#thank you for this ask! i hadn't thought to connect the cruises/doj thing until i started composing an answer and now i'm like 👀

[loverboyromanroy]

so i guess i am completely fucking losing it over the roy brothers and i have been since the finale but it has just hit me that kendall only told shiv and roman part of the story. he didn't tell them logan covered it up yet and i've been seeing over and over this speculation that ken will go public about the incident to take logan down but the cover up makes that near impossible AND now with roman's reaction to his confession i really fucking doubt he would let ken go public

interesting point! i think, with the benefit of hindsight, i agree that the incident will probably never be public for a couple of reasons

1) as you mentioned, the cover up lies entirely with logan, so if there is any proof, logan has it and if he were going to use it to metaphorically kill kendall, he would've used it already

2) in hindsight, i think that omnipresent, foreboding death imagery that lingered over season three was meant to clue us in to this mounting internal tension that kendall was feeling from holding in the secret – we were inferring that he was going to die because we were supposed to make that connection and jump to the conclusion that he was going to absolve that internal turmoil by killing himself (intentionally or unintentionally). the good old succession bait-and-switch, of course, is that he comes as close as possible before being saved (which tells us and kendall that not even death can absolve you of your sins). i think that extra step of prolonged torment is what cracks him open and we see as the confession scene resolves itself, as the siblings rally back to these familial support positions and come together as a team again, they've given him that catharsis to start moving past it. i think now that it's out in the open, even if he clues them in to how logan covered it up, it ultimately won't matter because he's shared the guilt and now they'll all shoulder it together.

3) i also think it actually provided us this neat little parallel with season 3 cruises/doj storyline as well – kendall is so upset in 3x06 that nobody ends up getting prosecuted on the cruises cover up, and yes that's because that means his father gets away with it, but maybe it's also because he'd been harboring a belief that if his dad was held responsible for the horrible shit that happened with the cruises, kendall would karmically be forgiven for the one horrible thing he did. if he brought justice to a bunch of people, it would save him from having to provide justice to the one person he can't give justice too. it's actually interesting because the doj fine is revealed at the top of kendall's birthday party (3x07) – that kind of puts kendall's spiraling mental state in a new light if we look at it from a viewpoint that he was expecting to relieve some of his guilt through a doj conviction. when he realizes that justice won't be served in either case, it only accelerates how guilty and torn apart he feels. but, now that those storylines have both had their resolution, i can't imagine cruises OR kendall's accident living on as plot points in season four.