Everyone Died on Succession

Kendall Roy is dead. And so is Roman Roy. And so, too, is Shiv Roy.

Not in the literal sense. Their father, Logan (Brian Cox), is the only character who didn't technically survive Succession's mesmerizing, brutal fourth and final season, which concluded Sunday with a sprawling series finale. That death, a shock that came early in the season, formed the shape of the episodes that followed, with every subsequent action from Logan's children — every word, every move, every thought — filtered through the cavernous void rendered by his absence. The pressure cooker timeline (a detail critics and fans have spent confused hours dissecting) added to the intensity: With the season taking place over 10 or so days, the Roy kids' mourning became that much more potent. The immediacy of grief allows for a frankness that has the power to humanize anyone, even as the show also leaned into the Roys' most dehumanizing traits. In its final season, Succession became a show about death. In its final episodes, Succession killed every character.

The ending of the series finale, "With Open Eyes," is at once a thunderous surprise and a foregone conclusion, the satisfying product of a season that took its time gradually breaking down its trio of siblings into jagged pieces until there was nothing left of any of them: Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the would-be king without a crown; Roman (Kieran Culkin), the lost dog without an owner; and Shiv (Sarah Snook), the most powerless of the three, simply a consequence of being born a woman, who in this final hour held the power in the most agonizing of ways. Of course none of them could have ascended the throne, not even in the chilling Shakespearean manner that many fans predicted might happen. Coming into contact with Logan Roy, who built a haunted house and called it an empire, will kill you. Dead people can't rule over anything.

Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) may have spent the days since Logan's death complaining about and being mocked (mostly by his wife) for his bone-deep exhaustion, and yet, as was the case at the end of Season 3, he stayed alert enough to be aware that the tides were turning. Tom is a social climbing brownnoser, but an intelligent one; a handful of hideously awkward encounters with Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) paid off, and he ended up in the right place at the right time when it really mattered. In interviews, Strong has mused about a Godfather-esque ending for Kendall, a modern day answer to Michael Corleone, the man who gave himself over to darkness in order to become his father's successor. Such a fate seemed fitting for Kendall, who has cut off so many parts of himself to fit into the idea of the person he imagines would be worthy of the impossible reward of Logan's approval. But this was a reading that didn't account for Tom, who'd proven himself worthy of a show-stopping Godfather moment long before being named CEO of Waystar Royco. Was he only picked because he's the guy who put the baby inside the baby lady? Sure. Does the why ultimately matter? Not at all.

What matters is Tom's willingness to push his wife down the stairs, again and again. It's not just that Tom was underestimated, but that he was rarely seen by the Roys as a whole person. His outsider status left him at a disadvantage until it didn't; his eyes were open when theirs weren't. ("Something about eyes," their mother, Harriet Walter's Caroline, says earlier in the episode. "They just kind of revolt me.") The same can be said for Greg (Nicholas Braun), a character who, despite his bumbling, has — ever since he reserved copies of the cruise scandal documents Tom made him dispose of back in Season 1 — been shrewd enough to sense a shift in alliances. At its bones, Jesse Armstrong's drama was focused on exploring the cyclical nature of trauma and abuse, and people's inability to change as a result of being stuck in those cycles, even (or maybe especially) when the world is changing around them. For Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, the world was irreparably altered when Logan died. It changed again when ATN, off a decision made by Kendall and Roman, called the presidential election for crypto-fascist Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk). But that central conflict between siblings, stemming from being raised as attack dogs always poised to bite each other, never wavered. It's what ultimately lost them Waystar, and what ultimately eroded their souls.

That erosion is solidified by one final, desperate argument between the three, a scene that arrives in the last moments of the episode. It's not a surprise, really, to watch a resentful, hurt Shiv defect — for the husband they've always viewed as a joke, an extra twist of the knife — but the things said and done between her and her brothers are jaw-dropping. "With Open Eyes," which borrows its title from "Dream Song 29," the same John Berryman poem from which all three previous season finales have taken their titles, builds up the tension between them with a deftness that makes the buoyant scene that precedes it feel almost unbearably foreboding. In their mother's kitchen, the siblings giggle and joke about murdering Kendall with a vile smoothie concoction; hours later, in the sterile, sobering light of the boardroom, all three dressed in black and surrounded on all sides by memories of their father, their camaraderie dissipates.

