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Word: This text comprises spoilers for a number of Succession episodes, significantly season 4, episode ten, “With Open Eyes.”
In a approach, we knew how Succession would finish. We’ve been pre-grieving the present’s wrap-up for months now — and many people maybe knew from the pilot on that the Roy household was certain for a deeply tragic denouement.
“With Open Eyes,” the sequence finale of Succession, which aired Sunday, definitely delivered. The finale confirmed the Roy household of their truest kind: destroying each other higher than any outsider might. Like Saturn devouring his son after listening to a prophecy that one in every of his youngsters would overthrow him, Logan Roy has consumed his youngsters for good.
Not one of the siblings took the crown ultimately, although they tore one another down until the bitter finish. Because the board votes to both approve or block the sale of Waystar to streaming service GoJo, Shiv (Sarah Snook) lives as much as her namesake, inserting the knife into her brother’s again by voting sure on the sale. Kendall Roy (Jeremy Robust) won’t run Waystar-Royco, and her estranged husband, Tom Wambsgans, a no person from Minnesota, will as a substitute change into the American CEO of the newly merged firm.
It was a basic Succession shock. (Properly, possibly not a shock to all: A fan idea from a viral Tiktok video surmised that Tom would emerge victorious as a result of he form of shared a final title with a famed baseball participant, Invoice Wambsganss, who made an unassisted triple play within the 1920 World Sequence, taking out three gamers directly. Ultimately, Tom did the identical with the Roy siblings.)
This episode noticed the siblings viciously duking it out over who must be CEO at their mom’s home in an idyllic seaside location (later revealed to be Barbados), by no means realizing GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) is secretly plotting to betray Shiv and crown Tom as a substitute. Roman (Kieran Culkin) — who has been lacking for some undetermined period of time — is at Caroline’s, and Shiv and Ken have rushed over not out of concern of their brother’s well-being, however to safe his vote to dam the sale of Waystar to GoJo. The day of the board vote comes, and after painstakingly gaining the loyalty of different shareholders, Kendall faces a defector he hadn’t foreseen however in all probability ought to have: his one and solely sister, Shiv.
Showrunner Jesse Armstrong introduced early this yr that the fourth season can be the final, ending the present earlier than it misplaced even a little bit of its luster or overstayed its welcome. Now that we’ve reached the top, it’s truthful to ask, what did Succession got down to do? On essentially the most floor degree, it needed to show the company boardroom combat into an intimate, intense household drama in regards to the cycle of abuse. It meticulously captured the atmosphere of privilege, using a number of wealth consultants to make sure each element rang true. It cleverly toyed with the headlines and anecdotes about real-life enterprise offers and billionaires, making a decoupage of references that grounded the present’s at-times-unbelievable drama in actuality. A lot of its crass, biting dialogue was irresistibly quotable, and viewers even grew fond of those horrible, petty characters. And oh, yeah, Succession needed to crown Logan’s successor, ultimately. But it surely additionally got down to present how brutish and humiliating the ascendency can be — and the way hole the victory.
“It’s saying human beings are mainly ludicrous,” Brian Cox, the actor who performed Logan Roy, advised the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “They’re ludicrous of their needs, they’re ludicrous in what they get and don’t get and, ultimately, they by no means even know what they need.”
The Roys solely knew what they didn’t need: They didn’t wish to be crushed, sidelined, or have another person’s foot on their neck. In the top, the three Roy siblings, having completely shunted eldest son Connor to the aspect, destroyed each other. They gave into their want for revenge for a lifetime of slights at every each other’s palms; retaining their father’s legacy within the household mattered far much less.
After feeling run over by her brothers all season, whilst they promised to incorporate her in all the most important choices as interim CEOs — within the election episode, she known as them Pontius Pilate — Shiv lastly bought her revenge. But it surely’s a bittersweet revenge; she has solely sufficient energy to smash another person, however not sufficient to ever change into the one who holds the reins. She makes a calculated play to make sure that none of her siblings would change into CEO, solely as soon as it turned clear that she would by no means get the title.
The pleasure of stepping on another person’s neck outweighed the pleasure of serving to another person take energy, even when it means all of them fall. “I really like you,” Logan mentioned the final time the entire gang was assembled. “However you aren’t severe individuals.” The patriarch was confirmed proper: his youngsters had been hapless, incompetent little creatures who all caught themselves within the bear entice of their thirst for energy.
