Inside the winning fight in Vermont.
Action in Congress to support child care has been stalled for years. But in Vermont, lawmakers have just approved an ambitious plan that would pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s starved child care system.
The bill authorizing $125 million in annual investment comes after nearly a decade of organizing. As in many states, thousands of Vermont kids lack access to any child care program, and among families that have been able to land competitive slots, average costs exceed $26,000 a year, more than 30 percent of many families’ household income.
Meanwhile, child care workers are some of the lowest paid employees in the state, earning about $15 per hour, and typically with no benefits. Given that their workers could make more money doing just about anything else, programs struggle to hire and retain staff — adding additional stress to parents who can’t rely on their child care programs to stay open.
The newly approved child care bill would expand state subsidies for families earning up to 575 percent of the federal poverty level (or $172,000 for a family of four) and families earning up to 175 percent of the poverty line (or $52,000 for a family of four) would now pay nothing out of pocket.
The new payments will mean an infusion of funds for child care, allowing providers to be reimbursed at a 35 percent higher rate than they currently are. The legislation also tasks lawmakers with studying how to create an affordable full-day pre-K system.
The investments would be paid for in part by a new payroll tax, of which employers would cover at least 75 percent. It’s not law yet — it’s headed to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, who has previously said he would reject any new taxes. His office did not return request for comment, but Democrats have a supermajority in the Vermont legislature and have made clear they would override any veto in June.
Vermont’s legislative victory comes nearly a year after the Inflation Reduction Act passed the US Senate without any child care provisions, a gutting blow after the House had approved a $390 billion investment in November 2021. The Vermont victory also comes as federal pandemic child care subsidies are expiring, and President Joe Biden looks to make child care a top priority heading into his reelection campaign. Last month, Biden signed new executive orders to boost child care programs and their workers.
The path to victory in Vermont offers a roadmap for activists in other states who want to see increased public investment into their child care systems, and insight into the policy trade-offs leaders had to make for their measure to get through the legislative process.
“Vermont showed that you can have a bold vision, cultivate a broad base of support, persevere though budget battles and pandemics, and make the state a better place for those who don’t have a voice in politics,” said Helene Stebbins, the executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a national nonprofit that supports early childhood advocacy. “The hard part is not the policy — it’s the strategy, and the patience.”
How Vermont built its winning coalition
The origins of Vermont’s child care campaign trace back to 2000, when a Burlington real estate developer named Rick Davis and his friend in private equity, Carl Ferenbach, launched a foundation dedicated to supporting Vermont children.
For its first decade, the foundation focused on a range of initiatives, including youth centers, programs for kids with incarcerated parents, and supporting new community pre-K programs. This work helped prompt Vermont legislators to pass a bill in 2014 requiring all school districts to offer at least 10 hours per week of publicly funded pre-K.
Yet huge gaps remained, and the philanthropists grew more interested in the emerging research demonstrating the cognitive importance of a child’s earliest years. Teaming up and pooling money with other foundations interested in children’s issues, the two men launched Let’s Grow Kids in 2014 to boost child care access, an area they thought would carry the most bang for their charitable buck. They pointed to economic studies that found every dollar spent on high-quality early childhood programs yielded a return of $4-$9.
“Everybody knows we should invest early to save money down the road,” explained Davis, who often framed his work in terms of economic development. “We’ve got to find ways to get young families to come to Vermont and stay.”
In 2015, Bob and Christine Stiller, the founders of Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, gave Let’s Grow Kids a massive $20 million gift, and the group pledged to achieve their mission by 2025. This so-called venture philanthropy idea was to essentially use foundations as a catalyst for legislative change.
Let’s Grow Kids assembled a powerful team of lobbyists and organizers to lead the campaign. In 2015, Davis recruited Aly Richards, a top aide to Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, to serve as CEO. While working for Shumlin, Richards led the push to establish Vermont’s universal pre-K program. Other Let’s Grow Kids leaders included a former lobbyist for victims’ rights and a campaigner for legalizing same-sex marriage.
The philanthropic investments helped support statewide organizing, ultimately bringing more than 35,000 Vermonters into the campaign. Volunteers wrote op-eds, signed petitions and pledges, turned out for rallies, and testified before state lawmakers. Let’s Grow Kids also funded television ads and digital marketing, and organized 1:1 meetings with politicians. They helped mobilize child care workers to share their stories, and during the 2016 election, they asked all state candidates how they would address Vermont’s child care problem, and posted their responses online.
