[This story contains major spoilers for the Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.”]
Whether or not you “pre-grieved,” the time for mourning has finally arrived: Succession is over, and with it, the story of the Roys.
Heading into the 90-minute series finale, creator Jesse Armstrong‘s Emmy-winning drama faced the daunting task of resolving numerous individual and interconnected character arcs, all with an eye on one major question: who will succeed Logan Roy (Brian Cox) at the head of Waystar Royco?
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Entering the finale, there were numerous possible answers. Would Kendall (Jeremy Strong) embody his middle name and transform into the killer his dad always told him he’d never become? Would Shiv (Sarah Snook) become the tip of the spear for a successful GoJo deal with Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), and where would Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) land within that?
How about Roman (Kieran Culkin), so thoroughly anguished over the death of his father that he had to walk out into an ocean of political unrest (thanks for that, Jeryd Mencken!) in order to feel something other than sheer grief? Could this story end a la Game of Thrones, with an unlikely candidate on the Iron Throne — like Greg (Nicholas Braun), as one oft-repeated theory in the Succession fandom? Which skeletons from the closet (or in Logan’s “cat food Ozymandias” tomb, as it were) would come dancing out for one last scare?
No more need to speculate on any of those questions. Ahead, here’s how the finale shook out for all the major characters and plotlines. Look away or else face down massive series-ending 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 speaks Tom, the new presumed CEO of Waystar Royco. In a rollicking episode where the momentum passes from hand to hand more than a few times, it’s the outsider Tom Wambsgans who ends up at the head of the table.
Here’s how it happened.
The Path to the Waystar Throne
“With Open Eyes” begins the day before the board’s vote about the GoJo sale. Shiv thinks she’s locked in with Matsson as his pick for an American CEO. Turns out, not so much. During dinner with Tom, Matsson confesses he’s over Shiv and her ideas, and doesn’t want to get into a messy situation given 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 mantle.
Meanwhile, Shiv and her siblings reunite in the Caribbean at their mother’s tropical home. Kendall catches word of Matsson moving on from Shiv, and fills his sister in on the shattering news. Shiv and Roman reluctantly agree to sign on with Kendall as the king. Over time, the reluctance turns into mania, as the three siblings celebrate by pouring a disgusting smoothie on 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 is selling off his dad’s wares. Kendall, Shiv and Roman are visited one last time by their dad’s ghost by way of a home video, taped at a recent dinner before Logan’s death. It’s a haunting moment for the brothers and sister, one that would seemingly only serve to unify them further, especially after Tom tells Shiv he’s the one Matsson wants as CEO; that news goes over about as well as you would expect.
But when it comes time to cast the votes, it’s a six-six tie, with Shiv’s vote hanging in the balance. She recuses herself to consider whether or not she wants to back Kendall or Tom, though it’s not much of a debate at all; Shiv chooses Tom. To say Kendall is devastated doesn’t do justice to the fallout, as the three siblings almost literally tear each other apart over old wounds, from Kendall’s role in the death of the cater waiter at Shiv’s wedding (which he says never actually happened, in a sign of Ken’s degrading state), to the fact that Kendall’s children are not his by blood. Ken and Rome come to blows, and as they’re fighting, Shiv goes and casts the winning vote for GoJo.
The episode ends with a highly confident Tom waltzing into Waystar Royco like he owns the place, because he effectively does. Shiv rides away in a private car with Tom, taking his hand when he coldly offers it up. Roman ends the series alone at a bar, sipping a martini, perhaps liberated from his father’s shadow once and for all.
Sunset for Kendall
The final image of the series: Kendall Roy, walking through a park, with bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson) close behind him. Ken walks up to a park bench, staring out at the water as the sun starts to set. We hear the sound of waves as Kendall stares out, his next moves uncertain — both for him, and certainly for us, who will never know what happens to “the eldest boy” now that he’s lost the only thing that ever mattered to him: the power seat his dad promised him in a candy store decades earlier when he was a 7-year-old.
