Roman Roy Foretold His Own Downfall on Succession

In “Church and State,” Roman Roy unwittingly predicts his own downfall early on then follows through on the inevitable destruction just like any fan blade on a fixed track (OK, the fan metaphor is done now. Promise.). It makes for completely riveting television. The moment where Roman predicts his own doom comes early on. After a kinetic, confident opening scene in which Roman rehearses what is sure to be The Best Eulogy of All Time, Roman meets with his brother Kendall (Strong). Noticing that Kendall is wearing sunglasses to their father’s funeral, Roman delivers a quip that might as well be a grave horoscope for himself.

“Glasses. That’s smart. You can cry in secret, hide all your emotions, and thus emerge victorious as the winner of the funeral.”

Roman’s fatal flaw, aside from being an enthusiastic supporter of fascism, is that he’s so frequently correct about the transactional nature of the world but doesn’t have the necessary traits to take advantage of it. Roman inherited all of his father’s clear-eyed cynicism yet none of his abilities to put that cynicism into practice.

Most of the Roy kids fail time and time again because they’re quite simply wrong. Kendall was wrong in his estimation that his father could be overthrown as CEO. Shiv was wrong that she could keep Tom in line with an uneven power dynamic. Connor was wrong that he would win Kentucky’s electoral votes. Roman is different though in that Roman is often right. For, while it may be ridiculous to even joke about the concept of becoming the “winner” of a funeral, at the end of the day Logan’s funeral does have a winner. It just isn’t Roman.

After it turns out that Roman didn’t “pre-grieve” as well as he claimed to have had, Kendall steps in to give the bravura eulogy that Roman thought would be his. By the end of the service, everyone who comes into contact with the family is very impressed with Kendall’s performance and defers to him as his family’s leader. Kendall is the one who gets all the “attaboys” and face time with the president-elect. But those attaboys should have been Roman’s. He is the only one of his four siblings shrewd enough to realize that attaboys were even on the table. And yet he still couldn’t rise to the opportunity because his boring old human feelings got in the way.

That’s something that Culkin himself confirmed in an interview with Vanity Fair following the episode, saying that Armstrong told him that “You get positioned to be the guy, and you shoot yourself in the foot by just being a human being.”