Nevertheless, Connor is not quite at the point Kendall eventually reached, where his hatred of Logan outweighs his desperate wish that Logan would just love him already. It would be really exciting to him if Kendall were coming around to one of his strange political ideas. The little moment where Kendall says Waystar is a declining empire within a declining empire and Connor says "amen, brother" is so sharp and also bitterly sad, because Kendall is just rambling like a knucklehead (as I said last week, my sense is that he's very high), but for Connor, this is the kind of thing he deeply believes in and loves to hold court about. And weirdly, as Connor has become even a fringe political figure, he's gained allies and an identity that's not reliant on Logan. I've always considered Connor a ticking time bomb, in that you can tell how much he notices (and resents) his father taking him for granted, writing him off, acting like he doesn't matter. The title of this episode, "Mass in Time of War," comes from a 1796 piece by Joseph Haydn that, to quote the program notes from Boston Baroque, carries "a sense of foreboding as Austria and its allies were about to face Napoleon." 30 MPH: Connor Like Shiv and Roman, Tom spends a lot of this week trying to take out his discontent on other people - Greg, in particular, who has been ducking Tom's calls until Tom thinks to call him from a different number. His decision to withhold his "I love you" from Shiv is just another way of trying to get her to give him more reassurance, but it's interesting how unsettling it is to her. Tom is doing what Tom does best: tormenting Greg and desperately wishing for his wife's love. (Shiv saying "unsubscribe" while Kendall unfurls his dopey speech about the end of empires is my choice for the single funniest line of the week.) 49 MPH: Tom Shiv would go along with a team effort here, too, except she can feel that in a way, she will never be part of the team.
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They laugh it off when she tells Kendall she would only go along with the overthrow if she then became CEO, and they side with Roman when she needles him about Gerri and he gets upset. But Shiv is a pragmatist, and she knows that none of the men in her family intend to cede any ground to her. Shiv is upset about Gerri getting the CEO job over her, and it seems at first that there's a chance she's going to turn on her father.
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There are times when Connor (Alan Ruck) tries to be a good big brother to Shiv (Sarah Snook), but she's pretty much never into it.