Ruby Watson, Feature Writer

TV - Succession Finale Review – “The Poison Drips Through”

The TV series that the entire world has been watching came to an official close on Monday. Over its last four seasons, Succession has expertly toed the line between telling their audience just enough to advance the plot, but ultimately not giving much away about the fate of the characters.

In Monday’s final episode the future of Waystar Royco was to be decided by a board vote where the Roy siblings and billionaire CEO and tech giant Lukas Matsson went head-to-head in a battle for control of the late Logan Roy’s company.

The best phrase to summarise the final episode of Succession has to be one from Kendall Roy himself, “the poison drips through”. The cycle of abuse and mistreatment that the Roy siblings were brought up in is seemingly destined to continue. The finale saw each of the characters reduced to the expendable parts that Logan Roy saw them as.

While it seems as though the Roy siblings have finally escaped life in their father’s shadow after they lose the board vote, the finale demonstrates that none of them have come out triumphantly from this through the cast’s stellar acting, Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong) is left a shell of a man. He no longer has purpose in his life. With frequent silent nods to the toll that this battle for CEO and control of Waystar Royco has had on him throughout the series it is apt to ask, will Kendall survive this loss?

He finally almost had everything in his grasp, and Roman and Shiv had anointed him in their strange and frankly disgusting game, ‘meal fit for a king’.

For the moment he does persevere. Although this could be interpreted as a liberating moment for Kendall, I fear that he is now lost with nobody to point him in the right direction.

His brother Roman Roy (played by Kieran Culkin) is seen ordering a martini in a bar after everything implodes. Fans have spotted that this Gerri’s drink of choice. I can only hope that he is saying goodbye to Gerri and seeking both a more appropriate relationship for himself, and professional therapy for his Freudian mother issues.

He could have had it all, but he isn’t completely destroyed by losing it either.

Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is reduced to a piece of inherited antique furniture as the new successor of the company Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), brandishes him with a sticker on his head. This nods to an earlier scene whereby the children of Logan Roy were marking his possessions with stickers to indicate what they would like to inherit from their father. Greg is Tom’s inheritance, nothing more than an object he can use to his advantage. This is exactly how he has been treated throughout the series.

Many watchers of the series have been only too eager to point out that Tom shares his surname Wambsgans with the famous baseball player Bill Wambsganss who has the only unassisted triple play in the history of World Series baseball. This means that like Tom, he defeated three people at once.

Shiv, or Siobhan Roy (Sarah Snook) had the most heart wrenching ending as she was shown defeated reuniting with her husband Tom. It looks like she is forced to repeat the life her mother had, and her unborn child is destined for the same scarring childhood the Roy siblings experienced.

Shiv, like her husband, lives up to her name as she literally knifes Kendall in the back by not siding with him for the vote. In doing so, she is reduced to the roles in the domestic sphere of life that she has so desperately been trying to reject. Namely those of wife and mother.

The only way Shiv has ever been able to access her father’s empire is through her connections to other men and her final scene with Tom as the two uncomfortably ride off in their car hand in hand demonstrates the way she will never overcome the barrier of being a woman in this corporate space.

None of the characters of Succession succeed per se. It would be possible to read the successor Tom’s ending as a success, but considering he is described as “just an empty suit”, I'd argue that the future does not seem bright for him either. I don't think he or Shiv will be emotionally fulfilled in their marriage.

Each of the characters are left unhappy and unfulfilled with their outcomes, not to mention the amount of emotional healing they will have to do.