It’s all the more impressive that, for the very first time, it appears the Roys are breaking out of the shadow cast by their father. The best scene of the season was when Shiv (Kieran Cox) and Roman (Jeremy Strong) reluctantly decided to give up their CEO ambitions in order to support Kendall (Jeremy Strong). They knighted him as Logan (Brian Cox’s) successor, in a bizarre ritual which involved blending leftovers from their mother’s refrigerator into a horrifyingly unappealing smoothie.
In a flash, the moment feels like a breakthrough in their relationship. They get a peek at how a childhood could have been had they not all been informed that they were going to inherit the family business from an early age. It may be a celebration intended to demonstrate Kendall’s takeover, but it represents something deeper — their younger lives were overshadowed by the family business (in Kendall’s case, from as young as 7 years old), and now that they’ve finally got the breathing room to have a conventionally happy moment as children would, they can only comprehend it from the perspective of the company. This innocent bonding moment is the only thing they’ve ever known. They have no frame of reference for it, as their lives have always been dominated by their family business.
The Roys are always overgrown kids, and this is largely due to the fact that their father has so much power. Even when trying to snatch power from his hands during his lifetime, as Kendall made a habit of, they struggled due to always being viewed as kids; whenever they found themselves with a real chance of taking over, their inability to think logically was always clouded by fanciful, power-seeking strategies that were dead on arrival — business as playtime. Kendall said in his reading of Logan’s eulogy last week that he wanted to have Logan’s “magnificent and awful force” in himself. He does. But not in the boardroom. It’s no surprise that he is a horrible father. He has a maniacal obsession with winning at any cost, and he betrays every relationship he ever formed. Shiv is shocked to see a glimpse of Logan in her brother, just as he prepares to be enshrined into the role of CEO.