The Biggest "Succession" Questions After That Shocking Death

Warning: this post contains spoilers from Season 4, Episode 3 (“Connor’s Wedding”) of Succession.

We knew it had to happen eventually, but no one could have anticipated that Succession would kill off its patriarch so early in its final season. Logan Roy’s shocking death last week made for one of the most stunning episodes of television in recent memory. (Seriously, the fact that Matthew Macfadyen, Kieran Culkin and Alan Ruck will all likely be competing against each other in the Outstanding Supporting Actor category at the Emmys feels like a crime; they all turned in absolutely award-worthy performances, as did Sarah Snook and Jeremy Strong, who should be locks in the Lead Actress and Lead Actor categories.) But it also clears the way for a massive power struggle to play out over the course of the show’s remaining seven episodes.

With that in mind, we’ve rounded up the biggest questions we have in light of Logan’s death below.

Is Gerri actually fired? And if so, will she sue?

Logan died almost immediately after forcing Roman to fire Gerri — or, more specifically, give her a heads-up that her official termination was imminent — and Roman obviously wasn’t thrilled about having to cut his former ride-or-die loose. Besides Karolina and Frank, neither of whom seem likely to put up a fight, he and Gerri are now the only living people who know Logan wanted to fire her. Will they just…agree to pretend it never happened? That certainly seems like the smartest choice for Roman. When he was firing Gerri, she alluded to the dick-pics he sent her last season and indicated she wouldn’t be afraid to sue him and the company for sexual harassment. Given her background as Waystar’s general counsel, going against her in any sort of legal battle seems absolutely foolish. She knows where all the bodies are buried, and she’s not afraid to bring everyone else down with her if they try to get rid of her.

Did Kendall forget to tell his kids that their grandfather died?

From the moment Roman and Kendall get that phone call from Tom breaking the bad news, the majority of the action in “Connor’s Wedding” takes place in real time. We see Kendall and his siblings scrambling to draft a statement about their father’s death and hold a tearful press conference confirming the news once the plane carrying his body lands, but we never see Kendall (or anyone else, for that matter) call his ex-wife or his kids. Is it possible that in all the chaos, he forgot about them and those poor kids will learn that their grandfather is dead the same way that the rest of the world does? It does track that Kendall would be more concerned about getting ahead of the news to protect the company’s stock market value than with the feelings of the children he seems to see roughly once a season, but jeez. It’s hard to come back from that one.

What was in Logan’s will?

The biggest question in the wake of Logan’s death will obviously be who takes over as CEO, but there’s still the huge issue of who stands to inherit all his money and assets. What surprises might he deliver us from beyond the grave? We know that his relationship with his children was strained to say the least when he died; is it possible he wrote them out of his will entirely before he kicked the bucket? What if, as one final twist of the knife, he left all his money to his mistress Kerry? Or perhaps Colin, his trusty bodyguard and the closest thing he had to a real friend? One person will inherit the throne, but any number of people in Logan’s orbit could theoretically have a very large chunk of change falling into their lap very soon.

Will Tom try to reconcile with Shiv, or get a nice big divorce settlement?

If there’s one thing “Connor’s Wedding” taught us, it’s that however goofy he may seem most of the time, Tom Wambsgans is incredibly good in a crisis. He’s remarkably calm and compassionate as he guides the Roy children — including, of course, the woman he’s currently going through a contentious divorce with — through the worst day of their lives. He patiently goes through the motions of holding a cell phone up to a corpse so that a frantic Shiv can say her last goodbyes to her already-dead father, and after she reads the family’s statement at the press conference, she buries her head in his chest before leaving in the same car as him — allegedly so that he can walk her through the events of her father’s death one last time. Will their shared grief bring them back together? As Tom mentions to Greg, he’s lost his protector now that Logan’s dead. Will he seek out protection from his only other in with the Roy family, calling off the divorce as a way of aligning himself with another power player? Or, assuming Shiv stands to inherit a large sum of money, will he move forward with the divorce and simply try to take her for all she’s worth in court?

Will we ever meet Connor’s mother?

Through Succession‘s first three seasons, we learned very little about Connor’s mother, Logan’s first wife. There have been hints that she suffered from some sort of mental illness, but now all of a sudden in season four we’ve had two back-to-back episodes that explicitly confirm Logan had her institutionalized while Connor was a kid. (The reference to the “loony cake” that poor young Con was given as some sort of attempt to distract him from his mother being sent away to a psychiatric facility was especially devastating.) She’s always spoken about in the past tense, and given Connor’s age, it’d be safe to assume that she’s dead now. But is it possible that she’s still alive, hidden away from her family and the public a la Rosemary Kennedy? It doesn’t feel like an accident that she’s been referenced so frequently this season thus far.

