This week on Succession … Ken gets a tip, Tom gives a gift, and Lukas takes a hit. And now, the Power Rankings:
1. Kendall Roy (last week: 1): It turns out you were right. Matsson is a card trick. All you needed was for one of your in house snoops to do some digging and turn up the deets on Lukas’s frozen blood brick obsession with Ebba to learn he is unstable and a little cozying up to her in a moment of pique to confirm he is cooking the company books. You have seen this movie before. Lawrence pulled the same trick and you overpaid for Vaulter; this time, you want to flip the script with a reverse Viking and counterattack so that Waystar acquires a GoJo weakened by revelations of wonky business practices. Could it work? Perhaps. But if you fancy yourself a general fighting battles on six continents, we need to admit that a couple of the front lines do not look great. For one, you could not get Nate to bite on your offer to give Jimenez favorable coverage on ATN in exchange for using federal agencies to make the deal go away. For another, you do not realize your sister has switched teams. And, not for anything, you just pulled the same sleight of hand at the company investor conference by using meaty projections and some artful sound editing to convince the audience that Living+ will be a revenue generating machine. You envision a future with a single crown on a single head, but we are a little concerned your eyes are getting too big for your stomach.
2. Lukas Matsson (last week: 3): The thing about a charm offensive is you need to be, you know, charming. And while you were able to play the good boy for a little while, not inserting any body parts into the guacamole, telling Nate he need not fear the bleep bloop algo guys data mining the nation to death, and offering to send Tom off on an iceberg once you acquire ATN, the façade did not hold. Once you and Oskar fired up the vape pen, things went south. You lashed out at Ebba, called Ken’s Living+ numbers “gay,” and insulted the greatest city on Earth from a view of it most of us will never experience. When Shiv expressed legitimate concern about the deal (not to mention the loss she would eat if GoJo’s stock cratered when you revealed the company’s India subscriber numbers were half what the company said they were) the man behind the curtain was finally exposed – all you have is the hope that a quick deal with Waystar will paper over the bad news until the subscriber numbers tick up, probably. In other words, another card trick to keep the short sellers at bay before anyone realizes your company’s foundation is built on wet cement.
3. Shiv Roy (last week: 2): The problem with keeping your options open is that you risk being left with none. You betrayed your brothers in the hopes of taking over a post-acquisition Waystar, but when you floated the idea to Lukas, punctuated with not one, not, two but three “verys” modifying your request for a significant role going forward, he gave you the old corporate brush off of “let’s circle back.” That alone should have sent up a red flag, but you were undeterred. When your brothers, who are still not clued into the fact you are actively working against them, told you that Matsson has been fudging his numbers and you confronted him, he gave you a song and dance routine that hardly left you reassured. And so, realizing belatedly that you may have nailed yourself to the wrong cross, you tried to get some comfort from Tom only for the two of you to air all of your grievances with one another in the ugliest way possible. You have painted yourself into a corner and now your best play is hoping dumb and dumber never realize you were a double agent.
4. Ebba (last week: NR): Publicly, you have been burnishing Lukas’s reputation as a tech genius when in private you know he cannot even write basic code. In comms, this type of lily gilding is de rigueur and you might have just kept it to yourself or put it in that book you threatened to write if your nest was not feathered properly, but Lukas embarrassed you in public one time too many. Roman was naïve enough to think you are going to walk because of the fallout from your break up, but you spilled the real tea – that GoJo’s subscriber numbers in India are half what the company says they are – and may have handed the CE-Bros the silver bullet they need to put down Lukas once and for all.
5. Gerri Kellman (last week: 9): Back at Argestes, Roman pitched you on a tandem leadership team – Tarzan and Mole Woman. He would be the dashing public face of Waystar, taking big swings and making big deals while you were back at HQ sorting out the details. The reward for being, as he described you, a competent filing cabinet, would be a pile of money so high you could buy your own private island. It turns out two of those things are coming true. Roman is running the company and taking a bunch of big swings, but you are not going to be around to fill in the blanks because one of those decisions was showing you the door. You are getting a massive pay out, some of which you will use to pay those personal reputation managers to polish your image, and the rest, well, you can figure out later.
