I’m so glad the composer for the Succession opening music and theme music is getting some recognition. I noticed how stunning it was in episode 3, the famous episode where Logan died on a plane. I just rewatched that episode to see when it happened — this majestic sweeping classical strings and I noticed a couple of extra things. Logan says, before he gets on the plane, “Today’s the day.” There’s a slight pause before he says “when we do whatever blah blah blah and fire Syd and kill Gerri and tell all my kids to fuck off.” In retrospect, of course, today’s the day he dies. The last sight of Logan is perhaps an homage to the chilling end of The Godfather, except in reverse. In the Godfather, it is Diane Keaton’s face that the door is slowly closed on. In Succession, the door is closed on Logan and the living people where the camera is, start to work on a statement. All you see of him, before the door shuts, are his feet. There’s no camera in that room.
I tried to pinpoint, without much success, where the kids were the moment Logan had his heart attack in the bathroom of the plane. (Did they ever say what finally done him in?) It could have been at the exact moment that Roman Roy was leaving a pretty foul message for his father, for making him tell Gerri, the grandmother he lusts for, that she was going to be fired for some made up reason. I think he called his father a fucky fucky fuck face. But Tom’s first attempt to reach Shiv came 5 to 10 minutes after that moment so he might have died when they were boarding the boat that’s supposed to take them to the wedding. It’s just hard to know unless the writers had a specific ironic moment in mind. But it also explained why Roman asked, “Did anybody check his cell phone messages?” Because HE thinks he might have killed him with his message. (Doesn’t really know his father that well. Only one of the four kids knows that man and everything he is, and the name of the episode has his name: Connor’s Wedding.)
Logan left the world as shittily as he lived in it. His last acts were to fire Gerri and Syd; to scream at his son Roman for not being on his side; to skip Connor’s wedding with the excuse that they got them a… “what was it,” he asked his lovestruck assistant. She answers, “Napoleon letters to Josephine,” or something like that.
Really Connor had the most honest and interesting reaction to Logan’s death. He says, quite simply, “He never even liked me.” The other three all reacted in the different ways that abused children react. They all professed to love him. (Only, possibly, Roman actually does.) Kendall says (in his dead father’s ear), “I can’t forgive you.”
Anyway, the point where the music soared to the level of a great concert was when the plane with the corpse was landing at Teterboro, the children were driving up in their black Suburbans and the emergency vehicles were gathering around the plane. Anyway, here is the article behind a paywall about the soundtrack of Nicholas Britell.