wants a monopoly on the grown-upness.

• Great new word; Lawrence talks of being “Facefucked” when Facebook changed their algorithm, affecting Vaulter’s traffic.

• It’s telling that both Tom and Shiv’s previous dalliances were featured tonight, a reminder of the faulty foundations of their liaison. You suspect that their relationship is going to come under severe strain this season. And then what?