Succession is very much like real life, in that sometimes you don’t realize who you’ve formed a full-blown attachment to until they’re cruelly yanked away. No, I’m not talking about expletive-spewing paterfamilias Logan Roy (RIP), but rather someone who’s never been advertised as a major part of the show’s central goings-on: Kerry Castellabate, his former personal assistant and...girlfriend? Mistress? Lover? Woman who makes sure he’s hydrating adequately so as to avoid future UTIs? (I don’t really know what kind of relationship nomenclature they employed, TBH.)
This has been a big season for Kerry, from her pitch-perfect delivery of one of the season’s best lines (“Marcia’s in Milan, shopping, forever”) to her vaguely humiliating attempt at becoming an ATN anchor to her clearly visible shock and grief upon learning of Logan’s death. To be clear, I’m not trying to mount an “in defense of Kerry” argument here—she’s more or less as morally bankrupt as anyone else on the show, just with less money and power at her disposal than her dead ex or his kids—but the actress who plays her, Zoe Winters, has endeared herself to me to the point that when she didn’t show up in this week’s episode, I was disappointed.
Of course, narratively speaking, there wasn’t much reason for Kerry to be around in episode five, which centered on the Roy siblings’ meeting with GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson in Norway, but even one hour without the presence of her blunt bangs and blunter personality made me beeline to IMDb to confirm that Winters was scheduled to appear in ensuing episodes. Luckily she is, so I can only assume that Marcia’s callous treatment of her at Logan’s memorial (and Roman’s uncharacteristic kindness as she spilled all her belongings on the floor) will come back to haunt her (haunt Marcia, that is, not Kerry; I want Kerry to be wholly unhaunted).
We don’t know yet whether Kerry’s plan to get pregnant with another Roy heir, which the already-born Roy kids speculated about in season three, ever panned out, but I’m guessing it did not, given the recent news about Shiv’s little bundle of dissatisfaction and yearning. (It’s possible, yes, that there could be two pregnancy storylines at once, and I would pay a lot of money to see Shiv and Kerry shop for baby clothes or attend a prenatal yoga class together, but that doesn’t feel super likely.) So how, exactly, will Kerry scheme her way back into a position of relative power at ATN? (I completely think that she could take Shiv, a soft-handed nepo baby who has probably never gotten into a fistfight with a girl with bangs before.)