The ultimate destiny of Kendall Roy
Kendall has been a bulldozer all through this final leg of the season; he convinces his brother and sister that there isn’t a different logical alternative for CEO. When Roman, who’s in a fragile frame of mind for the reason that dying of his father, eyes the injuries he suffered in a latest scuffle with protestors self-consciously and expresses anguish at by no means being a severe contender for the inheritor, Ken’s basest intuition is to crush him in an deliberately painful hug that reopens the wound on Roman’s face, making it bleed anew. Later, Kendall tries to browbeat Shiv into backing away from the sting of her betrayal, however it’s no use.
In clumsily attempting to rewrite his personal historical past, he claims he didn’t truly kill a cater-waiter in season and that he was all the time the unequivocal successor to their father’s seat. Kendall, spouting his delusions and lies in regards to the hideous issues he did on the best way to ascend the throne, solely manages to push his siblings additional away. As an alternative, Shiv throws her lot in with Tom.
The final scene in Succession’s finale options Kendall, for a very long time the presumptive inheritor of the Waystar-Royco empire, staring dead-eyed on the gently rolling waves of the Hudson River. Water has been a continuing image dogging Kendall for the reason that starting of the sequence, usually portending hazard and darkness, however often proving invigorating, because it did within the season 4 episode Dwelling+. After the board vote is over, Kendall stares on the unfathomable waters, directly tranquil and treacherous. He’s actually “twin observe,” as he advised his outdated buddy Stewy earlier this season: each lifeless and alive.
Within the pilot episode, which aired in 2018, Kendall was launched to viewers within the again seat of his automobile, listening to his emotional-support hip-hop as he prepares to shut an essential acquisition. All through the present, Kendall used rap music to spice up his confidence earlier than an essential second; the artists have a swagger Kendall needs he might muster. He’s a trembling ball of hysteria, lighting up a cigarette simply to take one nervous, unsexy puff. This scene advised viewers virtually the whole lot they wanted to find out about him: Kendall desires to be the Man, like his father, Logan, however it doesn’t come naturally and can by no means come naturally to him. In his eulogy for his father Logan, three seasons later, Kendall remembers that Logan was comfy on this world. What he doesn’t say is that others by no means had been. Solely Logan might waltz round in these cutthroat settings and thrive.
After a harrowing few years of peaks and plunges, Kendall went into the sequence finale poised to change into CEO of Waystar-Royco — however solely after Logan has died, and solely after Kendall has come near dying, too. All through the present, Kendall confirmed a powerful expertise for fumbling the ball on the 1-yard line. The finale solely affirmed this sample. It started with Kendall assured and bombastic, attempting to bully shareholders into coming over to his aspect however with a put-uponness that’s by no means fairly convincing. Stewy, his long-time frenemy, continues to be on the fence.
Among the many 4 Roy youngsters, Kendall was most like Logan; at occasions he displayed a superb intuition for enterprise, and there was a tough kernel of ruthlessness in him. Logan as soon as advised his son that he wasn’t a killer, however that’s not true. Kendall has killed, and by the sequence finale, he had remodeled himself right into a butcher. Within the course of, it has stamped out his nerve endings, the gentle, human uncertainties that spilled out of him particularly in his lowest moments. He was the one one in every of his siblings who questioned, now and again, whether or not he was doing The Proper Factor — whether or not he was a superb father or a superb particular person. He has consciously and methodically consumed that essential a part of himself, swallowed it up in order that he is likely to be his father’s son.
Robust, in final week’s Succession podcast episode, famous that Logan’s funeral was additionally Kendall’s coronation. Sitting on the throne, nevertheless, is a lonely place to be. His spouse and kids at the moment are distant figures — even his seemingly steadfast assistant Jess (Juliana Canfield) is gone. After his complicity within the election, and having nobody left by his aspect, Kendall is gritting his tooth and going all-in. There’s no street again from what he’s accomplished and who he’s change into.
In the direction of the top, begging Shiv to not renege on their deal to tank the deal and be sure that he’s the lone CEO, Kendall sums up who he’s. He admits within the finale that Logan promised the successorship to him on the tender age of seven; he was raised all his life to take the mantle. Kendall doesn’t know what he can be for in any other case. He admits that if he’s not CEO, he would possibly die. The water that’s been threatening him all his life would possibly lastly swallow him up. “I’m like a cog constructed to suit just one machine,” he says. “I imply, it’s the one factor I understand how to do.”
The way it began vs. the way it ended for the remainder of the Roys
The Roys, who had been stuffed with absurd hubris, believed that they had been good and succesful and the rightful heirs to the corporate that their father had constructed from scrap. However at each transfer that inched them nearer to holding the reins of final energy, they had been sabotaged by a vindictive meagerness — the factor that was their true inheritance from their father — which, ultimately, turns their high-handed ambitions into mere mud. And so they by no means fairly acknowledge what their failings and deadly flaws had been. Every season’s final episode takes its title from the John Berryman poem Dream Tune 29. “With open eyes, he attends, blind,” the poem reads. So blinded had been they by their internecine wrestle that they didn’t even see the interloper Tom as a risk to the road of succession.
