Logan Roy is dead, but as Succession plunges to its finish, his children are still trying to figure out whether or not he favored them over their siblings. In this season’s fourth episode, “Honeymoon States,” Kendall is left pondering a single sheet of paper found in his father’s private safe. The document, which says that Kendall should succeed Logan as CEO, includes a puzzling addendum: A penciled-in mark that either underlines Kendall’s name, or crosses it out.
The show has technically always centered on Kendall, who from the start saw himself as Logan’s one true heir, and the show’s arc has been traced alongside his power moves, relapses, car crashes, and snotty crying jags.
In the first three episodes of this final season, Kendall and his siblings were briefly united in their anger over how their dad cut them out of his plans to sell Waystar. But now, faced with this piece of paper, that union is crumbling—an inevitability foreshadowed by Roman secretly meeting with Logan about returning to run ATN the night before he died. All of Kendall’s old ambitions come flooding back—he gets a hint of Logan’s respect from beyond the grave and grabs onto it.
Of course, no one knows when this document was actually drafted. The Waystar execs speculate, based on its placement in Logan’s files, that it was initially written about four years before. But it’s unclear when the addendums were penciled in. Vice Chairman Frank (Peter Friedman) suggests that they were maybe added in the last 18 months—Logan also wrote “Greg?” on the sheet, and Greg was basically an unknown to the Roys before the pilot, which takes place approximately a year before the events of the latest episode. Without the date, it’s hard to know whether Logan was inclined to underline Kendall’s name or cross it out.
But given Logan and Kendall’s fractured relationship, it seems most likely that the name was crossed out. After all, Kendall has tried (and failed) to overthrow Logan multiple times. On the other hand, if Logan really wanted to cross out Kendall’s name, wouldn’t he start with a clear strikethrough? Instead, it’s the Kendall part of “Kendall Logan Roy” that is underlined, and the surnames that are obscured. So perhaps Logan meant to underline, and his hand slipped.
Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, will probably never reveal what Logan intended, because what Logan intended isn’t actually the point. It’s the mere possibility that Logan at one point wanted him and then (maybe) changed his mind that nags at Kendall. (It doesn’t help that Shiv is the one that first brings up the cross-out theory, in a sisterly little stab in the back.)
In the end, though (of this episode, anyway), Kendall finally gets what he’s been angling for since his very first scene in the series: A deal that he will ascend to interim-CEO alongside Roman, while Shiv gets pushed aside (though her brothers promise her she’ll be involved in every decision).
But as Logan once famously warned, you can’t hold this job without being a killer, and Kendall gets the chance to prove he has that instinct almost immediately. The episode ends with him going behind Roman’s back to start a posthumous smear campaign suggesting that Logan was a puppet and his kids were pulling the strings—a choice he makes in the bathroom, after zooming in on a picture of that mysterious scribble and reminder of his father’s fickle love. Destroying his father’s reputation in death is not just a “fuck you” for the pencil stroke, it’s also what Kendall thinks Logan would do—a sort of homage.
As Kendall tells Frank, “He made me hate him, then he died. I feel like he didn’t like me. I disappointed him.” Even if it is an underline, the idea of the strikethrough symbolizes the disappointment that Ken knows was real. And it’s going to motivate him to act as ruthlessly as his dad.