“You’ve won… because you’re corrupt and so is the world.”

This episode contains what is easily my favorite scene of the show. Kendall and Logan finally speak to each other for the first time in several episodes, with Kendall finally admitting defeat in his latest attempt to overthrow his father. It’s obviously incredibly well written and acted, but I think there’s so much more to talk about beyond the surface level details. It reveals so much about Kendall and Logan’s complicated relationship.

Like all of Logan’s children, Kendall has been trying to compete for his abusive father’s approval. In Kendall’s case, this takes the form of constantly trying to play the business game the way Logan does. But he always fails, because in the end, he’s not his father. And Logan sees that. He sees all of Kendall’s weaknesses and insecurities and uses them against him, making him blame himself for not being the perfect model of his father he always wanted to be.

Even as Kendall has tried to be better than his father, this remains true on some level. In all his attempts to take over, he’s always still positioned himself as no more than Logan 2.0. Everything that made the company work the same way it always has, but you know, better. And it’s in this conversation that he’s finally begun to realize it. He can’t beat his father at his own game because Logan wrote the rules. Logan has accrued power so vast that no one single person can take it out from under him. And in realizing this, he is able to comprehend the evil his father represents for the first time in his life. But even knowing all of this, where does that leave him? Who is Kendall when he’s not trying to be his father’s son?

And this is where we have to talk about Kendall and Logan beyond the business, because Logan has power not just as a CEO, but as a father. Logan says he does everything for his children, and in a twisted way, it’s true. He wants his kids to prove themselves worthy successors because that will prove his own worldview correct, cement his stamp on the world for all time. It’s what gives his vapid posturing about being a great revolutionary in this scene such bite, because as transparent and ego-driven as it all is, he has unfortunately succeeded. But at the same time, he blames his children for the way his own abuse has broken them and left them unable to fulfill the roles he’s tried to prepare them for. And none embody this principle more than Kendall. It’s why he can’t bring himself to let Kendall go, even when he fails and says he wants out.

Kendall’s latest battle against his father has seen him attempt to win the fight on moral terms, to expose his father’s corruption and prove himself the more ethical alternative. But it can’t work, for several reasons. As Kendall tells Logan, the world’s corrupt, the current structure will keep Logan in power until the day he croaks, and no one is actually hoping for a more moral person to take the reins.

But there’s a deeper reason, and it’s the thing that Kendall still doesn’t realize, and it’s the reason this scene breaks him in a way never seen before. Kendall can’t win a fight against his father on moral grounds because Kendall’s only morals are the ones his father gave him. Reeling from the emptiness of his recent birthday, he’s realized he has nothing in his life but the excesses of the wealth his father gave him. Everything he’s done in pursuit of being the next Logan made him forget to even become his own person. He doesn’t even know what he wants to do, really, he just wants his father to drop some meaningless asset on him so he’ll still have some kind of arbitrary purpose to keep him going.

And that’s what’s so heartbreaking. Kendall truly does want to rise above his father, to be a better person, but he doesn’t know what being a better person means anymore. He does a good thing by ignoring his father’s latest attempts to manipulate him and constantly repeating “I’m better than you” but this on its own won’t fix the problem. Saying it won’t make it true. What are words but complicated airflow? Only his father has the power to make his own words reality like that, and Kendall’s accepted he’s not his father’s son.

He doesn’t yet realize that he can’t truly escape his father until he rejects Logan’s power outright. If he can’t get Logan to buy him out of the company, then the healthiest thing for him to do is to leave anyways. But doing the healthy thing isn’t always going to be the easy thing. The easiest thing for Kendall to do is to live with the “failure.” And that breaks him. It’s what makes the circumstances in the finale going into S4 so exciting, because Kendall finally finds a way to carve his own path, with people by his side to support him. Time will tell if it truly manifests in him finally gaining the independence from his father he needs, or if his current alliance will even last, but if it works out for him the way I hope it does, this heartbreaking dinner scene might have been the turning point.

It’s difficult not to get sappy and sentimental with this show. It’s impossible not to look at a scene like this and walk away talking about the inherent potential for goodness in humanity. How can you look at this story and not want to believe that redemption is possible even for someone like Kendall? Pretentiousness is warranted with this show, it’s impossible to talk about it and say “it’s not that deep” because it is so deeply honest with how its characters are written. There’s nothing else on television like this.