Who are the Roys without their father?

In its final season, it felt like Succession would answer the question it had dangled from the beginning—could the Roy kids ever win against Logan? But this tension obscured the actual question of the series, which has been hiding in plain sight since the first episode: What will his children look like when Logan is gone? Can the siblings move forward without their father, the force that both split them apart and united them? Can they ever escape their dad’s influence? We don’t know, but from what we see in “Connor’s Wedding,” the answer is probably not.

The brilliance of Succession is that it was able to take an inevitable plot point—one we pretty much have known was coming since the first scene of the series, when a disoriented Logan relieves himself in the corner of his bedroom—and make it an absolute jaw-dropper. In a series of scenes that unfold over one long phone conversation with Tom Wambsgans, of all people, the Roys learn that their father’s heart stopped while he was in the bathroom on his private jet, and each of his kids speaks to the possibly-already-dead Logan over a phone held to his ear. (Well, not poor Connor, who no one gets around to informing until it’s definitively too late.) Grief is a leveler, and whether it’s Shiv’s confident alto shifting to the high, thin voice of a child when she says “Daddy, I love you, please not now,” or Kendall’s burst of crying when Frank tells him Logan is gone, we feel it land.

But while their awkward, startlingly genuine efforts to comfort each other bring them close—watching them hug while only able to look at the ground is devastating—the decisions they make over the rest of the episode lay the groundwork for the way they are almost certain to be spun apart in the series’ remaining episodes.

“Whatever we do now will always be what we did the day our dad died,” Kendall says, and while he’s referring to how he and his siblings will look to the markets, the SEC, and the public eye, like all things in Succession, the line has a separate familial charge. Not only does Logan loom so large that their private grief is still defined by his greater stature, but it also speaks to how their own decisions and actions, sibling to sibling, will reverberate in the days to come. Because just like Karolina, who shifts immediately to stone-cold crisis-management mode and starts drawing up a list of who needs to be informed and when, the Roy siblings have a timeline issue on their hands.

When Logan goes into crisis on the plane, Tom at first tries to call Shiv, but she sends him to voicemail, twice, and while Tom is deciding who to call next, Kendall and Roman, in a moment of friendly, only slightly acid-tinged banter, convince their little sister that she should be the one to break the news to Connor that Logan isn’t coming to his wedding. As soon as she leaves, Tom gets through to Roman, and in the panicked confusion that follows—“Who’s in charge?” Kendall barks, “Who is medically competent?”—neither of them runs to get Shiv, even though Tom asks after her several times. By the time Kendall goes to find her, it’s been an eternity.

This isn’t cruelty—the brothers are in shock. But it is negligence, the product of a lifetime of having other people—Jess, Hugo, Tom’s “Greglets”—do their bidding. The Roys can’t seem to grasp that in this moment, they have responsibilities that lie outside of themselves. When Kendall finally reaches his sister, you see him try to string together threadbare facts into some kind of coherent narrative—bathroom, trouble breathing, chest compressions—and Shiv’s shock is devastating. The brothers insist they came for her right away, but in the cold light of day, especially after Shiv talks to Tom—we see them together in the episode’s final moments—it’s not going to play that way.

But in these first moments of shock, the Roys are surprisingly gentle with each other. When Roman insists, against all logic, that it’s too early to actually say Logan is dead, Kendall and Shiv treat him with kid gloves. “OK,” she says, in a quiet voice, with no venom. The brothers don’t tear Shiv apart when she makes the terrible suggestion that they “keep the plane up there an extra beat” because she feels too distraught to make business decisions (although the fact that that comment is out there doesn’t seem good). As for Connor, he is so used to being the also-ran that he rolls with his exclusion from the final farewells and goes through with his marriage to Willa—not as the planned spectacle for his presidential campaign, but in private, after making sure they see eye to eye on what they’re getting into. (Willa assures Connor that while she is with him for his money, it’s not only for his money.) It’s the healthiest thing anyone does in the entire episode.

Killing off Logan in the season’s third episode leaves a lot of room for the show’s various factions to fight over the spoils. It feels impossible the alliance of the Roy siblings will hold—this isn’t a show that’s about to deliver seven episodes of togetherness. When it comes out that Roman was speaking to Logan while plotting with his siblings against him, when Shiv gets the full download from Tom, when the jockeying for position begins in earnest, they will have plenty of runway to tear each other apart.

It would be one thing if the siblings had real trust, built on the belief that they can count on each other. But they don’t. While we’ve had the novelty of seeing Kendall, Roman, and Shiv work together, including a moment of genuine glee when they thwart Logan’s attempted acquisition of PGM, the alliance has felt fragile. Shiv has kept her options open from the beginning, while Ken withheld the details of his conversation with Matsson. As for Roman, when he starts going behind their backs, he turns his siblings’ paranoid fear over a birthday text to his father into a reality. Loving without trust is what they learned from their father, and the irony of “Connor’s Wedding” is that Logan’s influence is so inescapable that even his death has strategic significance. In death as in life, Logan will set his children against one another.

But there’s one caveat, built on a truth that Succession understands completely. Siblings can weather catastrophes that would sever a friendship or a marriage. We’re talking about a family where Shiv put out a press release calling Kendall a drug addict and an absentee father; where Kendall turned the entire DOJ against the family business; where Roman burned them both in his pursuit of Matsson. They got to the other side of that. After all, your sibling is the person you practice your actual feelings on before learning how to make them more palatable for outside consumption. And while the Roys have never seemed too concerned about how they come across to others, they do care, deep down, what their siblings think of them. They have survived saying the unsayable to each other.

Right before Shiv goes out to make the statement to the press, Kendall and Roman take a moment with each other. “We’re going to be OK,” Kendall says to Roman, big-brothering it up. “You’re not going to be OK,” Roman says, with a bit of the old cheek. Kendall parries with the classic sibling comeback, “You’re not going to be OK.” The ritualistic intimacy of sibling ribbing was the only thing that made me think, maybe they will be OK. Or at least they have a shot.