Succession finale is a road map for how to be a good in-law and a bad feminist
Even by Roy family standards, the final episode was brutal | Warning: Spoilers
WARNING: This recap contains spoilers
It’s a good day for horrible people.
If the season finale of Succession leaves us with one lesson it’s that “sucking up” and assimilating can really get you places. Even in 2023.
Tom won the series. The character had the greatest arc of the critically-acclaimed HBO show. Starting out in early seasons as the puffer-vest-wearing, submissive “hick” fiance of Siobhan ‘Shiv’ Roy he emerged as the expensive-suited victor in the finale as the man who will replace Logan Roy at the helm of Waystar Royco.
It was a decision only made possible when Shiv lived up to her nickname and knifed her brother, Kendall, in his bid to replace his father and continue running the family business rather than selling out to Swedish tech mogul Lukas Mattson – a guy who has HR issues and an unorthodox and cruel way of doing business.
Mattson, played to terrifying perfection by Alexander Skarsgård, showed his true colours in the 90-minute finale. After coming clean about his dodgy numbers, he also announced what most business executives would never say out loud and decided to appoint a man instead of a pregnant woman (who he also said he was attracted to). He dumped Shiv and instead gave the role of “US chief executive” of the new GoJo-Waystar to Tom, “the man who put the baby in the baby lady”.
“Shiv, you should probably know: it’s me,” Tom then tells his estranged wife in a rollicking episode, where the momentum passes from hand to hand more than a few times, but it’s the outsider Tom Wambsgans who ends up at the head of the table.
There were conspiracies raging online for days that Tom would win.
The most potent being a TikTok connecting Tom’s surname to that of the former baseball great Bill Wambsganss, who completed the only unassisted triple play in World Series baseball history.
The show ends with two deaths. The patriarch in Logan and also that of the Roy siblings as a cohort.
When Kendall catches word of Matsson moving on from Shiv, she and Roman reluctantly agree to sign on with Kendall as the king.
The reluctance turns into mania, as the three siblings celebrate by first plotting Kendall’s death (too much “admin”) and then pour a disgusting smoothie on Kendall’s head, serving as a liquid crown of sorts.
While Jeremy Strong as Kendall will be remembered for his brilliant role as the epitome of a “nepo baby”, Shiv – played by Australia’s Sarah Snook – will go down in feminist history. As being one of the worst kinds.
When the board meeting vote comes down to the wire, rather than siding with her brother to take back control of the out of control news company their father created, she hesitates and instead aligns herself closer to her husband, who she also reluctantly reunites with earlier in the show.
The final scene of Kendall – the defeated eldest son now with nothing to live for, staring out onto the water while being watched by his father’s “only pal” and security guard Colin – is brutal but not half as chilling as watching Tom make small talk with his new minions as he jumps into a car where Shiv is waiting.
He puts out his hand – his wedding band on full display – and she takes it.
In a show built on the character’s ability to say everything with their “fish egg eyes”, according to their ice queen of a mother Caroline, no one has said more or provided more social commentary about the state of the world than Shiv.
She takes Tom’s hand but refuses to interlace her fingers with his.
Shiv refusing to interlace her fingers with Tom’s…these two are really willing to die unhappy and unloved together#Successionpic.twitter.com/WrgsVTgoWY
— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) May 29, 2023
For a woman never taken seriously by her family, she sides with her husband — the man who helped detonate the Roy clan.
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