Wins, losses and regrets: It’s all part of the game at this “Succession” tailgate party

“Succession” is not a twist machine. Sure, the plot flips here and there, but once whatever jolts we experience fades you realize how inevitable Jesse Armstrong and his writers arranged them to be. Logan Roy’s children were raised to compete for his love and respect and never work as a team. This is why they are consistently underprepared for moments of great opportunity.

Kendall (Jeremy Strong) was always going to rise to his greatest level of success by imitating Logan’s worst behavior. Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) were always going to end in disaster; we just haven’t seen how large the cauldron of gold in which she boils him will be.

The unkindest swindle of all may be in how successfully the writers, Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen resurrected a sliver of hope that Shiv and Tom Wambsgans would figure out that all they were good for was each other. We’re joking – Shiv and Tom are terrible together, but they sure do look adorable at times. On this show, appearances are everything. Including deceptive.

When we last saw the estranged couple they’d hooked up and, finding the lust was still there, decided to give it another try, mostly by going at each other. “Tailgate Party” opens with Tom, dubbing himself Father Sex-mas, delivering Shiv breakfast. They’re excited to be hosting the company’s traditional Election Eve “Tailgate Party” at their decidedly un-tailgate-ish luxury condo.

But nothing is conventional about this day. Waystar and ATN are on the verge of being acquired by Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), although he texts Shiv he won’t be coming because he doesn’t want to hang around Logan’s “bulls**t pre-election brain-dead AOL-era legacy media putrid stuffed mushroom f**k-fest.” Oh well – more pigs in a blanket for Wambsgans and Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), I guess. Before the party, Tom presents Shiv with a present – aw! The gold wrapping paper hides a red box Shiv opens to discover . . . a scorpion inside a paperweight.

Tom explains that it means, “I love you, but you kill me, and I kill you.” Adorable!

Compared to Kendall’s brief meetup with his estranged wife Rava (Natalie Gold), who updates him on their daughter’s fear of going to school, Shiv and Tom are aces. Kendall, meanwhile, responds to Rava’s report by blaming her parenting. What was his daughter doing outside on the street? (Um, walking with her friends?) Where was Rava when the scariness occurred? “I was raising our daughter while you were running a f**king racist news organization,” Rava says, suggesting he call his kid. Kendall will not – he’s too busy “making the world safe.”

“And it’s all for them!” he yells while stomping off.

While this warm reunion is going down, Roman has a guy doing a dirt excavation on Matsson. The Disaster Triplets meet with Connor (Alan Ruck) at a restaurant for a quick update on Logan’s funeral planning, reminding us that despite the tornado of upswings, reversals and minutes’ notice trips to Scandinavia and Los Angeles, their media titan father isn’t even in the ground yet.

“The weird thing is how much he’s not there,” says Connor. “I find that consoling.” But not as consoling as the news that in Alaska, the presidential candidate’s pre-election day polling numbers are “exploding at four, five, six percent!” Be that as it may, Connor’s main point of business is to figure out which adult child of Logan Roy will speak at his funeral, which Logan’s idiot eldest wants to keep to “a tight 90.”

They get up from the table without having decided anything, except that Roman and Ken want to invite Shiv’s ex Nate Sofrelli (Ashley Zukerman), the man Shiv cheated with while she was engaged to Tom, to the party they’re throwing in the home Shiv currently shares with Tom. Sure, why not? Nate works closely with Democratic Senator Gil Eavis, who is closely involved with the regulatory machine, and tight with Democratic presidential candidate Daniel Jimenez. Any points the boys can land with Nate will surely work in their efforts to drive Matsson out of town.

Shiv reluctantly says yes before phoning Matsson, sharing her brothers’ plans with him and telling him he needs to gird his loins and jump into stuffed mushroom f**kfest after all.

Sarah Snook in “Succession” (Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO)

Then she sexts with Tom, still in the afterglow of their “orgasm Olympics”: “Harder, faster, sorer,” he messages. She returns fire, smiling, with “Sorry if I broke your d**k last night.”

