Every Succession Season 4 Fan Theory So Far (Even the Wild Ones)

The last trailer for Succession season four landed on Friday, and already the fan theory machine is in overdrive.

The trailer goes out of its way to tell us that absolutely everybody is back in the game. The Pierce family, the Roys' folksy, lefty mirror images, are back. Lukas Matsson and his crackling chemistry with Roman are back. Maybe Adrien Brody's going to turn up again too. Who knows?

With three weeks to go until the first episode drops, these are the Succession fandom's best guesses as to what's about to happen based on the 160 seconds of trailer we've been digesting over the past few days.

The Roy kids form an anti-Logan megazord

The obvious through-line in the trailer comes from Kendall suggesting that he, Roman, Shiv and Connor partner with Kendall's greasy old pal Stewey and Logan's former nemesis Sandy as well as the Pierce family to take Logan down. That's the position from which we start the season, and the success of their tilt at the top will be determined by how long they manage to keep themselves together.

Photo by HBO.

Shiv and Tom will be the crucible

After shifting from Kendall to Shiv to Roman, season three ended with Tom in pole position to succeed Logan. That, naturally, is going to be a bit of a fly in the old ointment.

Tom tentatively broaches the idea that he and Shiv could, possibly, perhaps, maybe, break up. Not that he's saying it ever would happen! Obviously! But what if it did?

"If we're good," Logan says, "we're good." Tom is heartened. (Tom is definitely not heartened.) As good a position as Tom appears to be in, it looks like he'll have to choose between staying married to a wife who basically doesn't like or respect him but hanging on to his position in the pyramid, and walking away to become a little man again.

Roman had him pegged as looking like a divorce attorney from the Twin Cities. He might be headed there again, but if he does he'll have his head held high. And, probably, a decent divorce settlement.

Roman goes crawling back

He's a sick little slime puppy with no moral compass and a torrent of urges tumbling about inside him, but one thing you can rely on Roman Roy for is a total collapse in nerve whenever his dad asks him for something. And lo, Logan wants "a firebreather" to sort out Matsson and his attempt to take over Waystar. Notice that later in the trailer, when Logan tells his kids that he loves them but they're not serious people, there's no Roman cut into it. Might be a fake-out, but Roman would be the most likely to duck out of the Rebel Alliance.

Connor ruins everything

Greg wonders about the importance of a single percentage point of difference to Connor's ratings ("Squeezed down from one? Because that’s... the lowest number") but if Connor were to derail Waystar's chosen neo-fascist presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken by nicking just enough of his voters, that could leave Logan looking extremely foolish. (The Conheads, presumably, are gonna love it.)

Getting his guy into the Oval Office is going to be a big part of Logan's story this time around, though, and a wayward eldest son siphoning votes could be an irritant. We'll see Connor and Willa get married, so that's nice at any rate. Everybody's happy.

Kendall won't make it

The enduring self-loathing which has consumed Kendall since the death of that poor waiter from season one is finally something Shiv and Roman know about. Whether unburdening himself will do very much for Kendall's state of mind is another question entirely.

Succession has hinted very strongly at quite a few points that Kendall has been thinking of taking his own life, and if the news broke that he was involved in a death which was then covered up, he could get back to that dark place. Certainly, of the key players he's the one least likely to make it to the end of the final season.

Greg is the key

With Tom starting out close to Logan and Tom offering Greg a hand up to the top table at the end of season three at the expense of Shiv ("Do you want to come with me, Sporus?"), Greg is now a power player in a way he's never been before.

Greg's never been the most serially competent member of the Roy clan, and the risk now is that he somehow makes a hash of something Tom entrusts to him on behalf of Logan. Some fans reckon it'll be this which gives the Roy kids some kind of advantage over their dad. Fingers crossed Greg takes Greenpeace for everything they've got.

That biographer of Logan will finally drop her book

Remember Michelle Pantsil from way back in season two? The journalist who had a mole in the Roy camp, the one Logan tried to flush out with a game of boar on the floor? We've not heard anything more about her biography. One possible move for the Roy kids is to suddenly decide they'll cooperate with her, and drag him down by exposing his past. We've yet to really get into the nitty-gritty of the Roy kids' childhoods, aside from Roman's spell in the dog cage.

Colin does... something

The most threatening man in New York knows where the bodies are buried. (Specifically, the one of that poor waiter from season one.) Logan's bodyguard whispers to Kendall: "I know you." But Colin could easily ruin any of the Roy kids with the things he knows. He's a specter at all of their shoulders. Then again, we've no idea really what he might do, because the most we've ever really seen him do is remove the imaginary cat from the presence of a hallucinating Logan. One to keep an eye on.

The Peep Show gambit

Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain ended the saga of Mark and Jez by bringing it all back around to where it all started: in Mark's living room in Apollo House, Croydon, with neither character having managed to escape the other.

One theory runs that Armstrong and the writing team might decide to go that way again, with Logan having another health scare as he did in the first episode, and showing that his hold over his children is as strong as it ever was.

Photo by GRAEME HUNTER.

RIP Logan

Or – and this is a nuclear option – Logan might actually cark it after another health scare. Without him to rail against, how could they hold it together? The answer, as you well know, is that they couldn't. Logan dies, the kids splinter into factions and without a leader to carry Waystar-Royco onward it's swallowed up by Matsson or one of their other suitors.

The plane crash strategy

You might remember what Tom told Greg when Greg was thinking of trading up to dating a woman eighth in line to the throne of Luxembourg: "Greg, you marry her, you’re a plane crash away from becoming Europe’s weirdest king!"

Some fans reckon this was the deep groundwork being laid for a spectacular Coronation Street style mass extinction event for the Roys. Most of the chat about the promo posters has been about who's wearing a tie and who isn't (those aligned with Logan are in ties, everyone else is open-necking it) but in one there's a reflection of a plane in the glass behind the key players.

A hint, perhaps, that all the Roys will be taken out at once leaving the perennially disorganized Greg to inherit the Earth? Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.

From: Esquire UK