I never thought Roman would *literally* stab Kendall in the back, but it worked so well. Shiv then spitting on his corpse was a nice callback too.

That moment with Logan and Kendall at dinner might have been the most well-constructed scene in the series. That was so good.

It's a perfect role for him. He was insufferable even when he was (kinda) one of the good guys in The Big Short.

What the **** Shiv

Lol'd many times in this one, esp the mistake, but so much sadness too.

"Complete Pope….very religious."

"Ten years is like two and a half Olympics."

Shiv got a lot of great scenes, sad with her mom, sad with Tom, great with Gerri at the end.

Why couldn't Kendall keep his mouth shut?!

Are we really to infer Kendall's dead?

Man the finale is gonna be absolutely bananas, can't wait!

This episode!

Shiv - Basically telling the truth to Tom on how she feels about him.

Ken & Logan - That sit down scene. Logan is right. He always cleaned up Ken's crap.

Roman - That text! He messed up and I was scared for him. Gerri may go down and Shiv finding a way to take down Roman.

Ken - Is he going out? I've read messages here the past few days and like everyone has said here, where does he go from his failed take down? Are we thinking he's gone? Can't tell from the preview but can infer he is or isn't. I don't know.

The show is more entertaining with Ken on it, even if he's not vying to take over the company. Just have him be the ******* that goes in and guts startups.

Clearly someone had insider info on Kendall and started tweeting about it

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Calling my shot.

Gerri and Roman will bang within the next 2 episodes, leading to that relationship falling apart completely.

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Well it didn't quite happen but the fallout of it did.

Also, Roman's wallpaper of him flipping off Shiv.

Calm before the storm #SuccessionHBO #Succession pic.twitter.com/nllBIE2h7z

— hazel (@_heyyzzerr) December 6, 2021

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Clearly someone had insider info on Kendall and started tweeting about it

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After that episode, I'm actually more convinced than ever that Kendall doesn't die. He was *too* sad and aimless and kicked around this episode. His mom literally excommunicating him from the family wedding festivities, him finally admitting that he wants out of the company, saying he doesn't know what he'll do with his life, doing his whole The Graduate in-the-pool thing... it was all telegraphing rock bottom/death *too* much, IMO. To show all that in the penultimate episode, and then kill him off in the season finale just feels like not great writing to me. Instead, one way or another, I think he actually finds a new purpose next episode, even if it's at the tail end of the episode, heading into season four. I could of course be way off, but this just doesn't feel like an inevitable death to me. Instead, it feels like they want you to think that.

kendall roy + water pic.twitter.com/Ic8QyNW0EL

— meri lemon (@filmsexuals) December 6, 2021

Could be. If that's the case and we go by the "shocking and upsetting" descriptor thrown around for the finale it could be Roman. Hope not though.

I hope Tom shivs Shiv immediately after the surrogate gives birth.

That's super interesting. Take himself down, but take his dad down with him.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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I think he'll go on the podcast and admit to it, while also throwing his dad under the bus for protecting him. Basically a PR murder-suicide.

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Count me in for that. With nothing left to lose and unable to get out, it makes a lot of sense

I never understood that from Ken. If he's going to go down about the dead guy, bring your dad with you and say how he covered it up.

Maybe I'm the minority, but another Kendall vs Logan cliffhanger to end the season is going to get old. I think it'll be a cliffhanger with GoJo. But they really need to start handing some losses to Logan to keep this show fresh.

Shiv got fat in the off-season.

There is so much smoke about Kendall dying by suicide (and Jeremy Strong needing a break) that it makes you want to say it won't happen, but I think it's the only way to make all these people look themselves in the mirror especially Logan.

TCTTS said:

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This is so good, and Jeremy Strong really does come across as somewhat insufferable...

This profile of Succession's Jeremy Strong is fascinating partly because it's clear the writer fucking hates him: https://t.co/2iyISt1TUR

— Jason Pargin, author of John Dies at the End, etc (@JohnDiesattheEn) December 6, 2021

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What an amazing read. I can't get enough of the on-set stories of his weirdness and yes this author is mocking him the whole time

Quote:

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When I asked Strong about the rap that Kendall performs in Season 2, at a gala for his fathera top contender for Kendall's most cringeworthy momenthe gave an unsmiling answer about Raskolnikov, referencing Kendall's "monstrous pain." Kieran Culkin told me, "After the first season, he said something to me like, 'I'm worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.' And I said, 'I think the show is a comedy.' He thought I was kidding."

Part of the appeal of "Succession" is its amalgam of drama and bone-dry satire. When I told Strong that I, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, he looked at me with incomprehension and asked, "In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?" No, I said, in the sense that it's funny.