Cut to him in the office, texting her verbal confirmation of his tumescence before informing a few dozen employees on video chat, that he’s just sick, so sick, of what’s about to happen. Then he hands it off to Greg who reads from a soulless statement informing them they’ve all been fired as Tom fake boohoos off camera.

Tailgate time. Before the guests arrive, Shiv gives Tom the heads up that her brothers are inviting Nate. “It’ll be good to see Nate,” Tom says with terse artificiality. “What do I care?” Spoiler alert: the answer to that question will be delivered later!

As the place fills, Roman gets a phone call from Jeryd Mencken, the fascist horse he bet on in this presidential race. 

The poll numbers aren’t looking good, so he asks Roman to persuade Connor to drop out, assuming his exploding four, five, six percent will go to him. Roman corners his older half-brother and conveys Mencken’s promise for a sweet ambassadorship to his choice of autocratic states. Connor insists on North Korea. “You don’t know! Nobody knows. That’s the point. I could open it up like Nixon did China!”

“Con, they’re not going to put you anywhere with nukes,” Roman counters.

“Well that’s insulting,” Connor says. “I don’t think I want to go anywhere that doesn’t have nukes.”

How about Oman? “Oman? Poor man’s Saudi Arabia, rich man’s Yemen? Hmm, I’ll have to check. See what my wo-man thinks about Oman,” he dumbly jokes. Willa’s answer is, not much. So Connor hangs on to his tiny polls.

Kieran Culkin and Alan Ruck in “Succession.” (Photograph by David Russell/HBO)

As the revelry hits its apex, Kendall toasts the crowd, asking for a moment of silence to honor Logan. That’s Matsson’s cue to loudly burst through the door in a louder gold jacket, with Ebba (Eili Harboe) and Oskar (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) in tow.

Kendall decides Shiv should handle Matsson, who stampedes through the crowd and catches Tom off guard. Tom doesn’t acquit himself well, which Matsson announces to Shiv as she walks up. “I’m about to take a s**t in your husband’s mouth, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to tell me it tastes like coq au vin. But seriously, it’s a really, really nice place. Who will get to keep it in the divorce?”

Oof.

Not long afterward Shiv says hello to Ebba, who is miserable with social anxiety, and Oskar, who is stoned out of his gourd. Shiv takes Matsson over to chat with Nate, who he pitches hard as a better option than Roman and Kendall, who he calls “the failsons,” to run Waystar. “They will do what he did,” Matsson says, referring to Logan, “but they will do it stupider and uglier and less amenable.” When Nate asks about leadership changes, Matsson mentions Tom. Nate looks Tom’s way, in time to notice Shiv’s still-husband glaring back at Matsson, the man Shiv wants to screw, rubbing shoulders with the guy his wife already cheated with while she stands between them grinning. A devil’s threesome!

Then Shiv pulls Matsson into a coat room to bolster his confidence. Before they re-enter the fray she tells him she wants assurances that if she moves to actively assisting him, she’ll be rewarded with a “very, very, very significant role” under his leadership.

“Three ‘verys’. Wow,” he condescends, then signals her to lay her pitch on him. And Shiv . . . shivs it, offering nothing of substance. “I know the company, I know everything, I know my way around. I’m collaborative. I have the name. I’m hot s**t and I’m ready to go.”

They return to the party, and he quickly loses her. A suspicious Kendall sends Greg to disrupt Matsson as he pulls aside Nate to salt the regulatory earth for GoJo. But Ken’s alarming attempts to pitch woo make Nate utter those three reliably triggering words. “You’re not Logan,” Nate says, adding, “That’s a good thing.”

Elsewhere Greg has thrown himself to the Vikings and assumes their customs, which primarily means belittling Ebba, who angrily escapes to the balcony to smoke. Just in time, because Roman’s guy has exhumed Matsson’s blood brick harassment story, which he shares with Ken. They decide to approach Ebba, wagering their pretense of empathizing with her will yield more damaging information they can use.

It works. Ebba spills that Matsson is all smoke and mirrors – he’s not even a real coder. Roman casually brings up the harassment weirdness, and she laughs, blurting, “That’s pretty much the least of his worries right now,” mentioning India.