Let’s Grow Kids conceived of their strategy from scratch but studied lessons from other winning campaigns like Freedom to Marry. “We’re very small, very nimble, and we had an opportunity and responsibility to be a pioneer,” Richards said.
In 2021, with just four years left until their organization planned to shut down, Let’s Grow Kids established a sister 501(c)4 organization to exert more power in the 2022 midterms. Their goal was to support candidates who not only committed to prioritizing child care, but who also would commit to increasing public investment. Let’s Grow Kids ultimately endorsed 130 candidates last cycle, of which 117 won in November. This led to the first-ever coalition of self-described child care champions headed to Montpelier.
The political compromises lawmakers had to make
Partly spurred by the Let’s Grow Kids campaign, Vermont lawmakers passed a law in 2021 setting goals to expand child care slots, to limit family child care spending to no more than 10 percent of their annual income, and to pay early childhood educators comparable wages as kindergarten teachers in public schools.
Policymakers then commissioned a study to figure out how much that would all cost. To meet all those objectives, state officials would need to raise between $179 million and $279 million in new public funding, according to a report led by the Rand Corporation published this past January. The consultants suggested instituting a new payroll tax, a new sales tax, or a new services tax to get it done.
Even coming in this year with a Democratic supermajority, new committed legislative champions, and a well-funded lobbying effort, the last few months in Montpelier demonstrated the tough political compromises inherent to passing any new program.
Lawmakers said they weren’t ready to commit to spending as much as the Rand report recommended. When the legislative session began, Vermont Senate lawmakers proposed instead expanding child care subsidies for families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty level, (or $180,000 for a family of four), paid for by a new payroll tax funded primarily by employers. They thought this was fair, as child care largely provides a benefit to employers. To help fund those new subsidies, Senate lawmakers also proposed repealing a $1,000 per-child tax credit Vermont authorized last year.
In the House, lawmakers favored keeping the child tax credit in place and instead wanted to fund child care investments via a new progressive corporate and personal income tax. In this scenario, wealthier individuals and businesses would finance the bulk of the new revenue, but all taxpayers would still help contribute to a social program that benefits the greater good. The chair of the Senate finance committee said he didn’t like taxing people who might not ultimately need child care services.
Lawmakers were gridlocked for weeks, and it was not clear the two chambers would be able to compromise. In the end, House lawmakers agreed to the payroll tax, but funding families only up to 575 percent of the poverty level, not 600 percent, so that the child credit would stay in place.
The final legislation garnered approval from Democrats, progressives, independents, even some Republicans and a Libertarian. “It is not easy to ask Vermonters — any Vermonter — to pay just a little more, which seems to be a theme of this session,” said Republican Rep. Ashley Bartley of Fairfax. “However, the price of inaction is far greater.”
While Let’s Grow Kids didn’t achieve their goal of capping child care costs at 10 percent for all families, advocates have hailed this as a “quantum leap” forward and note they still have two more years left to push for additional investment, as well as to formalize a compensation scale for workers. Higher-income families that won’t receive direct financial assistance will still benefit from new subsidies flowing into the system, which can stabilize the workforce and boost program quality.
Vermont’s child care political blueprint
Not every state has the kind of philanthropic infrastructure Vermont enjoys. Experts say, though, their political roadmap could be replicated elsewhere, including the assemblage of a diverse coalition of parents, grandparents, business leaders, and child care workers.
“I really think that no matter the demographics of a state, no matter the political landscape, there is something that cuts through anything and that’s grassroots mobilization,” Richards told Vox.
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Let’s Grow Kids
The only other state to take comparable leadership in state child care investments is New Mexico, which successfully organized a ballot measure this past fall that authorizes new money from a state sovereign wealth fund to provide dedicated funding for universal preschool and child care. Like Vermont, the victory came after a decade-long organizing campaign, where early childhood educators helped lead the fight.
While Vermont’s win is yet another example of the child care movement gaining momentum, Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change Action, said the “real lesson” from states like Vermont and New Mexico is that the system is broken, and federal investment is needed to fund the true cost of child care, to pay early educators what they deserve, and to make care affordable for families.
Miriam Calderon, the chief policy officer with Zero To Three, a national advocacy group focused on infants and toddlers, agreed with Wells that states can’t fix this problem alone.
“In the short term this looks like not letting tens of billions of dollars in federal child care funding expire in September and protecting child care funds from deep cuts proposed as part of the default debates,” she said. “Long term, we need to pass the Child Care for Working Families Act, which ensures a strong federal and state partnership in funding the early care and education our babies and toddlers and families deserve.”