"That's exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role," McKay told me. "Because he's not playing it like a comedy. He's playing it like he's Hamlet."

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Quote:

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Strong's dedication strikes some collaborators as impressive, others as self-indulgent. "All I know is, he crosses the Rubicon," Robert Downey, Jr., told me. In 2014, Strong played Downey, Jr.,'s mentally disabled brother in "The Judge." (To prepare, he spent time with an autistic person, as Hoffman had for "Rain Man.") When Downey, Jr., shot a funeral scene, Strong paced around the set weeping loudly, even though he wasn't called that day. He asked for personalized props that weren't in the script, including a family photo album. "It was almost swatting him away like he was an annoying gnatI had bigger things to deal with," a member of the design team recalled.

"I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through," Strong told me. This extreme approachRobert De Niro shaving down his teeth for "Cape Fear," Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for "The Revenant"is often described as Method acting, a much abused term that, in its classic sense, involves summoning emotions from personal experience and projecting them onto a character. Strong does not consider himself a Method actor. Far from mining his own life, he practices what he calls "identity diffusion." "If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anythinganythingthat is not the character and the circumstances of the scene," he explained. "And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand."

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Quote:

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We first sat down in April, at a restaurant in Williamsburg. Strong, an avowed foodie, seemed to know everyone who worked there. He was midway through shooting Season 3, and he wore Kendall's brown corduroy jacket everywhere; Strong often borrows items from the wardrobe department, to help "elide the line" between fiction and life.

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Quote:

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Between takes, a writer named Will Tracy recalled an earlier scene, which called for Kendall to meet a reporter over a Waldorf salad: "Jeremy said, 'A Waldorf salad's way too old-school. That's something my dad would eat. It should be a fennel salad with a light vinaigrette.' " They changed the salad.

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This part here reads like brilliant fictional satire

Quote:

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As we passed through airport security, Strong set off the metal detector. He stepped back and took off his lucky-charm necklace. It beeped again. He took off his belt. It beeped a third time. "I have a leg brace," he explained to a security guy, and lifted his pants leg. After getting patted down, he told me that he had hurt himself on set. "I jumped off a stage, thinking I could fly, but it turns out I can't," he said. "It made sense in the moment, though." In the scene, Kendall is at the Shed, in Hudson Yards, planning his fortieth-birthday party. During one take, in a moment of "exultant anticipation," Strong leaped off a five-foot-high platform and landed in hard Gucci shoes, impacting his femur and his tibia. (The take was not used.) This was not his first "Succession" injury. In Season 1, Kendall gets stuck in traffic on the way to a board meeting and sprints through the streets. Strong wanted to be sweaty and breathless for each take, and he fractured his left foot running in Tom Ford dress shoes. "It's the cost to himself that worries me," Brian Cox told me. "I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself, and therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else."

Before the flight, Strong popped a Xanax; he gets anxious flying, which he attributes to the "total surrender of control." As we boarded, an attendant told him that his cloth mask was unacceptable. With ten minutes until the gate closed, he raced through the terminal looking for a surgical mask. He found a vending machine, but the instructions were in Italian. When he finally figured it out, the mask got stuck in the rotating dispenser. He tried tilting the machine, but then told himself to keep cool. He ran into a candy store, which carried child-size surgical masks. He returned to the gate wearing a tiny sherbet-colored square.

At seven that evening, we touched down in Copenhagen. Strong was relieved to be returning to Tisvilde. "I don't feel stress there," he said in the car. "I don't feel colonized by all the wanting and needing. If I'm in L.A. or New York, I feel so encumbered by the weight of the profession that I'm in. And ambition." But, before leaving the city to join his family, he wanted a hamburger. Noma's burger offshoot was closed, so he looked up the nearest location of Gasoline Grill, a chain that makes his second-favorite burger in Copenhagen. The Web site said that the burgers were available until eleven, or until they sold out. The driver brought us to the Vesterport train station, where there was a Gasoline Grill kiosk on the platformbut the woman there said that they were all gone. "See, now I'm determined," Strong said.

We drove to another location, at a gas station. No dice. Foiled in his quest for the second-best burger in Copenhagen, he got back in the car and slumped his head. It was getting dark, so he directed the driver toward Tisvilde. "It does illustrate a good point," he said. "Which is that all drama is about wanting something very badly and not getting what you want."

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I mean, the guy was an assistant to Daniel Day-Lewis. Not much of a surprise that he weird about acting.

https://www.vulture.com/2021/12/succession-season-3-episode-8-chiantishire-ending-scene-kendall.html

Ok
Now I want a Mark Strong documentary