The Box Set: "Succession."

S4, Ep. 3: "Connor's Wedding."

If you don’t know, The Box Set deconstructs episodes in detail and thus there are spoilers, which would be particularly true this week, so stop reading if you haven’t watched.

Well, bravo.

“Succession” duly — and with skill — got out of the predicament I thought it was in after last week’s episode where we were asked to believe that anyone in this family has empathy by killing off Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and revealing, if not quite empathy and not quite sympathy, something much more complicated and, thus, better.

In “Connor’s Wedding” the series gave us the best episode yet — early though it is — and handled the twist with aplomb, having Logan die on a plane on his way to Sweden without the audience seeing it, without Cox — who has been magnificent in the role from the very first line of S1 — saying a final word in his dying moments. It felt true to life — poof, you’re gone — and it allowed the Roy clan to deal with an unexpected shock, which in turn allowed them to convincingly reveal shades of their own convoluted, complicated, unformed, unedited feelings in a completely real and believable telling that didn’t allow them to hide behind snark as they might have been able to if, for example, Logan had a stroke and was in the hospital for a lengthy stay.

No, in this quick twist, we got pretty much everyone — but for essential purposes, the Roy children — forced to put their feelings on display. It’s here, I think where the episode shines, because first Roman, then Kendall and finally Shiv all are put immediately on the spot, like a microphone, camera and spotlight thrust into their faces, asking how they felt about their father, right then, right there, moments before he was going to die (or, in a realistic turn, moments after he already did). All that mattered was that Tom was holding his cell phone, speaker on, next to Logan’s ear and, dying, dead or neither, it was a moment where his children had to speak to their father from the bottom of their little black hearts.