On this episode, Shiv continues to be below the phantasm that when Matsson will get the deal, she’ll be introduced as the brand new American CEO. The difficulty is that Shiv has by no means been revered amongst her siblings, regardless of being roughly equally incompetent. As an alternative she’s consistently ignored and undermined.
Matsson has dinner together with her husband Tom, with whom Shiv has been on the rocks for your entire season. Tom thinks he’ll need to show that he ought to keep on as ATN head or get the ax; it seems Matsson is definitely feeling him out to run the whole lot as soon as the acquisition goes by. A part of Matsson’s motivation for counting out Shiv is that he sees her as an object of sexual want; he desires to fuck her, he tells Tom, so he metaphorically fucks her want to be named CEO. It might be too messy in any other case. Tom eagerly agrees with the plan, whilst he’s disturbed by the considered being cuckolded by the mercurial Swedish tech founder and although he is aware of it’s an unimaginable betrayal of his spouse, who all however created the function for herself.
After we first met Shiv, she wasn’t even trying to comply with in her father’s footsteps. She has her personal profession as a political strategist, and anyway, she’s by no means been taken critically within the household enterprise. Kendall is aware of his father has excessive expectations of him, and he’s a nervous wreck about it, whereas Shiv is painfully conscious that her father expects virtually nothing from her. Logan, as Shiv mentioned in her eulogy, merely couldn’t match a complete girl in his head. Seems, nobody might — not her brothers, not Matsson, not even Tom.
By the finale, we see Shiv launching a full-court press to change into CEO. Her brothers, and maybe the Waystar executives as nicely, had been by no means going to take her critically as a contender. Shiv must claw her approach in and steal what she desires — even when it means promising to neglect her soon-to-be-born little one. Within the closing episode, she talks with Tom about the place they stand. They’ve been by the wringer, saying the ugliest issues to at least one one other just some episodes in the past, Shiv known as Tom “striving and parochial,” however now, she appears to sense a delicate shift in energy between them. She’s reluctant to divorce. Tom quips that she’s lastly fallen in love together with her husband, however the reality is, Shiv has all the time been in love with energy, and by the top of the sequence, Tom is the one who sits on the throne. He’s the person that Shiv has chosen to anoint, and that’s extra energy than any of her brothers ever gave her.
For all their marriage, Shiv has loved the truth that Tom is “fathoms” beneath her, as Logan as soon as put it, and so would by no means dare betray her. Now, after Tom has certainly betrayed her and advised her alternative harsh truths in regards to the nature of their unequal relationship, she demurely takes his hand after he’s appointed CEO, just like the trophy spouse of a robust politician.
Then there’s Roman — or, as Logan known as him, Romulus, the boy raised by wolves: He’s all the time been directionless and fueled primarily by masochism, which is why he appears to repeatedly blurt out essentially the most disgusting issues conceivable. It’s as if he desires individuals to recoil and name him a canine. Roman isn’t actually motivated by the identical drive and vitality of his father the best way Kendall is. He’s in awe of it like everybody else, positive, however what Roman craves most in life is for somebody to take management — to inform him what to do and the best way to be. Within the fourth season, he has someway failed up into being co-CEO with Kendall, and the sincerity of his want to screw over GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson is palpable. However he’s nonetheless not pushed by a want to be a powerful media mogul — he’s spurred by a must defend his lifeless father’s honor, which Matsson spat throughout early this season. It’s unclear the place he’ll be left when the revenge is completed.
Connor (Alan Ruck) is the oldest Roy sibling, and has lengthy additionally been the always-forgotten half-brother who’s odd, awkward, and corny. Because the eldest, he has extra reminiscences with their father than the opposite children, but in addition has horrible trauma round his mom, whom Logan forcibly dedicated to a psychiatric hospital.
Connor boasted declaratively within the karaoke scene earlier this season that he didn’t want love. However by the top of the sequence, is he blissful? He married Willa (Justine Lupe) the day Logan died — after acknowledging that their relationship is considerably transactional. However the admission of the truth that Willa is, partly, with him for his cash has caused a degree of mutual help and respect. Connor is aware of that Willa doesn’t love him the best way he loves her, and he’s made his peace with it for now. They’re planning to maneuver to Slovenia for the ambassadorship that Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) promised Connor simply as ATN declared him the winner of the election a number of episodes in the past. However is a fraction of affection sufficient to maintain somebody perpetually? If Succession has proven us something, it’s that human nature yearns for one morsel, after which yet another, after which ultimately desires the entire world.
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