Will Marcia come back to stake her claim in the company?

Speaking of Logan’s former wives, there is the small matter of him still being legally married to his estranged wife Marcia at the time of his death. Last season, she negotiated a deal to stay married to him for appearance’s sake that included, among other things, some shares in the company and a job in Waystar’s European division for her son. Presumably, once the news reaches her in Milan — like Kendall’s kids, no one thought to call her — she’ll want to come back to collect what she’s owed? As his wife, that could be quite a lot. (Could it be a majority stake in the company? A seat on the board?) She’s one of only a handful of people who know about Kendall accidentally killing that caterer at Shiv’s wedding at the end of season 1, and it feels foolish to assume we’ve seen the last of her.

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What is Kerry’s deal?

The woman Tom dubbed “Chuckles the Clown” because of her weird, giggly reaction to witnessing Logan’s death on the plane sure is hard to read. Everyone assumes she’s in shock, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the case, if she’s laughing at the absurdity of the fact that she hitched her wagon to Logan at the expense of her own reputation only to have her meal ticket die on her, or if as Tom puts it, “she just caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium.” Does she know something we don’t know about Logan’s will and what’s coming to her, or now that Logan’s gone, will she be kicked to the curb at Waystar as quickly as Karolina kicked her out of the war room on the plane?

Will the Matsson deal still go through?

Logan’s death obviously changes everything here. He was on his way to Sweden to meet with Lukas Matsson and try to finalize their deal for him to purchase Waystar when he died. Will Matsson be spooked by the CEO’s death and attempt to back out? We know that the Roy siblings, Stewy and Sandy all believe Matsson can be pressed to go higher on the selling price, but Logan was insistent before he died that Matsson would walk if they tried to press him for more money. Will they blow the whole thing by trying to squeeze a few more pennies out of him? Will they even still want to sell the company now that their father is dead, or will they now want to keep it in the family so that one of them can become CEO?

Will the Roy siblings still buy Pierce?

Obviously complicating things here is the fact that the Roy kids very stupidly agreed to pay $10 billion for Pierce Global News, the left-leaning rival network to Waystar’s right-leaning ATN, in order to buy it out from under their dad out of spite. Of course, the catch here is that they don’t currently have $10 billion; they’re counting on the cash they’ll get from selling Waystar to Matsson to cover the costs. If that deal falls through, they won’t have the funds to finalize the Pierce purchase — but at this point, would they even want to? Now that Logan’s dead, they could potentially find themselves in the awkward position of owning two competing media companies. It’d be like owning both Fox News and MSNBC during a contentious election year. Which will they decide to throw their weight behind?

What is in Tom’s “Logistics” folder?

Before he died, Logan was preparing to fire Cyd and grooming Tom to take over ATN as her replacement. Now, of course, that’s all up in the air. As mentioned earlier, Tom’s “protector” is gone, and he has to plot his next move. When Logan dies, he calls Greg and asks him to go into the office and delete a folder off of his computer labeled “Logistics.” What could possibly be in there? Potential Logan blackmail that’s now worthless to him? Sensitive information about the cruise department scandal that nearly sent Tom to prison? Something to do with his divorce from Shiv? We have no idea, but it’ll be interesting to see if Greg actually did delete it for him in time or if he takes it upon himself to make a copy of whatever sensitive files are in there and use them as leverage to climb further up in the company. It wouldn’t be the first time; back when Tom made him destroy a bunch of damning cruise department documents in season 2, he pocketed a few of them and later used them to negotiate a different position in the company before eventually handing them over to Kendall. Might he do something similar with whatever’s in the “Logistics” folder now that the future of his protector, Tom, hangs in the balance?

Who will be named CEO of Waystar?

This is obviously the question that will drive the remainder of Succession‘s final season, and judging from the midseason trailer that was released last week, it seems as though seemingly everyone is throwing their hat into the ring. It seems as though there’s a line in the sand being drawn between the old guard of Gerri, Frank and Karl (along with Tom, sort of, though now that Logan is dead, they’re likely looking to cut him out of their little alliance) and the three Roy children — though, as we know, Shiv, Roman and Kendall have a hard time staying aligned on anything for very long, especially when there’s power and prestige up for grabs. As we said ahead of the season premiere when speculating who will take over the company, this is not a show that has been building toward a happy ending. Whatever happens in the end, there’s bound to be plenty of backstabbing and jockeying for position to get there, and if it’s half as good as “Connor’s Wedding,” it’s going to be entertaining as hell.