Succession season 3, episode 3 recap: Salty moves and happy headspaces – CNET [CNET]

Helmed by Birds of Prey Director Cathy Yan, the episode, titled The Disruption, is on HBO Max now. Let’s see if Kendall plants a flag. Spoilers ahead.

How’s your headspace?

The question remains: Is Kendall serious? He shows up to a gala dinner for journalists wearing an Ai Weiwei lapel pin and yelling “Fuck the patriarchy,” so maybe he genuinely wants to cleanse the sins of his father’s “rotten cabal” (and by extension, the “declining empire” of Western patriarchal culture). He even apologizes to Shiv for his outburst in episode 2, though she thinks he’s just attention-seeking. But Shiv may still be stung by Kendall claiming the moral high ground she staked out for years. He certainly saw right through her mealymouthed talk of changing things from the inside.

At the same time, he just can’t get away from who he is. The comedy show is right: He’s a rich white guy, and it may simply be that his only contribution to fixing a broken world is to get out of the way. He’s certainly still as uncomprehendingly callous as only a rich person can be, jokingly-but-not-really trying to order up a police raid, blowing past a TV show floor manager, and failing to recognize Greg’s distress at being lumbered with a $40K watch (though that one was pretty funny).

Perhaps most unfeeling is Kendall’s stunt to blast the song ‘Rape me’ by Nirvana during the Town Hall. Not only does it humiliate his sister, but it makes a mockery of the suffering of the sexual abuse survivors he claims to champion.

We know he’s obsessed with how he looks. From the opening interview, where he feeds a journalist suggestions about his shaved fennel sandwich, to the game of Good Tweet/Bad Tweet he plays with a rowdy limo of obnoxious rich young things, Kendall constantly casts needy sidelong glances at what other people think about him. He’s an experienced media mini-mogul and knows the importance of image, but it clearly cuts deeper than that for “bootleg Ross.” There’s an edge of self-loathing in his pathologically cheerful embrace of the satire/abuse flung at him, and it clearly isn’t just media maneuvering. The facade fully cracks when it’s Shiv dealing out home truths in a bile-soaked open letter, and he’s reduced to hiding in a server room like a hurt child.

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