Kendall’s crossed-out ending comes underlined with some powerful foreshadowing from Strong, who cleverly teased his sundown of an ending in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter following the final season premiere: “We finished filming on location somewhere I’m probably not allowed to say…then I flew to Denmark, where I have a house near the ocean. I went to my house directly from the airport, took a long walk, sat on the beach, watched Kendall go down with the sun, and said, ‘Adios.'”
Adios Kendall, indeed. (Read Strong’s post-finale interview with THR.)
The Name of the Win
Even if we don’t know the next steps for Kendall, Shiv and Roman, at least we know who’s sitting at the head of the table: Tom, whose victory was 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 refers to Tom as “son.”
Then there’s the last name Wambsgans, which has been linked to the baseball player Bill Wambsgans, who executed a legendary triple play — a move Tom pulled off at the end of season three when he outmaneuvered the siblings, and one he’s done again, this time with an assist from Matsson’s misogyny, as well as Shiv, who lives up to her name in her own right and shivs her brother right when it matters most.
“It’s Always Been a Tragedy”
In the official “Succession: Controlling the Narrative” feature after the episode, Armstrong and Mylod spoke more about ending the show the way they did, and ending the show, full stop.
“It feels very perverse to end it,” says Armstrong. “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 this writers room, working with them. I’m quite a sort of softie really. I like the family vibe we have on this show and the relationships.”
With that said, he adds: “One of the few things I’m able to be really tough about is protecting the show and its integrity. The more and more we discussed it in the room, the more and more clear 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 ended with the show ending. Once that became clear, I didn’t really have any doubts. I had lots of emotional sadness, but it felt like, ‘OK, this is 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, which is where production ended. He points to the scene in which the siblings pour a celebratory smoothie crown on Kendall’s head the night before his alleged appointment. Mylod says the scene has “a sense of recaptured innocence, kids being kids.
“Every moment of hope like that is so cruel,” he adds, “because you’re just waiting for that shoe to drop and waiting for their essential natures to be exposed and to break your heart again.” [Read Mylod’s THR interview.]
What Does the Future Hold for the Roys?
For his part, Armstrong has strong thoughts about what happens next for Roman, Shiv and Kendall, and the rest of the Succession cast.
“They don’t end,” he says about the characters and their stories. “They will carry on. But it’s where this show loses interest in them because they’ve lost what they wanted, which was to succeed, this prize their father held out.”
He says Roman’s final scene set in a bar speaks to how “he could have easily been a playboy jerk with some slightly nasty instincts and some quite funny jokes. He could’ve stayed in a bar, being that guy and this has been a bit of a detour in his life.”
For Shiv, Armstrong thinks she’s in “a rather terrifying, frozen, emotionally barren place,” following her big move to back Tom. Tom’s win was carved out long ago, according to Armstrong: “That’s something I thought was the right ending for quite a while now. Even though he’s not the most powerful monarch you’ll ever meet. His power comes from Matsson. Those figures who drift upward and make themselves amenable to powerful people are around.” Armstrong believes Tom and Shiv will struggle to progress given all the cards they’ve laid out on the table: “There’s a lot of that game to play out, but that’s where we leave it.”
And then there’s Ken, the number one boy. Is his final look out at the water and the setting sun a sign that he’s going to turn a new page, and start building his “own pile” separate from his father? That’s an optimistic way to look at things, and Armstrong’s not looking at Kendall’s ending optimistically.
“This will never stop being the central event of his life,” says the creator. “Maybe he could go on and start a company or do a thing, but the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status his dad achieved are very low. I think that will mark his whole life.”
For his own part, Armstrong deeply feels Succession will mark his whole creative life. “I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything as good as this again,” he says. “It feels really scary and foolish, but with that sense that it must end, so that’s what I guess I cling onto.”
Succession is now streaming on Max. Read THR‘s Succession finale coverage.