6. Nate Sofrelli (last week: NR): When the polling vibes are good you can moonwalk from D.C. to New York City and never feel the ground beneath your feet. You may be a humble public servant, but you are being wooed by a tech billionaire and the scion of one of the most influential media companies in the world to leverage your power in their favor. But you find this kind of horse trading almost as unsavory as Tom trying to bigfoot you with his endless supply of biodynamic, light and fruity red wines. You ditched the tailgate party early, no doubt hoping you did not miss the last Acela train back to the nation’s capital.
7. Roman Roy (last week: 5): We are starting to think you may be in over your head. Anything beyond deploying a minion to sniff out Lukas’s dirty laundry seems beyond your reach. You could not get Connor to quit his campaign and endorse Mencken. It took Ken asking Ebba for a smoke to get her talking about India. And when you attempted to make peace with Gerri, she was having none of it. Your impulsivity caught up to you. Not only are you losing a valuable ally who might have helped you navigate the top job, all that institutional knowledge you flushed down the toilet may end up being more costly than the check Waystar is going to write so Gerri keeps her file folder of your NSFW pics to herself.
8. Cousin Gary (err Greg)(last week: 6): Your tolerance for humiliation is only surpassed by your capacity for self-preservation, two skills we are not unimpressed with. Lukas may have dismissed you as the backwash at the bottom of the gene pool, but he took notice when you humble bragged your firing of 100 ATN international employees. It turns out appearing to care about people when you do not in fact care about people is the true skill Matsson values, but your moves are all tactic and no strategy. Ingratiating yourself with whoever you think has the upper hand at any given time is a recipe for staying on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder.
9. Connor Roy (last week: NR): We get it, Connor. You had a lot on your plate, what with trying to parlay your meager support into a suitably prestigious ambassadorship, keeping your dad’s funeral to a tight 90, and convincing Willa to give up living in a posh Manhattan townhouse for the thrill of tooling around a middle eastern country in a car with diplomatic license plates so the cops can’t touch her. But instead of eating the carrot being dangled by the Mencken campaign, you are going to stay in the race on the off chance a better-than-expected performance might lead to a book deal and a lecture circuit tour. Seems thin.
10. Tom Wamgsgans (last week: 7): The Power Rankings were also in a toxic marriage borne out of a roller coaster courtship and engagement, so we are not unsympathetic to the beats a relationship of this sort entail. The fights are punctuated with the kind of passionate reconnection that leaves you weak in the knees but the underlying problems never disappear and quickly bubble back up to the surface. You mistook the radical honesty previously unseen in your marriage as an opportunity to show her (via an ill-advised scorpion encased in lucite) and tell her (in a series of escalating insults) what you really think. Big mistake. It may have been the late hour, the energy sapped out of you by a house full of guests critiquing ATN, or the murmurs that your job was at risk, but your fight on the balcony is the kind of thing we do not see you coming back from. In a marriage, there is a mutually assured destruction aspect to things. You each possess knowledge about the other that can nuke everything, and because of that, it is not in either party’s interest to launch their missiles unless they are prepared to destroy the earth. So, when you are accused of taking away the last few months a mourning daughter could have had with her dad and you respond by telling her she is incapable of love, question whether she should ever be a parent, and dismiss her as broken, the emotional blast radius is big enough to send you back to whatever Midwest town you came from because your career and marriage both appear to be over.
Not Ranked: Willa Roy. Rava Roy. Sophie Roy. Hugo Baker. Karolina Novotny. Shakespeare Frank Vernon. Maxim Pierce. Daniel Jimenez. Jeryd Mencken. Karl Muller. Oskar. Len. Carly Flight, The Pod Goddess. Coop. Kettle Corn. The Logan Roy Funeral Management Committee. Biodynamic German Red Wines. The Phoenix Thing. South Asian Packing Peanuts. Slim Reaper. Slovenia. Slovakia. Somalia.
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