[This story contains major spoilers for the Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.”]
Whether or not you have “pre-afflicted”, the time of mourning has finally arrived: Succession is over, and with it, the story of the Roys.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Heading into the 90-minute series finale, the Emmy-winning drama from creator Jesse Armstrong faced the daunting task of resolving many individual and interconnected character arcs, all with one eye on one major question. : who will succeed Logan Roy (Brian Cox) at the head of Waystar Royco?
Going into the finale, there were many possible answers. Would Kendall (Jeremy Strong) embody his middle name and transform into the assassin his father always told him he would never become? Would Shiv (Sarah Snook) become the tip of the spear for a successful GoJo deal with Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), and where would Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) land in that?
How about Roman (Kieran Culkin), so deeply anguished by the death of his father that he had to walk through an ocean of political turmoil (thanks for that, Jeryd Mencken!) in order to feel something other than pure grief ? Could this story end at the Game Of Throneswith an unlikely candidate for the Iron Throne – like Greg (Nicholas Braun), as one of the oft-repeated theories in the Succession fandom? What skeletons from Logan’s closet (or Logan’s “Ozymandias cat food” grave, so to speak) would dance out for one last scare?
No more speculation on any of these questions. Ahead, here’s how the finale shook up all the main characters and storylines. Look elsewhere or face massive end-of-series spoilers for “With Open Eyes,” written by Armstrong and directed by Mark Mylod.
Who won Waystar Royco?
“Shiv, you should probably know: it’s me.
So says Tom, the alleged new CEO of Waystar Royco. In a joyous episode where the momentum passes from hand to hand several times, it is the outsider Tom Wambsgans who finds himself at the top of the table.
Here’s how it happened.
The Path to the Waystar Throne
“With Open Eyes” begins the day before the board vote on the sale of GoJo. Shiv thinks she’s locked in with Matsson as her choice for an American CEO. It turns out not so much. During dinner with Tom, Matsson confesses that he’s done with Shiv and his ideas, and doesn’t want to end up in a messy situation considering his attraction to her. Tom takes the news on the chin, especially when Matsson says he would like to place the crown on Tom’s head as an alternative to Shiv who also wears the Roy coat.
Meanwhile, Shiv and his siblings reunite in the Caribbean at their mother’s tropical home. Kendall learns that Matsson is leaving Shiv and tells her sister about the upsetting news. Shiv and Roman reluctantly agree to sign with Kendall as king. Over time, the reluctance turns into mania, as the three siblings celebrate by pouring a disgusting smoothie over Kendall’s head, serving as a liquid crown of sorts.
When they return to New York for the vote, the siblings head to Logan’s old apartment, where Connor sells his father’s wares. Kendall, Shiv, and Roman are visited one last time by their father’s ghost through a home video, recorded at a recent dinner party before Logan’s death. It’s a haunting moment for the siblings, one that would seemingly only serve to unify them further, especially after Tom tells Shiv that he’s who Matsson wants as CEO; this news is going about as well as you’d like.
But when it comes time to vote, it’s a six-to-six tie, with Shiv’s vote hanging in the balance. She recuses herself to consider whether or not she wants to support Kendall or Tom, though it’s not a debate; Shiv chooses Tom. To say Kendall is devastated doesn’t do the fallout justice, as the three siblings are almost literally tearing each other apart over old wounds, from Kendall’s role in the death of the caterer waiter to Shiv’s wedding (which he says, never happened, in a sign of Ken’s degrading condition), to the fact that Kendall’s children are not his by blood. Ken and Rome come to blows, and as they fight, Shiv goes to vote for GoJo.
The episode ends with a very confident Tom waltzing around Waystar Royco like he owns the place, because he actually does. Shiv drives off in a private car with Tom, taking his hand when he coldly offers it. Roman ends the series alone in a bar, sipping a martini, perhaps freed once and for all from his father’s shadow.
Sunset for Kendall
The final image of the series: Kendall Roy, walking in a park, with bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson) right behind him. Ken approaches a park bench, staring at the water as the sun begins to set. We hear the crash of the waves as Kendall watches outside, his next moves uncertain – both to him, and certainly to us, who will never know what happens to “the eldest boy” now that he has lost his only thing that ever mattered to him: the electric seat his father had promised him in a candy store decades earlier, when he was 7 years old.