Young people are suddenly interested in working for the military industrial complex.
For new college grads, the tech industry is out, and the defense industry is in. Well, sort of.
Companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin saw some of the biggest jumps in search interest by this year’s grads on the popular college career site Handshake. Meanwhile, not a single tech company made the top 10. When it came to applying for work, there was huge growth in the number of applications to jobs in government, law, and politics (84 percent); energy (53 percent); and pretty much every industry that isn’t tech, although that grew too (8 percent). This likely reflects the overall 24 percent growth in full-time applications this year, as students struggle with a rougher job market than last year.
If you don’t spend a lot of time with Gen Z, it might be confusing that such an idealistic and tech-savvy generation would want to work for defense contractors or the government. But talking with new grads, it starts making sense. They don’t have the same associations as millennials like me who witnessed — and protested — the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they have been exposed to lots of other chaos in their young lives and now crave stability. Some see that in defense jobs as well as more tried-and-true industries. Chevron, Boeing, Bank of America, and NASA also topped the list as far as growth in interest.
“Financial stability is really important,” said Emma Fringuelli, a new Smith graduate who has accepted a job at a newspaper north of Boston. Journalism isn’t the most stable career these days, either, but stability looks different in the humanities. “Any job is a good job because you actually have something that can sustain you,” she said.
Some 85 percent of 2023 grads said stability was important to them, according to a Handshake report this year, up from 74 percent at the beginning of their senior year. It was the most important thing they considered when applying for a job — something that’s not usually the case. Historically, things like pay and brand name have topped the list, according to Handshake.
“I have worked at four different institutions, and I have advised thousands of students,” Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s chief education strategy officer, told me. “And stability historically has not been one of the top factors for what students would look at.”
Why are Gen Z grads so focused on job security and stability?
There are a few reasons why the latest graduating class cares so much for stability.
Though still young at the time, the class of 2023 was old enough to know its parents or friends’ parents lost jobs during the Great Recession, and to feel the stress and economic fallout from it.
“I remember driving through the neighborhood seeing people who had been evicted and all their stuff on the lawn,” said Mary Miller, a recent global studies graduate who has secured a job as a public engagement coordinator at a nonprofit. “It was kind of scary as a kid.”
Then, halfway through their first year at college, the pandemic hit, causing massive layoffs and upending many students’ college experience.
“This class in particular has experienced a completely different year, every single year of their entire college experience,” Cruzvergara said. “From freshman to senior year, they have experienced nothing that has looked exactly the same as the year before.”
Nina Stevens, who will soon graduate from law school and has a job lined up with a law firm, said she hadn’t really considered stability before the pandemic. “Covid really recalibrated that for me,” she said. “I feared that I would end up unemployed again, watching all my friends go through that and having to move back home. I didn’t want that to happen.”
Now, just as they’re graduating college and should be entering the job market, news of layoffs at the tech companies that have been expanding their whole lives is blanketing the headlines. A recession continues to loom, threatening what’s been a strong job market. It’s a confusing economy for everyone, let alone people just starting out in it.
Gen Z may not dream of labor, but they know they have to work to live. And they don’t necessarily see that drive as compromising their other ideals, such as having a positive impact on the world and maintaining work-life balance.
They’re just trying to thread that needle.
Apparently, government jobs and even defense contractors can fit, though that wasn’t what I heard from any of the 10 or so grads I spoke with. The new grads are keen to find stable work — and many already have — but they also want to feel like that work is doing good in the world. They’re willing to work hard but say they have boundaries around hours, demand flexibility, and want their employer to acknowledge there’s more to life than work — a sentiment at home with a lot of the larger work conversation that has defined the Great Resignation.
“I want to work somewhere where I know people, and they know me, and there is an understanding that we are people outside our jobs,” said Jessica Nowak, a cinema major graduating from San Francisco State University.
Gen Z is more likely than other generations to say they’re looking for a new job that better aligns with their values, has more opportunities, and pays more, according to a survey last year by LinkedIn.
It’s ostensibly not much to ask for, but it’s more than other generations have.
What job market is the class of 2023 entering?
Grads might just get what they want thanks in part to the fact that, despite ongoing concerns about the economy, the job market is actually very good. Unemployment hasn’t been this low in more than 50 years. The situation holds for new grads, even if the picture isn’t as rosy as last year.
Employers are planning to hire 4 percent more graduates from the Class of 2023 than they did from the Class of 2022, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That’s lower than they had estimated last fall but still represents notable growth.
