This post contains spoilers for the Succession Season 1 finale.

Well, that wedding went an unexpected direction.

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong told Vanity Fair that, to prepare for scripting the nuptials between Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), he and his writing team scoured reports from real-life society weddings. Hence the lavish setting (the family’s ancestral seat: a stately castle in the English countryside), snobbery, deliciously passive-aggressive insults, and gilded place settings. But for the final-act plot twist that derails Kendall (Jeremy Strong) from taking over his father’s business, Armstrong and his team found inspiration in a haunting tragedy that halted a real-life family’s dynastic progression. “The finale has a bit of Chappaquiddick in it,” Armstrong said in an interview with Vanity Fair, referencing Ted Kennedy’s 1969 car accident, which resulted in the death of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, and the end of his presidential aspirations.

Succession’s Season 1 finale, “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” kicks off with Kendall finally outfoxing father Logan (Brian Cox)—by presenting him with a “bear hug” takeover notice on the morning of Shiv’s wedding. (A “bear hug” is “one part Emily Post and two parts Machiavelli,” explained Andrew Ross Sorkin for the The New York Times, “before mounting a hostile bid and going in for the kill, suitors send a bear hug—named for a popular wrestling maneuver—to their targets.”) Though his father demeans him to his face, the unflappable king actually expresses begrudging respect for the maneuver in private. Later, Logan gives a father-of-the-bride speech that is less celebratory toast than guilt-trip missile directed at Kendall. And Kendall, unable to contain his inner conflict, asks a cater-waiter to help him blow off some steam by tracking down cocaine.

Kendall has to drive because the cater-waiter is high on ketamine. “I don’t drive that much because I’m incredibly rich, and I mostly get driven everywhere,” Kendall explains as he grinds the stick shift, his passenger drunkenly guffawing at the absurdity of the statement. Cut to: a deer in the road; the car careening off a bridge and into water; and Kendall saving himself but not the cater-waiter. Rather than call for help, Kendall, in shock, walks through the rain back to the wedding reception; cleans himself up; and returns to the party—alibis don’t write themselves—in time to boogie down to the most chilling Whitney Houston music cue of all time.

The next morning, Logan is summoned to his father’s den. His security detail found Kendall’s key card near the crime scene, and saw him schlepping back to the estate the previous evening in soaked clothing.

“Let me handle this,” Logan says, suggesting his flock of fixers can pin this on a local in exchange for Kendall calling off the takeover. “This has been quite stressful. Why don’t you get in my car, we’ll drive you to the plane, and then you can relax.”

When Kendall shakily resists, his father coolly interjects: “This could be the defining moment of your life . . . a rich kid kills a boy. You’d never be anything else. Or it could be what it should be: nothing at all. A sad little detail at a lovely wedding, where father and son are reconciled.”

Kendall erupts into sobs, and Logan hugs him, giving him the affection he’s spent decades searching for: “You’re my boy. You’re my No. `1 boy.”

For Ted Kennedy, whose father Joe was as ambitious and fearsome as Logan Roy, the 1969 accident was indeed the scion’s defining moment. “Either you forgave Kennedy for Chappaquiddick or you didn’t,” wrote Andrew Cohen in Ted’s 2009 obituary for Vanity Fair. “If you forgave him, then you saw the rest of his life as his noble and dogged and astonishingly productive way of paying for his sins that night. If you did not forgive him for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, then you saw the rest of his life as a travesty upon justice, a sign that the rich and famous rarely pay for their mistakes the way the rest of us do.”