Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter) is something of a legend and a hero to the emotionally unavailable but nevertheless charming girlies. She is the best Caroline on television (third-best if you countBojack Horseman’s Princess Carolyn andSurvivorseason 44’s queen Carolynas Caroline variants), and she was given her proper due in the series finale ofSuccession,with the entire first half of the episode devoted to her “Caribbean air clear” family gathering. When Shiv arrives, she notices Roman’s beat-up mug, and Roman says that stepdaddy Peter Munion was actually the one to give him his eye drops. (So intimate!) It checks out for Caroline, who recoils at anything nurturing or maternal, that she wouldn’t tend to her youngest son’s wounds. But the moment is elevated to high comedy when she explains her reasoning: “There’s just something about eyes. They just kind of, ugh, revolt me.”
“Eyes?” asks Shiv. “Like, human eyes we all have?” She’s confirming her vision of her mom as some sort of inhuman Disney villain. Eyes are the windows to the soul, a thing that Shiv is convinced her mother does not possess. But true intellectuals know that Caroline is notnotwrong once she gives her reasoning: “I don’t like to think of all these blobs of jelly rolling around in your head, just, face eggs.”
Face eggs! It’s sort of aRick and Mortystoner-thought way of looking at things, but eyeballsdohave a sort of albumen-esquequality to them, do they not? Sort of pokey and squishy, watery and vulnerable. And Caro was totally justified in being a little squeamish about Roman’s busted-up eye; toward the end of the episode, when he’s actively pushing his ocular wound into Kendall’s pointy little shoulder, I had to avert my own face-eggs.
Caroline gets a bad rap for her parenting, but Kendall, Roman, and Shiv probably owe their quick sense of humor in part to her. “Face eggs” is sure as hell a lot funnier than “reciting presidential-campaign losers.” So here’s to Lady Caroline, a true chiller, who may have never been Mother of the Year, but at least wasn’t Logan.