Payroll and HR platform Gusto is forecasting a similar story. Hiring of 20- to 24-year-olds into full-time salaried positions this month is expected to grow by 5.4 percent, down from 7.2 percent growth in May 2022. So the labor market for new graduates is still growing but at a slower rate.
“It’s coming down from its peak of the last two years, but it’s coming back to levels that we had seen in prior years,” Gusto economist Luke Pardue said. “It’s not falling off a cliff like a lot of the headlines might lead people to think.”
In other words, the labor market for grads looks a lot more like 2018 or 2019 than 2008 or 2009.
Part of the challenge for new grads will be understanding that there are jobs out there, even if they have to look harder than in recent years.
“There are still opportunities. It just may be a little bit more difficult, and it may take a little more persistence,” said Kelli Smith, assistant vice president for student success at Binghamton University. “We’re encouraging them to not let those challenges get them down to the point where they’re not applying anymore.”
Though pain can certainly be found elsewhere, much of the layoffs have been isolated to the tech industry. But that doesn’t mean things are bleak for tech grads, either.
Graduates with degrees in things like computer science are widening their net to industries outside of tech, where their skills are still hugely in demand. For tech majors, Handshake saw an 8 percent drop in applications to tech companies this year compared with a year ago, but saw a growth in applications to all other industries, including health care, government, and nonprofits.
Two computer science majors I spoke with, roommates at Brown University, are headed into the music industry. Chance Emerson plans to tour as a folk-pop musician, while Jack Riley is planning on doing freelance music production.
They both stumbled on something they’re more passionate about than computer science in recent years, but that doesn’t mean they’re forgoing it entirely. Emerson, for example, has created a startup that helps other musicians connect with their fans. Both also work remotely for mentor program Curious Cardinals.
“One thing I will say about stability is that I’m excited to have a computer science degree for myself because I’m not worried about finding a job if I need to,” Emerson said.
Trauma, chaos, and a nation in peril.
Note: This article contains spoilers for several Succession episodes, particularly season four, episode nine, “Church and State.”
Last week’s episode of Succession took place inside the ATN headquarters on Election Day with barely a glimpse of the outside world. Now, in Church and State, the penultimate episode of the series, it’s the day of Logan’s funeral, and we see that New York is burning. In the aftermath of the fishy election of right-wing demagogue Jeryd Mencken, there are roving bands of protesters, stores boarding up their windows, gridlock in the streets, and police everywhere. Logan Roy is dead; the city is alive with fury.
This chaos has been building up for years, and we’ve been shown brief glimpses of how the world reacts to the right-wing, politically polarizing media empire the Roy family has created. In season one, activists disgruntled by ATN’s racist, misogynist coverage threw a water balloon of piss at Logan. A few episodes ago, a racist ATN fan physically attacked Kendall’s daughter. Now that slow buildup has erupted, propelled by a seething energy that the Roys — especially Logan — spent their lives stoking but can’t control. Logan isn’t even around to see what he’s wrought.
The last episode of Succession airs on May 28, which is hard to believe because the lives of these characters — and the world around them — are in shambles.
Given that Succession has always been most fascinated by the ambiguities, the blurry margins, of power and human greed, it now seems unlikely that it will tie up everything with a neat bow. Kendall and Shiv’s naked ambition to succeed their father as the sole leader of their company still hasn’t come to a head; the corporate GoJo-Waystar war to gobble up the other wages on. The question of who “wins” Succession has always been a half-serious, reductive way to describe what might happen in the series finale, but it’s become vanishingly difficult to imagine any of these broken, nasty people emerging with a sense of inner peace. It’s even harder to envision that the Roys will inherit a world that hasn’t been utterly polluted by their presence.
The antics of this family in the last few episodes have been a disquieting reminder that, beyond the fandom’s memes and jokes, there is actually no one to root for. That was never the point. The question is, what do we have left to learn about how their narrow, privileged world intersects with ours? Church and State zooms out and shows us more bluntly than ever before.
Disarray and disorder after Mencken’s election
Kendall (Jeremy Strong) drives past disturbing, apocalyptic scenes of New York in post-election disarray — it’s never made explicit whether the protesters are for Daniel Jiménez or Jeryd Mencken, or a mix of both, though a TV chyron in the background of one scene reveals that at least some of them are Jiménez supporters. The vote results for Wisconsin, which lost a significant chunk of ballots in an election-night fire, can’t be certified until all the lost absentee ballots are counted. The pandemonium isn’t likely to resolve any time soon.
