Editor’s note: Below are major spoilers for the fourth episode of the fourth season of The Descendants, “Honeymoon States.”
CNN
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The shock was followed by aftershocks, a power vacuum, and perhaps most importantly and impressively, laughter as Legacies spun around to face life after Logan Roy, in an episode that finally blossomed into an HBO show title.
The sudden death of Logan Roy left his adult children and subordinates struggling, each seemingly humbly offering themselves to fill the void, worrying about how the various candidates would play with the company’s board of directors.
At the same time, they mourned the huge figure they had lost, considering that he treated many of them horribly. And the fourth hour also saw the return of Logan’s wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), in what looked like “Marcia Strikes Back,” while his current and much younger girlfriend Kerry (Zoe Winter) was shown straight to the door. (The latter was reminiscent of the musical Evita, when the title character boots Perón’s mistress, singing about another suitcase in another room.)
More than anything, this episode highlighted just how brutally funny The Heiress can be when Shiv (Sarah Snook) reads her dad’s obituary and muses, “Dad sounds amazing. I’d like to meet my dad,” while brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) hilariously translated the language, referring to Logan being “a man of his time,” which equated to “racist.”
The episode also showcased Waystar Royco executives confusedly wondering what to do with the document, which included not only Logan’s posthumous wishes, but also handwritten notes that apparently indicated who he would like to be his successor. They made half-hearted jokes about throwing paper down the toilet, but they made it very clear how much they really wanted to throw paper down the toilet.
All the knives fell out, and Carl (David Rashe) brutally insulted Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), barely hiding behind the fact that he gave out doubts about Tom’s future as hypothetical.
Among these, however, were human moments as an jaded Kendall expressed his conflicted feelings to Waystar CEO Frank (Peter Friedman), saying, “He made me hate him and he died. I feel like he doesn’t like me. I disappointed him.”
“Continuity” also highlighted the fragility of not only life but also the corporate legacy, with PR professionals debating how to spin up and down Logan’s involvement in his later years as a means to shake up the company and its stock price – a maneuver. which Kendall eventually secretly approved of, concluding that it was a smart and ruthless move his father would have made.
Succession issues also seem to threaten the harmony that Kendall, Shiv and Roman had achieved before Logan’s departure, as Shiv remains the extra woman in the plan to take the CEO’s seat just long enough to close the GoJo deal. Trust doesn’t come easy in the world of series creator Jesse Armstrong, and when Shiv said, “I need to get my beak wet,” her brothers’ reassurance clearly made an impression on how easily that beak could bend out of joint.
Ultimately, after the previous episode’s operating highs, the series successfully turned the page from mourning to the next order of business. And that too, as Kendall put it about Logan and the “bad dad” leaks, is “what he would have done.”