The bleak finale of ‘Succession’ denies audiences any catharsis
After five years of tense board meetings, sibling squabbles, and countless shouts of “fuck off”, Jesse Armstrong and HBO’s Shakespearean-satire dramedy Succession aired its last episode this weekend. The hour-and-a-half-long finale saw the Roys at their closest and at their most broken, finally cementing their fates as inescapably their father’s children.
At the centre of the finale, and the whole show, Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy has never been happier than in ‘With Open Eyes.’ For a moment, he has everything that he ever wanted as Shiv and Roman agree to back him as CEO. Kendall has never had luck around water. In the season one finale, he set his relentless guilt into motion when he let a boy drown, while the season two finale saw his father set him up to take the fall for a mass corporate scandal while on a yacht. In season three, he nearly drowns himself when he drunkenly falls asleep on a lilo.
But now, as he floats in the waters of Barbados, Kendall triumphs. Strong told HBO’s Succession Podcast: “It’s as happy as this character ever gets.” The siblings seem closer, more familial and childlike than ever, mixing potions unattended in their mother’s kitchen. Kendall is king. But his happiness has never lasted long.
Finally taking his place in his late father’s office, Kendall becomes Logan, grinding his brother’s scar into his shoulder as a veiled act of love and desperately using the ‘no real person involved’ thinking in an effort to hold onto his position. He finally attains the “killer” instinct Logan always said was holding him back. But now Logan is gone, there’s no one left to impress.
Shiv, perhaps noticing Roman’s bleeding scar and discomposure, sinks the deal and removes what is, seemingly, Kendall’s final lifeline. Strong stated: “This is the thing he needs to make everything right in his life, and so they give that to him, and then they take it away from him.”
Whether it’s for love, security, or just that innate need to win her father’s love, Shiv reluctantly backs Tom. He holds out his hand, which she tentatively takes, and they continue to play out the facade of their failed marriage. Shiv gains a replacement figure for her father in Tom Wambsgans, Waystar CEO. Tom has become someone whose love she has to fight for and ‘schedule’. As she falls back into the cycle, it’s a toss-up as to whether Shiv has won or lost. She may have made the final move, but it’s Tom who reigns.
Roman’s end comes full circle, too, as he echoes his own words from the pilot. Once the chipper younger brother who visited Waystar to poke fun at his brother and proclaim, “Look at all this fucking bullshit”, he’s become a part of the bullshit. Echoing his father’s sentiment that they’re not serious people, Roman admits that “We are bullshit.” Battered up and broken, he’s left to drink a martini alone at a bar. Despite a sea of unresolved issues, he’s perhaps the sibling with the most freedom at the show’s close.
Strong, on the other hand, has stated that he can see no way back from this for Kendall: “Kendall has just slowly mortgaged off everything, and has nothing left to live for.” As Kendall is met with the water once more, he stares out at the waves leaving viewers to wonder if he might walk into them. In a different shot of the final scene, Strong “stood up and walked slowly to the barrier that was set up there and climbed over it, and I didn’t really know what I planned to do and the actor playing Colin saw me and ran, and he stopped me from doing it.” He explained: “It’s a completely tragic ending from my perspective.”
Underscoring the entire finale and each sibling’s fate is this tragic, bleak notion that they were never going to escape the life their father had made for them. There is no happy ending, no catharsis – how could there possibly be? The hereditary Roy poison ran too potent and too deep. Each sibling is left alone in the wasteland empire their father created, one where cycles are unbreakable and power trumps love every time.
As Strong summarised, at its core, Succession underlines the danger of placing power above love. He states: “The vortex of power which is drawing them in and which is drawing us in as a nation is a clear and present danger”, Only love could’ve saved the Roys from the pull of the vortex.
Armstrong’s cast and crew leave behind one of the most well-written and well-loved series to hit our screens in years – a commentary on our current landscape, corruption of power, and cycles of abuse. Succession will gain a legacy as a masterfully balanced, witty and tragic time capsule of contemporary media.