Ken calls Roman (Kieran Culkin), wondering if they should advise Mencken to tone down his rhetoric. Roman, who is delivering the big eulogy and has been practicing it in the creepiest daddy-issues way, is delighted by the discord — it’s great for ratings. Kendall, having witnessed the bedlam, is both concerned and guilty about it, yet can’t contain his anger when his ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold) tells him she’s taking the kids and going upstate for fear of their safety, missing the funeral. Rava is firm; she’s already loading up the car. “This is my decision,” she says with finality.
Unable to stop her, he’s spitting mad. “You do not fuck with me today,” he shouts, pointing a menacing finger at Rava. He’s an echo of his father here, trying to bully someone into submission and jumping immediately to revenge when they don’t fold. Kendall threatens to get an emergency court order to stop her from taking his children out of the city. Later, he informs his assistant, Jess (Juliana Canfield), to set up a meeting with a family lawyer for next week. Perusing his schedule is how he discovers that Jess had blocked off time to inform him that she’s taking another job. “It just feels like time,” she tells him. Though he senses that ATN’s role in pushing Mencken as the president has something to do with her decision, Kendall takes Jess’s leaving as a deep betrayal, too. He snaps at her as if she’s one more child who won’t be attending Logan’s funeral, ungrateful of all that Ken has done for her.
The siblings ride to the funeral together, and protesters bang on their car window. The highway is gridlocked, so they get out before they reach the church and walk the rest of the way. It’s an unusual experience for the billionaire family, typically flown in private jets and driven around in private cars, to be out on the street and moving on their own two feet, especially as the city is reacting explosively to the self-serving decisions they made yesterday.
Logan Roy’s chaotic funeral
Church and State is an episode that highlights the dichotomy of movement and stillness. The funeral mass, held in the grand, solemn Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on the Upper East Side, is unsurprisingly tumultuous. Naturally, the Roy children aren’t staying still, not even today — they’re scurrying around to check on the various irons they’ve stuck in the fire. The world doesn’t stop even if their world, in one sense, has stopped with Logan’s death.
Shiv (Sarah Snook), even in mourning, recognizes that it’s the perfect time for CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) to make public that GoJo made up fake subscriber numbers in India, because everyone will be so distracted by the election unrest. Roman, almost as soon as he arrives at the church, suggests to Kendall that they make the rounds rallying the Waystar board members in the continuing fight against GoJo’s proposed acquisition of Waystar. Matsson is at the funeral himself as a ploy to get in Mencken’s good graces, just in case the man really does end up president. Shiv comes up with a contingency plan: Tell Mencken they’re willing to create a US CEO position at GoJo, which Mencken could spin as a win he helped secure against a foreign company, while also having close access to a top executive at a powerful tech firm. That CEO role, of course, should go to Shiv.
Meanwhile, Greg (Nicholas Braun) desperately pumps the pedals of his Citibike in order to make it to the funeral on time; he wants an intro with Mencken, too, considering he’s “amongst the crowning committee.” Connor (Alan Ruck), at the last minute, announces he wants to give a eulogy, one that his wife, Willa (Justine Lupe), clearly co-wrote. In a rather bold move, Kerry (Zoë Winters) — Logan’s former assistant and lover — arrives at the funeral, too. When we last saw her, at Logan’s wake, his wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), savagely kicked her out. There’s a flurry of activity as always, with characters trying to preserve or steal power, like swinging metal balls in a pendulum toy.
When it’s time for the eulogies to begin, Logan’s brother Ewan (James Cromwell) stands up and decisively moves toward the podium. He’s not supposed to give a speech, and the kids (and Greg) try to stop him, but Ewan forges on. He has always been an austere figure, disapproving of others’ moral failures, particularly his brother’s. But he unveils some tender insights into the bonds of brotherhood and, perhaps, why Logan was the way that he was. They were sent to America during World War II, and during the voyage their ship got separated from others in the convoy for a few days. “They told us children that if we spoke, or coughed, or moved an inch, that the U-Boats would catch the vibrations through the hull, and we would die…” Ewan recalls. “Three nights and two days, we stayed quiet.”
We finally find out what happened to their sister Rose — someone Logan never spoke of, but whom viewers heard a mysterious snippet about in season two, when the Roys traveled to his native Scotland. It turns out he believed all his life that he had brought home the polio that killed her. Later, when he became a father, he often demanded silence from his children. The sickly child grew into a terrible adult, in Ewan’s accounting, “who has wrought the most terrible things.” He was someone who “darkened the skies a little, closed men’s hearts.” He was not generous, Ewan declares, but mean, and “fed a certain kind of meagerness in men.”
