Warning: contains spoilers

Oh, a wedding! Everyone loves a wedding. Love, happiness and jollity all round. Except this is Succession, so there was none of that.

The bride was the ghastly Caroline (a welcome reappearance for Dame Harriet Walter), mother to Kendall, Shiv and Roman, which gave this episode a very English flavour despite the Italian setting. Caroline’s latest husband is a smarmy arriviste in pistachio green trousers, played by Pip Torrens. “He’s not posh. Father was a doctor. Bought all his own furniture,” said Caroline, a reference that could be lost on an American audience unless they’re particularly au fait with the put-downs of Alan Clark.

Also particular to the English upper classes: Caroline telling her only daughter that “I probably should never have had children. Some people just aren’t made to be mothers. I should have had dogs.” And I’m not sure if Kendal mint cake is globally understood, but the writers threw in a joke about it anyway.

How loveless was this wedding? Let us count the ways. “He is awful, I can see that,” Caroline said of Peter, her husband-to-be, as Roman dismissed him as “another in the line of post-Dad posh English phoneys”. Peter had insisted on inviting Logan to the nuptials, and set about working him as a contact. Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen, who is running away with this series and should win an Emmy if there’s any justice in the world) engaged in some spectacularly mean-spirited sex talk.

And then there was Kendall. If last week’s episode was his nervous breakdown, this one was his rock bottom. He arrived with a shaven head and a look of utter defeat. In the showpiece scene, he sat down to dinner with his father and told him he wanted out. Logan made his grandchild taste the food, just to check it wasn’t poisoned.