Of course it couldn’t be her.
Shiv Roy spent the series finale of Succession careening wildly between security and precarity, sureness and absolute chaos. Her one decisive move—the only, and the most important, definitive action that she takes in this episode—is to derail Kendall’s all-but-set-in-stone plan to succeed their father, and it wasn’t a premeditated scheme on her part. Contrary to what she may think of herself, Shiv has never really had a long game—she, like her siblings, is always playing the move that is right in front of her, rather than thinking enough steps ahead to actually win. She operates most from a position of self-interest; when her positions align with her politics, that’s a bonus, and when they do not, everything is negotiable.
So why did Shiv tank Kendall’s deal? Was she self-sacrificingly ending the cycle of hell in which her corporate monster of a father had imprisoned her family, freeing her brothers of that pattern of abuse while trapping herself and her offspring in the same? Or was she coolly calculating that if she made the move that she did, she alone would stay closest to the center of power—if in a diminished role, as the wife of the CEO—comforted by the knowledge that she had stopped her brother from getting the job she had so coveted? Is Shiv a savior or a Lady Macbeth?
The answer is: both, and neither. Just because Shiv is a woman doesn’t mean that she has to be either a feminist icon or a traitor to her gender. It is only because of some toxic combination of her roles as the show’s chief “liberal” and as the most significant female character that so much gets put on Shiv to be more than any of the others have to be, to the point where Succession fans are now engaged in a no-winners-guaranteed debate over whether Shiv is a bitch or a victim of misogyny on the showrunners’ part.
Mostly, she was reacting. They all are, always. The core quality of the Roy siblings is their emotional stuntedness—swaddled in money, none of them have grown up, have gotten to imagine their own lives outside their father’s influence, and it is this elementary childishness that has made them so susceptible to the endless pain that they’ve endured throughout the series. Insults and proclamations of “fuck off” may work as momentary barbs, but they are not actual insulation from everything the siblings have been put through: endless comparisons to one another and their father, and no way to actually win. This has been clear the entire time, but it is strikingly so in what I consider the most shocking scene in the finale: when Kendall holds his brother’s head as if he is cradling and comforting him, an embrace that then becomes violent to the point of destroying Roman’s stitches. Roman’s series of sad “fuck you” replies are equally tragic; they are what he would say if he were being merely hugged too.
None of this is to say that what Shiv experienced didn’t come with its own distinct swirl of misogyny. Any woman watching Lukas Matsson explain that he didn’t really need her ideas or her ambition would have already been screaming by the time he brought up the little side problem of wanting to fuck Shiv too, and that that’s just too complicating of a factor for the situation, and so he would hand the whole company over to the man who had already fucked her. It may not be a feminist tragedy that the man who actually worked for what he got undercut the woman who felt that she was born to it, but it still stings. That Tom and Shiv are husband and wife is what supercharges this dynamic, both upping the emotional stakes and setting up this debate over what is “fair” inside of a partnership that is wholly its own. What kind of equity can ever be achieved inside of parenting when one party literally bears the child, and thus bears the cost of being counted out because of it?
But what kind of equity did these two ever even have? Early on in the final episode, Shiv—still, at that point, secure in her position—takes the opportunity to call her husband and ask if maybe there’s a new way for them to move forward. It’s telling that she calls it a “real relationship,” acknowledging how much her long-standing insistence on their uneven power dynamic—with her always in charge, due to a combination of wealth and status—had prevented that for so long. The final shot of Shiv and Tom, after she agrees to ride with him in his car and he holds out his hand to hers, finally flips that dynamic. This—and the fate of Shiv as a wife and a mother—is not so much a comment on feminism as it is an inversion of power. The status quo that she has had for years has finally been upended, and she doesn’t just get the chance to say that she’s sick of it now that she’s on the losing end.
Shiv’s arc is one of Succession’s most compelling because of the way her gender is braided throughout it. So much of the story was different for her—more complicated—because of that, even with all the advantages of her race, her privilege, and her money. That doesn’t make Shiv Roy a victim or a hero—it just makes her a woman.
