Tom, as the head of the news division, would, of course, play a crucial role in Logan’s team next season if this were the case. Logan might happily give up influence over the studios, theme parks and cursed cruises line and turn his attentions solely to ATN. And when Lukas pitches Logan on buying out Waystar Royco, he says that Logan can continue to rule over whatever assets are most precious to him. And perhaps it’s instructive that Murdoch did break up his vast media empire in 2017 when he sold 20th Century Fox Studios and most of his entertainment assets to Disney. Logan’s closest real-life parallel is Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon behind Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and many other right-leaning news outlets. In fact, Tom hinted several episodes ago that his true love was Greg, not Shiv, and that he would happily betray his wife.
As Logan learned earlier this season with Marcia, humiliate your spouse, and you will suffer the consequences. (He did.) Tom refused to team up with Kendall against Logan because, as Tom told Kendall at the time, “I’ve seen you get f-cked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get f-cked once.”Īnd he stood silent as his wife told him she was out of his league, and that she didn’t love him. He offered to act as the fall man and go to prison for Logan in hopes that Logan would remember his loyalty. I’m guessing that this is his peak before a devastating fall.Įliana Dockterman: In retrospect, Tom has been playing the long game.
Plus, Tom now has three very angry Roy enemies. So even if Tom lands a C-suite job, it seems like his best case scenario is to become New Frank, i.e., an executive with ostensible wealth and power but who is nonetheless a human footstool. While Tom proved useful to Logan in this interest, he did so as a pawn as opposed to a partner. But now he’s gone from one master to another-and we know that in order to truly get in Logan’s good graces, he has to respect or even fear you. So Tom, too, finally figured out that he needs to act for himself that his wife isn’t thinking about his best interests, if she’s even thinking about him at all. But we knew all along that Stan didn’t have the wiliness of Tyrion, the ruthlessness of Dany or the rallying ability of Jon-and ten episodes later, he was dead. At the time, “Stannis the Mannis” memes proliferated on Twitter for a once-defeated character that had finally found his mojo. Watching him saunter into the room in the season’s closing moments, I was reminded of the Game of Thrones season four finale, when (spoiler alert, I guess?) Stannis Baratheon came galloping to Jon Snow’s rescue north of the wall. S ocial media erupted in his praise last night he’s made Kendall’s fake newspaper headline reducing Shiv to “Wife of Toms Wambsgams” come true.īut while Tom’s play was momentarily successful, I have a lot of doubts. Tom now has the inside track on a cushy job inside the new WayStar-GoJo Death Star, and has seemingly leapfrogged over any of the real Roy siblings in the pecking order. After getting off the phone, Tom almost immediately turned on his wife, warning Logan of their ambush and giving the Roy patriarch the time to, in his words, turn their guns into sausages. Tom has been buried so deep under his wife’s thumb for three seasons that the idea that he would do anything but meekly accept their machinations seemed ludicrous to me. Chow: About fifty minutes into the episode, when a tense Kendall asked Shiv if her husband Tom would go along with their plan to overthrow their father, I nearly laughed.