Do go on, Ebba.

The boys take what they learn to Shiv, who frantically leads Matsson to a private area to confront him. He ‘fesses up – yes, there’s a bug that’s making his subscriber numbers in India look twice as large as they are – like, you know, the size of two Indias (population: 1.425 billion) instead of one. If that news got out, that would affect his company’s Wall Street valuation by . . . what, two Indias? 

“By next quarter the numbers will be real, probably,” he says. “You can fix it though, right?”  But even Shiv isn’t that gullible.

Kieran Culkin and J. Smith-Cameron on “Succession” (Photograph by David Russell/HBO)

Across the room, Roman sidles up to Gerri and tries to snow her, saying that he didn’t really fire her. But she’s done, having communicated some of her severance demands in writing and leaving others to convey in person. First, she tells him, she wants money. “Eye-watering sums. Hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Second: she’s retained personal reputational management. “And if I ever get a whiff of anything undermining my narrative any time in the next five years, I will sue. And I will go public with the many, many pictures of your genitalia that I have in my possession. Have I made myself clear?”

Then she finishes, in a somewhat sad tone, “I could have got you there. But no. Nope.” And she’s gone.

Kendall and Matsson have a brief locking of the horns in front of the guests where it looks like Kendall is going to out GoJo’s numbers inflation but doesn’t. Instead, when Matsson advises Kendall to “Let the wave hit you. Float out,” Kendall objects with, “I think I am the wave, though.”

His ocean-sized ego whirling, Kendall sidebars with Frank (Peter Friedman) to tell him that the GoJo deal is sour and Matsson’s subscription numbers in India are significantly inflated. Then he proposes going “reverse Viking: We pillage their village. Waystar acquires GoJo . . . What if we could slow this down and we eat Matsson’s lunch?”

“And Roman and Shiv?” Frank asks, leading Kendall to channel his father’s spirit again. “I love ’em, but I’m not in love with them,” he says. “One head, one crown. But I’ll need ballast. Are you with me?”

One man who isn’t is Tom, who spent the evening hearing from people he’s going to be fired. In his own house. He and Shiv head out to their balcony to freak out about their separate misfortunes before turning their stingers on each other: “Should we have a real conversation?” he asks.

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Very quickly, keeping it real goes wrong. Shiv deeply resents his gift. “I’m a scorpion. You’re a hyena. You’re a street rat. Actually, no, you’re a f**king snake. Here’s a dead snake to wear as a necktie, Tom. Why aren’t you laughing?”

Then Tom lays it all out: “I think that you can be a very selfish person. I think you find it very hard to think about me. And I think you shouldn’t have even married me, actually.”

The air-clearing grown more poisonous with each exchange. Tom’s family is striving and parochial, Shiv says, adding, “You betrayed me.”

Back and forth it goes, meaner and darker until Tom lands the killing cut. “I think you are incapable of love, and I think you are maybe not a good person to have children.”

Tom still does not know that Shiv is pregnant with his child.

“Well. That’s not very nice to say, is it?” she whimpers.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. “You have hurt me more than you can possibly imagine.” So he makes his best effort to hurt her even more when she blames him for taking away the last six months she could have had with Logan by cutting her out.

“It’s not my fault that you didn’t get his approval,” Tom said. “I have given you endless approval, and it doesn’t fill you up because you’re broken.”

With that, they’ve cleared the air. “You don’t deserve me, and you never did,” she finishes, which is particularly cruel since that used to count as dirty talk.

Tom comes in from the balcony and announces the party is over, insisting he’s serious. As usual, nobody takes him seriously, and he leaves.

Roman, meanwhile, volunteers to do the eulogy at Logan’s funeral before he takes off. Ken follows him to the door, leaving Shiv at the bar, looking uncertain. Later that night, Shiv sits awake in the master bedroom, staring out the window. Tom is in the guest room, gawking sadly at the ceiling. They’ve arrived to the same place, at last, and each of them utterly alone, like we always suspected it would be.

New episodes of “Succession” air Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.