The cold truth at the heart of success lies on an airplane floor

Losing their father: What the Roys had to say in the end of HBO’s fourth season had they learned from the show? The case of Brian Cox

The Emmy-winning HBO show kicked off, after all, with a media empire being thrown into chaos when its imperious leader fell ill, leaving his children and underlings to jockey over how to replace him, and to contemplate if anyone possibly could. The very title dealt with that scenario, while the intervening seasons have reinforced the sense that in terms of corporate savvy and grit, the apples can fall pretty far from the tree.

Brian Cox did a good job playing the mogul, and he made him seem very old but not infirm. In the final scene of the show, a moment of total and painful shock left his children stunned to weakly try to say goodbye, and then grapple with the implications of what his death would mean.

The kids went through a series of reactions, one of which was pragmatic. Not everyone can worry about how their father’s death will affect the financial markets and how their stock price will tank, costing them millions of dollars.

The Roys had broken with their father after competing against him for the acquisition of Pierce Global Media, adding to the uncomfortable scene as those scenes played out.

“We’re not estranged,” Kendall (Jeremy Strong) insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, while his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) practically pleaded to her unconscious dad over the phone, “Don’t go, please, not now.”

Within the hour there was one note of semi-normalcy that came from a peculiar source: Elder brother and his bride-to-be Willa, who chose to go ahead with their wedding despite their plans to use the occasion as a ruse.

The Roy kids seemed to derive strength from each other, as evidenced by the fact that Roman said, “You’re not gonna be OK.”

Going Where The King Lives: The Case Of The Fate Of And The Remnants Of The Last Of The Cox Throat

In retrospect, this was the location of things to be headed, with what should happen when the king dies without a heir and what does happen after that.

Cox will be missed over the remaining hours. Yet in terms of setting up dramatic (and comedic) possibilities around the deal-making, scheming and family dynamics to come, the show is coming back to where it all started, in a way that appears destined to be more than OK.