Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for the fourth episode of the fourth season of “Succession,” “Honeymoon States.”

After the shock came the aftershocks, the power vacuum and, perhaps most significantly and impressively, the laughter, as “Succession” pivoted to confront life after Logan Roy, in an episode that finally put the HBO show’s title in full bloom.

Logan Roy’s abrupt disappearance left his adult children and subordinates scrambling, each seemingly humbly offering to fill the void, while worrying about how various candidates would play with the company’s board of directors.

At the same time, they lamented the gigantic figure they had lost, considering that he had treated many of them poorly. And the fourth hour also marked the return of Logan’s wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), in what looked like “Marcia Strikes Back,” while his current, much younger girlfriend, Kerri (Zoe Winter), was bluntly shown the door. (The latter evoked memories of the musical “Evita,” when the main character kicks Perón’s lover, who sings about another suitcase in another room.)

More than anything, the episode underscored how brutally funny “Succession” can be, with Shiv (Sarah Snook) reading her father’s obituary and reflecting, “Dad sounds amazing. I wish I’d known dad,” while brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) hilariously translated the language, with references to Logan having been “a man of his time” equivalent to “racist.”

The episode also showed Waystar Royco executives awkwardly wondering what to do with a document that included not only Logan’s posthumous wishes, but also handwritten notes that apparently specified who he wanted to succeed him. They joked, weakly, about flushing the paper down the toilet, while making it very clear how much they really wanted to flush the paper down the toilet.

All the knives came out, with Carl (David Rasche) viciously insulting Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), barely hiding behind the fact that he was presenting doubts about Tom’s future as hypothetical.

In the midst of it, however, there were also human moments, with the tortured Kendall expressing his mixed feelings to Waystar executive Frank (Peter Friedman), telling him, “He made me hate him and he died. I feel like he doesn’t like me. I let him down.”

The “succession” also underscored the fragility of not only life, but also the corporate legacy, with public relations people discussing how to misrepresent and diminish Logan’s involvement in his later years as a way to boost the company and its stock price – a maneuver that Kendall ultimately surreptitiously approved, concluding that it was the kind of smart, ruthless move his father would have executed.

Succession issues also appear to threaten the harmony achieved by Kendall, Shiv and Roman before Logan’s departure, with Shiv left as the odd woman out in a plan to hold the CEO position long enough to close the sale to GoJo. Trust doesn’t come easy in series creator Jesse Armstrong’s world, and when Shiv said, “I need to get my beak wet,” his brothers’ assurances clearly left the impression of how easily that beak could end up crooked.

In the end, after the operational ups and downs of the previous episode, the series successfully turned the page from grief to the next agenda. And that too, as Kendall said regarding Logan and the “bad dad” PR leaks, is “what he would do.”