*If it wasn’t clear enough from the title, yes, we are in a recap of the fourth and final season of “Heirs”, and here will be spoilers for the first episode*
The fourth season of “Heirs” opens with an unexpected revelation, an answer to a question we didn’t know we needed to ask. What’s more stressful than a particularly stressful episode of “Heirs” – what we used to call an “Episode of ‘Heirs'” until now? A relatively calm and harmonious episode of “Successors”, it turns out. It is a peace that cannot last much longer. It must not last much longer. The longer it goes on, the more the release of the cork from the bottleneck of the plot in an episode or two will only be more disturbed and violent and you can start to sweat just thinking about it.
>> Want a reminder of the events of previous seasons? No problem: the first, second and third seasons are summarized for you right here
>> Prefer to read a professional rap review about Kendall’s rap from season 2? No problem, we have that too
“Heirs” also starts with another new move for her: time jump. If so far, the second season began 48 hours after the end of the first and the third season – a few minutes after the end of its predecessor, then now we jump a few months ahead, and find ourselves in surprising territory. After the Roy siblings (apart from Connor, but hey, we know no one ever counts Connor out), Kendall, Roman and Shiv find themselves off the board of the Wistar-Royko corporation on the eve of its intended sale to Scandinavian tech entrepreneur Lukas Mattsson (Alexander Skarsgård , currently one of the few supporting characters in the series who only move the plot along but still don’t do anything too interesting in their own right) and ended the last episode broken and hurt – especially Shiv, given the fact that the betrayal of her trust was done under the auspices of her husband, Tom, who quietly turned himself into a close ally Logan’s – after all, now we meet them very far from gray New York, when they run a kind of business center somewhere in the sun, with lots of palm trees in the background (California?).
The good news is that they’ve done something with themselves and the billions they’re going to make—against their will, sort of—from the Wistar Roiko sale: they’re launching a new media venture (“Substack meets Masterclass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker” meets My Nightmares), They have just returned from Dubai and are about to close a significant capital raising round with their new friends. Shiv is still flirting with the idea of returning to her old job as a political campaign wizard, a romance is blossoming in business and indeed seems to have grown a backbone and self-confidence, and Kendall… Kendall is still Kendall, and he’s still walking around with that hideous brimmed hat, but he’s clearly feeling better – even Enough to joke about his drug history.
And what happens with Logan? On the other side of the map, we see Logan for the first time experiencing something we haven’t seen in “Heirs”. In the past, whenever he pulled off one strategic victory or another, it was only a reprieve in a longer containment battle over the company’s future. But this time his troubles seem to be over. The company is about to be sold to Matson, a man from GoJo (a streaming corporation and other digital affairs, presumably). Even his health is not bad, or at least reasonable. His victory is not threatened by anything dramatic – and here we meet him unhappy and melancholy as we have never seen him before. We have yet to see in “The Heirs” someone who gets exactly what he wants and discovers that it does not bring him any happiness.
Because he is alone. With three of his four children out of the picture, he is surrounded only by people he himself sees as losers and losers – eldest son Connor (who is just very stressed by the fact that he might get less than 1 percent of support in his unlikely race for the presidency of the United States), boring officials Carl, Hugo and Frank , even Jerry. The closest thing to family members that interests him are Tom – the estranged one is currently replying – and Greg, his brother’s grandson (he hasn’t spoken to him in years either) and they are, how to say it, Tom and Greg. Logan is so desperate for an interesting conversation that he even tries to talk about the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death with Colin, his personal security guard (who is apparently directly involved in a series of not particularly aesthetic Weistar-Roiko moves), when they sneak out to dinner around the time of his birthday . His loneliness is so deep that he even tries to ask his entourage to make him a roast – a bizarre request even in the terms of the eccentric Logan. He used to have someone to insult and someone to curse, but he lives on this friction. When he butchered Kendall or Roman (and to a lesser extent, Shiv), he also knew how to enjoy the fact that they couldn’t help but appreciate the sharpness and sophistication of his insults. In Logan’s limited kingdom, on the verge of selling the empire he built all his life, there are only Yes-men left who are unable to truly appreciate his greatness, even as they show him how much they admire him.
And so this episode progresses almost lazily. Logan tries to buy PGM, a liberal-democratic media company (as opposed to the Roy family’s right-wing-republican ATN), but the kids decide to dump their half-baked idea for a media company and buy PGM under his nose – which they do after a ping-pong Bargaining is quite long and the price is too high. All they get in return from Logan is “well done, you said the higher number” he barks at them over the phone; This is the only conversation they have on his birthday. We end the episode with Logan (after a long and emotional farewell call-not a long and moving farewell call by Shiv and Tom, with an excellent performance as usual by Sarah Snook and Matthew McFadden), almost falling asleep in front of his own channel and then calling to scold the channel manager for the quality of the broadcasts at night. He becomes the thing he hates the most – one of the people from whose money he built their fortune, his own client, a lonely old man who falls asleep in front of cable news broadcasts. It really wasn’t the most busy, stressful or intense episode of “Heirs”, but it was definitely the most melancholic we’ve seen in this series so far. “Well done, you said the higher number” – where is that and where is “If I’m not making the best deal at any given moment, what am I doing anyway?” that he slapped his children – and his son – at the end of last season.
And a few more diagnoses:
- “Where’s Marsha?” “Marsha in Milan. Shopping. Forever” is the most direct way to say “we gave up on this character, forget about her” since “The Hot Prince of Bel Air” replaced Aunt Vio in the middle of the fourth season. Good thing Greg didn’t wink at the camera in response.
- Note the comedic subplot about Greg and the date he brings to Logan’s birthday. Even before it degenerates into a comedy of errors surrounding the possibility that the two of them got a little too flirty in one of the rooms (completely enthralled by Logan’s cameras, which he supposedly watches “every night with a glass of whiskey”), it mainly serves to see how far Greg has progressed from one birthday of Logan to another. He used to be the stranger off the street who somehow slipped into a party; Now he can sneak in an alien of his own. Until they ask her to leave, of course.
- At the end of the first season, when Connor first considered his presidential campaign, it would seem like a passing comment about Donald Trump. Today, when he tries to extract a percentage of supporters just to “stay in the conversation”, he is more reminiscent of Kanye West’s bizarre presidential campaign in the last election.
- The Saudi money that the Roy brothers are trying to bring to their site is another one of many allusions to the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk – one of the prototypes on which Matson’s character is based.
- “If we’re good, we’re good,” Logan says to Tom in light of his fumbling trying to figure out if
- Shiv is almost nice to Tom’s dog! But only almost.
“Heirs”, fourth and final season, Mondays (starting from 3/27) at 10:00 p.m., Biss, Hot and Cellcom TV