Kendall’s barred ending is underscored by powerful foreshadowing from Jeremy Strong, who cleverly teased her sunset of an ending in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter after last season’s premiere: “We finished filming on location somewhere that I’m probably not allowed to say… then I flew to Denmark, where I have a house by the ocean. I drove home straight from the airport, took a long walk, sat on the beach, watched Kendall go down with the sun and said, “Adios.”
Goodbye Kendall, indeed.
The name of victory
While we don’t know what’s next for Kendall, Shiv, and Roman, we do at least know who’s sitting at the head of the table: Tom, whose victory has been seeded throughout the series in numerous ways.
In his first scene, Tom buys Logan a watch for his birthday; a sign of the man biding his time. In season three, while helping Logan through an illness, Logan calls Tom “son”.
Then there’s the surname Wambsgans, which has been linked to baseball player Bill Wambsgans, who performed a legendary triple play – a move Tom pulled off at the end of season three when he outsmarted the brothers. and sisters, and one he redid, this time with the help of Matsson’s misogyny, as well as Shiv, who lives up to his name in his own right and tears his brother apart when it matters most.
“It’s always been a tragedy”
In the official “Succession: Controlling the Narrative” report after the episode, Armstrong and Mylod talked more about the show ending as they did and the show ending, period.
“It’s very evil to end it,” Armstrong says. “I love this cast, I love working with the crew, my fellow writers, I’ve had some of the happiest times of my career in that writers room, working with them. I’m really kind of softie I love the family vibe we have on this show and the relationships.
That said, he adds, “One of the few things I can be really tough on is protecting the show and its integrity. The more we discussed it in the room, the clearer it became to me that this sequence of Logan’s death, the competition over whether to sell or not, intersecting with an election, and his funeral ending with the end of the show. Once it became clear, I really didn’t have any doubts. I had a lot of emotional sadness, but I felt like, ‘Okay, that’s how this show goes.’ “
According to Mylod, Succession has “always been a tragedy”, a notion he hoped to highlight in the portion of the finale set in Barbados, where production wrapped. He points out the scene in which the siblings pour a celebratory smoothie wreath on Kendall’s head the night before her alleged nomination. Mylod says the scene has “a sense of newfound innocence, kids being kids.
“Every moment of hope like this is so cruel,” he adds, “because you just wait for that shoe to drop and wait for their essential nature to be exposed and break your heart again.”
What future for the Roys?
For his part, Armstrong has some strong thoughts on what happens next for Roman, Shiv and Kendall, and the rest of the Succession cast.
“They don’t end,” he says of the characters and their stories. “They will continue. But that’s where this show loses interest in them because they’ve lost what they wanted, which is to be successful, that prize their dad was giving them.
He says Roman’s final scene taking place in a bar shows how “he could easily have been a playboy asshole with kinda nasty instincts and pretty funny jokes.” He could have stayed in a bar, being that guy and it was a bit of a detour in his life.
For Shiv, Armstrong thinks she’s in “a pretty terrifying, frozen and emotionally barren place,” after her big move to support Tom. Tom’s win was etched a long time ago, according to Armstrong: “It’s something I’ve thought was the right ending for quite a while now. Even if he’s not the most powerful monarch you’ll ever meet. His power comes from Matsson. These characters who drift upwards and make themselves accessible to powerful people are there. Armstrong thinks Tom and Shiv will struggle to progress given all the cards they’ve put on the table: “There’s a lot of this game to play, but that’s where we’re leaving it.”
And then there’s Ken, boy number one. Is his last look at the water and the setting sun a sign that he’s going to turn over a new leaf and start building his own “heap” separate from his father? That’s an optimistic way of looking at it, and Armstrong isn’t looking at Kendall’s ending with optimism.
“It will never cease to be the central event of his life”, assures the creator. “Maybe he could go on and start a business or do something, but the chances of him getting the kind of corporate status that his dad got are very slim. I think it will mark his whole life.
For his part, Armstrong feels deeply Succession will mark his entire creative life. “I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything as good as this,” he says. “It’s really scary and stupid, but with this feeling that it has to end, so that’s what I guess I’m hanging on to.”
Succession is now streaming on Max. Read THRIt is Succession final cover.
The best of The Hollywood Reporter
Click here to read the full article.