The argument begins with Shiv, who transitions from a state of fury over the revelation that her husband is angling to betray her once again to a petulant child who cannot bring herself to be the deciding vote in securing Kendall's future as heir. The scene is full of stark references to death, as Kendall pleads pathetically with Shiv and Shiv remains firm in her refusal. "It's the one thing I know how to do," he tells her. "If I don't get to do this, I feel like that's it. I might — like, I might die." She replies, "Well, it's not all about you." Anyway, she reminds him, he can't be CEO. "Because you've killed someone," she says, finally using the confession that bound the three siblings so tentatively together in the Season 3 finale against him. "That's not an issue," Kendall assures them. "It's just a thing I said, I made it up. It did not happen!"

By the time Kendall arrives in that boardroom, he has cauterized the part of himself that was damaged after the waiter's death and bandaged over the open wound that has been hobbling him since Shiv's wedding. To evoke Waystar's official designation for incidents on their cruise ships, Andrew Dodds became no real person involved. Kendall viewed his life with single-minded purpose, instilled in him by his father when he was a child (7 years old, to be precise). Without it, what's left? "I don't exactly know what I would be for," he told Shiv in Season 2. To Stewy (Arian Moayed), he insisted in "Honeymoon States," after being reinvigorated by the possibility that his dad's dying wish was for him to take over the company, "I'm twin track, I'm dead but I'm alive." Fans spent years worrying that Kendall might die at the end of the series, but Succession found a fate even crueler: depriving him of his reason for living and forcing him to go on living anyway. He's dead, but he's alive.

As for Roman, part of him died with his father on the plane. He said as much to Matsson in Norway, pointing his finger up to the sky: "I'm gone, I'm on the f---in'— I'm dead, it's over for me." The other part, the part he managed to neutralize during the election, died during Logan's funeral, thanks to the solemn reality brought down upon him by his uncle Ewan's (James Cromwell) eviscerating eulogy. When Roman opened his mouth, he hoped some approximation of Logan's voice would come out, though the only sound he could produce was a whimpering sob — a whole season of trying to remake himself in his dad's image rendered meaningless. In "With Open Eyes," he even wears a death wound on his face in the form of the stitches he incurred after his masochistic encounter with the anti-Mencken mob in "Church and State." The sight of Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) momentarily jolts him back to life, prompting him to stare in the mirror and wonder why his reflection doesn't look worse. If he looks alive, after all, why not him? Kendall pushes Roman's face against his shoulder until his stitches open up, blood gushing forth. There's a way to view this scene as Kendall violently taking Roman out of the equation, but there's also the view of it as an act of warped love between brothers: Kendall reminding Roman that he's dead. During the vote, Roman dabs at the blood, and everyone in the room ignores the fact that they're sitting next to a corpse. Because he never had it, their father's "magnificent, awful force" that Kendall spoke of in his own eulogy.

Early in the episode, Shiv cautiously feels out a conversation with Tom about the future of their relationship. From Shiv's perspective, their explosive burst of truth in "Tailgate Party," however vicious, was them overcoming their greatest challenge, but he's not so sure. Her betrayal of Kendall ends up being the most romantic gesture she could've made for Tom, although it means death for herself — for Shiv, after all, love and violence are inextricable. Speaking to TV Guide in 2021, Alan Ruck, who played Connor, the only Roy offspring to walk out of Season 4 relatively unscathed, said, "If they ever learned to listen to each other, the three of them could run that company. [...] But they can't, because the old man, by example, told us that winning is everything, coming in second is still losing." A win for Tom is not a win for Shiv, but it's still easier to handle than a win for Kendall, because a win for Kendall inherently means a loss for Shiv. It's bitter, dizzying logic reinforced by a lifetime of endless battles with her brothers because Logan liked keeping them at odds. Shiv's willingness to give up her morals if it meant working with Mencken as CEO, her breezy plans to ignore her child after its birth so she could focus on the company — all for naught. The last time we see her, she rests her hand slackly in Tom's as she looks away from him, frowning. Knowing she had no chance of winning, she chooses the purgatory of a marriage to the CEO rather than living in a world where Kendall came out on top.

