I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me.
When Connor Roy enters a room, nobody stops talking. There is no quiet silence in awe of his presence, or friendly smiles that follow him as he joins the group. He is a man without friends or family in any meaningful sense. As he describes himself in the most recent episode ‘Succession’, he is a man without love.
In the world of the show, the forgotten eldest son is often a figure of comedy. The fact he was not raised to inherit the theoretical throne – Logan would prefer an armchair – results in him basically making no plays for it. Instead, he flails from moment to moment, showing competency within very set parameters and a people pleasing attitude that only goes so far.
But the pathos around his character has been building. While the third season ended on the betrayal of Logan to his siblings, it is Connor’s outburst that always sits in my heart. His half-siblings have coalesced into what is essentially an intervention for Kendall. But while everyone is focused on the danger this reckless middle child puts himself in, Connor’s underlying resentment bubbles to the surface.
“Do you have any idea, how it feels, as the eldest son? To be promised something, and then, [snap] you know? Just have it taken?” says Kendall. But Connor is the eldest son in this scene. Not just by a few years either, he’s visibly at least two decades their senior, even if the in-universe age difference is up for debate. After three seasons and a lifetime of not being taken seriously, this is what causes him to snap.
“I’m the eldest son!” he shouts. It’s not the point. Everyone at that table is focused on the immediate issue of Kendall’s possible suicide attempt. But it just keeps spewing out, seemingly spurred on by Shiv’s dismissal midway through the scene. He’s been out of the loop in every conversation, written off as an impossible candidate, and now even his very existence is being ignored. He’s just proposed in a beautiful location surrounded by family, and he’s more alone than ever. The family doesn’t care, he’s paid for his fiancé, and now he’s been written out of history.
Which leads us to ‘Rehearsal’.
Everything about Connor this episode is inconvenient. The date of his wedding is basically an invitation for everyone to fuck off and leave him stranded at the altar. It’s ridiculously close to his embarrassing presidential campaign, which he’s clearly come to regret, but won’t drop as a matter of pride. The man is clinging to that measly 1% of voters.
The season opener, ‘The Munsters’, made it clear how much he is scrambling when he considers turning his wedding day into a public relations event, clearly terrifying Willa. It’s quintessential Connor Roy in a way, as he attempts to bring it back to what he’s clearly always been best at: event planning. Money is also clearly on his mind, as it continues to be in this most recent episode.
He's a theoretical obstacle as his rehearsal dinner looms, with sporadic reminders for his siblings that they need to prepare. But as the sale of Waystar RoyCo. comes into full effect, Logan plays mind games with his children, and Shiv’s divorce gets real, and the board begin to form a power play, we run into a drama nobody has been paying attention to. Willa is running off from the rehearsal dinner.
The scene which I will always return to with Willa is the conversation she, Tom and Marcia have in season one. The three of them are, in the most basic sense, interlopers for the family. They’re the spouses, and in Willa’s case, she’s not even that yet. Not even, in many ways, the girlfriend. Just the “girlfriend experience” at this point. Something she’s clearly uncomfortable about. So much of Willa’s work in the first two seasons is basically to retain her central essence – to not lose herself to Connor.
Four seasons later, with Marcia basically out of the picture and Tom’s marriage in pieces, Willa now seems to be taking Marcia’s advice. As nothing else works out, she needs to consider the future and invest wisely. To keep it simple: lock this shit down.
Each season has seen the future Mrs. Connor Roy give up pieces of herself and her dreams. Her play tanks, which clearly devastates her, to the point that she tosses the iPad into the sea. Her hair gets longer and blonder, and her clothes get increasingly more conventional. Every season sees her become just a little more palatable. This is the person that Kendall, Shiv, and Roman run into is perfectly blonde, in classic neutrals, and on the verge of tears. A woman so tightly coiled and adrift that she cannot even get excited for her wedding day. Cold feet from more than just nerves. Her acceptance of his proposal was essentially just her giving up the game and letting him have his way.
“Fuck it.”
The good thing about having a family that doesn't love you is you learn to live without it.
What’s truly astounding about Connor Roy is that he’s been insulated from every conceivable pain point he possibly could be while still basically (barely) functioning in society. He’s an adult baby, unable to leverage his fortune to anything greater than becoming a conservative meme. But the one thing he cannot protect himself from his fellow Roys.
So much of his past is basically in shadows. His mother’s existence is basically a mystery at all times, outside of the facts that there was a divorce, and she was “locked up”. The life he’s lived up until this point seems to be one of leisure and without purpose, except to run his father’s events. There were three years that he straight up didn’t see Logan Roy, although the essential why is unanswered.
The Roys are not a heartless family, but they are a cold one. It’s easy to blame all this on Logan and his ex-wife Caroline, who make a show of being absolutely people at all times. Yet it seems to have infected everyone. Logan’s brother cuts off his grandson completely for pursuing a career he finds evil – one through which his millions came from. Shiv immediately implodes her own marriage (not helped by Tom’s…personality). Kendall couldn’t pick his kids out of a police line-up.
It’s not just a by-product of wealth, but the riches haven’t made them better people. Business and corporate nonsense has been underneath every tension in the show’s run thus far, even the personal dramas. Money had made them all deeply despicable, to the point that Connor’s father and youngest brother are about to abandon his wedding day.
I don’t need love; it’s like a superpower.
I’m going to have to end this by saying how disgustingly excited I am to see Connor’s reaction when his father skips his nuptials. This is the man who only seems to have started asserting himself in his old age, for better and worse. Marriage is meant to act as the button to what he seems to see as a personal arc. A moment in which everyone has to pay attention to him.
In that karaoke room, all he wants is one moment that feels real. His siblings are all together again, and he just wants to sing a song, drink a beer, and pretend they’re not rich assholes trying to screw each other over. He’s a people pleaser at heart. At every juncture, he’s been the one to beg for civility and plead forgiveness towards their father. Logan doesn’t deserve it, but he’s really all Connor has in terms of real aspirations, particularly as everything else goes. So, when Kendall and Shiv viciously reject their father’s apologies, after making his night even more miserable than it already was, that’s where the hurt really comes in. Willa deserted him, his siblings failed him, and his father is about to abandon him.
If this season is setting up anything, it’s that nobody is ready to heal yet. The wounds remain wide open, everyone’s playing dirty, and that makes the whole game incredibly toxic. I wonder what damage Connor could do to everyone else. He may not be a big player, but he’s been there for everything. Nobody tells him things, but he witnesses plenty. You can’t forget about that podcast, sniffing around the family, looking for an insider.
Makes you wonder what happened to his mother.
.