Ewan’s denunciation rings thunderously throughout the church, and it seems to paralyze Roman, who is supposed to give his eulogy next. Early in the episode, we see him moving restlessly around his apartment, practicing the beats of the speech with bravado and smugness. That energy is sapped now. He mumbles feebly, barely coherent. He can’t do it. “Is he in there?” he asks like a little boy, pointing to the casket as he breaks down in tears.
Kendall takes over; someone has to do it, because, as Shiv points out, they have to point out “the other side,” giving Logan’s memory a positive spin to follow Ewan. Ken emphasizes all that his father did in life, for better or for worse. He was a doer. He acted. “He had a vitality, a force,” he says. It mowed people down, wrought a lot of suffering, but it was also a magnificent sight to behold. People were enraptured by the arc of his motion the way they can’t help but watch a lion pouncing on prey. Kendall tells the funeral attendees that he hopes this force exists within him, too — all the Roy children do. They’re in constant movement, scheming and whipping their heads this way and that, because it’s what their father did. But they’re the wind-up doll versions of their father, moving stiffly and clunkily.
“He made life happen,” Kendall says. Not just with Waystar and its many sprawling entities, but for Kendall and his three siblings. The eulogy only underscores Logan’s cruelty. He was a creator who acted carelessly with his creations, making out of clay four misshapen monsters — emotional imps who feel pain just as deeply as any other human, but lack the capacity to deal with it — and then unleashing them onto the world.
Bonded by trauma
The vast cast of Succession is brought under one roof this episode not by their love for Logan, but because they all experienced the hurricane that he was, tossing their lives into disarray. The funeral is a chance to look around at the wreckage and realize that they’ve survived. They’re bonded by trauma.
All of Logan’s old lovers are there. Caroline (Harriet Walter), his first wife, greets a woman named Sally Anne at the funeral almost with affection. Introducing her to Marcia, she says, “Sally Anne was my Kerry, so to speak.” Marcia doesn’t react to Kerry’s presence with anger, but the contrary. Sensing that Kerry’s on the verge of sobbing, she puts her hand over Kerry’s. They share a silent moment of understanding and forgiveness. These four women are briefly brought together by the indignities they suffered while they were with Logan: his unfaithfulness, his selfish behavior.
The Roy siblings, too, are conjoined by their mutual pain. Despite having a ragingly nasty fight just the day before over their presidential loyalties, they hold each other close today, because no one else in the world could understand the gaping hole left by Logan’s absence.
Logan was so full of vigor, his children say, but that great force has dissipated now. After the funeral ends, they continue on to the cemetery. The siblings are struck by the cavernous emptiness of his $5 million mausoleum, where he’ll be entombed. It’s completely still here, and sterile of life.
This is it — the official send-off. The kids look around in disbelief and make their last confessions about what their father did to them. “He made me breathe funny,” Roman admits.
At last, the funeral is over and done with, but the scheming continues full steam. Kendall learns that Matsson is floating an American GoJo CEO to Mencken; he orders Hugo to leak to the press that key members of the family are no longer on board with the buyout. Brushing off the hurt over Jess leaving him, he recruits Logan’s former security guard Colin (Scott Nicholson). With his father laid to rest, he’s more determined than ever to take his place.
Shiv, meanwhile, has succeeded in appeasing Mencken, aided by Matsson behaving surprisingly sincerely for once. Kendall and Roman know they need to act quickly to stop her; it’s all-out war with their sister now. The Roy children strive endlessly to emulate their father as if to justify the pain they suffered at his hands, that it was all worth something, that there was some purpose behind it that bore fruit.
Roman, blamed by Kendall for messing up their original plan to thwart the GoJo deal, is in a foul mood. He steps out into the night, watching protesters continuing to run down the streets. For a moment, Roman appears proud of the fire he started. Hopping into the bullpen, he faces the people marching down the street and yells, “Fuck you,” at each of them. A man finally body-checks him and hits him in the face.
The Roy children think they’re builders of civilization, of empire. They consider themselves movers and shakers, whose actions have real weight. But they don’t see all the ways in which they’re hamsters spinning in wheels, repeating the same mistakes and inflicting the same suffering that was foisted on them. For a moment, Roman lies on the street, immobile, while a current of people rushes past him. However much these titans achieve, and despite their immense power, one day they, like Logan, will be dead, and life will keep churning. The world and all the people in it are still big enough to crush them.