Will anyone buy into Tom’s leadership campaign?

Fitting into neither the Roy camp nor the old guard is Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), who seems dead set on throwing his hat into the ring, as he puts it in the trailer. Last season, he was consulting his prison advisor on which penitentiary might be best to stick out a potential jail sentence in, now he’s eyeing the top job: Tom really has the audacity. But despite his high opinion of himself, the rest of the board might be harder to win over.

Playing devil’s advocate (or at least pretending to do so), Karl lays out the case against him. “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you,” he says. “The only guy pulling for you is dead. You’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, and she doesn’t even like you.” Savage, but true. Tom’s protector is now dead, and a reconciliation with Shiv doesn’t seem likely (not after the move he pulled with the divorce lawyers in episode two). Is it possible to mount a viable leadership campaign when Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is your only ally?

And is Greg regretting their alliance?

And speaking of Greg… what will his place be in the brave new Waystar? Given that his business skills are, ahem, up for debate (at least most of the show’s other nepo babies have a vague air of competence about them – sometimes) and the fact that he has hitched his proverbial wagon so closely to Tom’s, there’s a big question mark hanging over Greg’s future, and (with a rare jolt of self-awareness) he seems to have noticed this too. “Just thinking about how things will shake down,” he not-so-subtly tells his cousins in the trailer, after having pointedly dropped a few references to “family” and “supporting each other”. At least he has his grandfather’s money to fall back on… no wait, he was disinherited in favour of Greenpeace.

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