Season 2, Episode 9: ‘D.C.’

Given what’s been going on in Washington the past couple of weeks, this latest “Succession” episode isn’t just gripping, it’s fairly illuminating. When the pattern of sexual harassment and cover-ups at Waystar’s cruise division is exposed by a popular network TV news program, the United States Congress gets involved, with Shiv’s old boss Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian) leading an inquiry. The Roy family sees a legacy-killing scandal expand beyond their capacity to contain it; and Roman’s first reaction — like those of a lot of people in power these days — is to wonder if they can just duck Congress. (But he doesn’t say “duck.”)

So the game begins. The traveling Waystar circus rolls into Washington, D.C., with a mission to stall, obfuscate, scapegoat and generally avoid accountability. It’s all high drama, with fresh fires popping up regularly. For a time, “Succession” becomes a kind of procedural, taking viewers inside the machinations of a congressional hearing from the point-of-view of the people being grilled. The hour reveals a lot about how seriously the megawealthy and the politically connected take government oversight.

Roman gets to skip the festivities because Logan sends him on a special mission overseas with Laird and Karl, in hopes of helping free Waystar from its shareholders’ demands by tapping Edouard’s family fortune. Roman hesitates because this assignment actually matters, and he knows he’s a goofus. But Logan reassures his son that he’s a likable fellow — which is true, in a perverse way — and so Roman eventually ends up in Turkey, where he does lock down the Azerbaijani money.

Sure, Roman also makes potentially dangerously non-fulfillable promises to Edouard’s people while being held at gunpoint in a luxury hotel by lackeys sent by “my president’s daughter’s husband” to seize certain “assets.” But while this deal is almost certain to blow up in the Roys’ faces eventually, for now Roman can take comfort in knowing that he did as he was asked, and he didn’t botch it.