For all the machinations and backroom dealings, the ultimate fate of Succession’s characters came down to three people in a room. Twice in the series finale, “With Open Eyes,” the offspring of Logan Roy’s second marriage gathered around each other to settle on a vision of their shared futures, with vastly different results. It was a bitter and poignant vision of what their lives might have been had they not been born into obscene privilege while being starved of the thing that matters most, and of how, because of who and what their father was, they never really stood a chance.
In the kitchen of their mother’s vacation home (well, one of them), Roman and Shiv manage to accept their elder brother’s argument that he should be the one to run their late father’s media empire, and they revive what feels like an old childhood game to seal the deal. As “King for a Day,” Kendall has to drink the most horrendous concoction his younger siblings can devise, a mixture of cocoa powder, tabasco sauce, and raw eggs (Roman cracks them into the blender then throws in the shells for good measure). It’s basically what you’d get if you turned the contents of a compost bucket into a slurry. Kendall has already made a compelling rational argument for why, facing a board vote on Waystar Royco’s potential sale to the Swedish tech giant GoJo, the best bet for keeping the company in family hands is putting him forward as the sole CEO—and, painful as it is to admit when your older sibling has a point, his brother and sister have finally come around to his side. But they still want to see him eat crow first—or rather guzzle it—in the form of a frothy brown concoction topped with a final gob of his sister’s spit.
Were it not for the giddy camaraderie with which Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, and Kieran Culkin play this scene, it could easily be mistaken for ritual hazing. But then in their family, the line between affection and aggression is an exceedingly thin one, the real and deepest legacy of their abusive tyrant of a father. Despite the arguments about which character would “win,” Succession was never a show about who would wind up in control of Waystar Royco, which the finale underlined by handing the position to the most comically inept candidate: Tom Wambsgans, the Midwestern striver who outmaneuvered more cunning opponents by simply staying in the same place. (He clinches the top job when his future boss tells him that he’d like to have sex with Tom’s wife, and Tom just nods, essentially confirming his endless capacity for subservience.) It was about children starved of their parents’ approval, too damaged by neglect and too insulated by privilege to conceive of success on their own terms. Even after Logan has died, his children were still fighting for his approval, trying to achieve the one goal he set for them, and made it impossible for them to reach.
For a moment, far from the boardrooms of New York, it seems like the Roy kids might actually be OK. Maybe Logan’s death would finally free them to treat each other as equals and not as competitors, regressing to childhood and then moving forward without his toxic cloud always darkening the sky. But the closer they get to realizing Kendall’s plan, the more that brief idyll slips away. He isn’t just aiming to replace Logan but to become him, abandoning his middle-aged hipster style for a plain suit that hangs uncharacteristically loose on his frame, taking on Logan’s bodyguard as his own advance man, even daring to take a seat behind Logan’s desk. He is poised on the edge of victory and damnation, achieving his lifelong goal of becoming the same kind of monster his father was.
When it comes down to the deciding vote, Shiv balks, sprinting from the conference table and convening, once again, in a separate room with her brothers. It was less like she’d had second thoughts and more like the prospect of shoring up the family legacy for another generation triggered her fight-or-flight response. She doesn’t have a reason for voting against Kendall, at least at first, not even the knowledge that her brother was responsible for a man’s death—she just knows that she can’t let it happen. Perhaps it’s the resentment of Logan’s youngest child and only daughter that the corporate world still obeys the laws of primogeniture, especially when Kendall feebly argues that he deserves the job because “I’m the eldest boy.” Perhaps she thinks that she’s better off as the wife of Waystar’s future CEO than his little sister. But on some level, it feels like she just knows that this has to stop. The endless cycle of people climbing over each other for a chance to occupy Logan’s throne has to be broken somehow, and the only way to do that is to ensure that none of them will ever again have a chance to run his company.
The siblings’ conference-room sidebar is a vicious mirror of their king-for-a-day romp, an intimate knife fight between people who know each other’s weak spots by heart. Shiv reminds Kendall that he killed a man on the night of her wedding, and Roman suggests that Kendall, whose daughter is adopted and whose son is the product of his wife and “some filing-cabinet guy,” is infertile as well as impotent. Kendall was the first to reopen a wound, turning a brotherly hug into a clasp so tight it made the stitches in Roman’s forehead pop, and now the blood flows freely. “I love you,” Shiv tells Kendall, “but I cannot fucking stomach you.”
Near the beginning of the episode, Shiv makes a halting attempt to revive her beyond-rocky marriage to Tom, after an earth-scorching fight which by all rights should have ended their relationship for good. Doing her best to put a bright spin on their cataclysmic spat, she tells Tom that what’s always scared her in relationships is “the underneaths,” the fear of just how bad things might get one day. But now, after she’s called him a hick and he’s told her she’s incapable of love, they know what rock bottom looks like. “Once you’ve said and done the worst things,” she tells him, “you’re kind of free.”
Succession’s final episode shows the Roys their underneaths. Roman confronts the fact that his life has meant nothing—that it, and he, are “bullshit.” Shiv, seated in the back of a limo, settles for being the first lady of Waystar Royco, taking Tom’s hand in a grasp so weak that it’s not clear which of them means it less. And Kendall has failed, definitively, at “the one thing I know how to do.” He ends staring out at the water from lower Manhattan, his eyes blank and empty, drained of the life force he so admired in his father.
There’s a sense, however, that the Roys’ final fate is a gift, albeit one they may never know how to unwrap. They’ve failed to become their father, but succeeding would have been even worse. As Kendall turns away from the New York Harbor, we can see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, evoking the moment at Logan’s funeral when his brother recalls their hellish wartime crossing from Scotland, the childhood trauma that formed the brothers just as Logan’s tyranny did his children. This could be the beginning of a journey for Kendall, as well as the end of one. When we last see Roman, he’s at a bar by himself, his face stretched thin with anguish. But at the very end, his lip curls in just a hint of a smile. He’s done the worst things. He survived Logan Roy. He’s free.