That's why predictions of who would win Succession never interested me, why I never paid much attention to the popular power ranking discussions, and why I avoided all analyses of the muddled timeline. All of that was irrelevant to the story the show has been telling since the beginning, and Season 4 attempted to make all of these issues obsolete, anyway. These episodes were never focused on achieving extreme realism with regards to how much is possible to pack into one day, just like the show was never concerned with who would win, but rather what the characters were willing to give up in their efforts to win. Grief can muddle a person's sense of place in the world; anyone who's ever lost a loved one recognizes how out of time those first few days can feel. Throughout the season, the characters often lamented Matsson's unwillingness to push the vote, but what would they have done without the distraction of tearing each other apart? There's a chance they might have actually had to be honest with themselves, with each other, about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their dad. Even in moments when they did try to demand honesty from outside forces, they received only smoke and mirrors in return: Kendall and Shiv, at different points, begged Frank (Peter Friedman) and Karl (David Rasche) for candid assessments of their father, something Logan's most loyal lackeys could have never provided them. In any case, they wouldn't have been able to handle it; as I wrote in my review of the season, there is nothing worse to these people than honesty.

This has been one of Succession's most striking recurring themes: Someone is always watching, but that doesn't mean anyone actually knows the truth. The fight between Kendall, Shiv, and Roman in "With Open Eyes" echoes the one Tom and Shiv had in "Tailgate Party," both taking place in front of enormous see-through walls, with hordes of people looking on just beyond the glass. At Logan's funeral, the camera cuts from Roman collapsing in on himself as he steps away from the podium to the giant television above him, broadcasting his breakdown for the congregation to see. The Roys exist in the public eye, but their wealth protects them from what that actually means. What becomes of such an upbringing is a group of bewildered, suspicious adults. Questions of what is and is not real have plagued the characters for all four seasons. No such existential quandary concerned Logan, which is why he was able to succeed: "You make your own reality," he told Kendall in the first episode. Everything is real, and even if it's not, who cares? With enough money and power, you can find your way to a convenient truth and mold it until it looks real enough to trick anyone looking in. Kendall tried to do it with the waiter, but the limpness of his lie is too obvious, his worry over whether or not he's a good guy too nagging. He may have killed, but he doesn't have the killer instinct that propelled his dad forward. How could he create his own reality when he was given no skills to understand the one he was born into?

Death is threaded through the fabric of Succession. There was Kendall's vehicular manslaughter, committed at the end of Season 1, and his suicide attempt in the penultimate episode of Season 3. There were the corpses of the nameless women at the center of the Waystar Cruises scandal, and the ghost of Logan's mysteriously deceased sister, Rose, who was occasionally referenced but never elaborated on until Ewan's eulogy. Logan always worried whether he brought the polio home to her. Maybe the poison drips through. Maybe when one person dies, everyone around them dies, too. Call it a wrong kind of love expression: Kendall, Roman, and Shiv certainly loved their father, and they certainly love each other, too, but the competition will always come first. ("I love you," Shiv tells Kendall. "But I cannot f---ing stomach you.") Season 4 was as packed with moments when the Roy children realized their powerlessness in their lives as it was with prompt rejections of those realizations. Lifeboats, thrown out by characters like Stewy and Nate (Ashley Zukerman), were rejected in favor of continuing to — forgive me as I borrow the show's favorite motif — swim against the current. By the end of the series, Roman is the only character who sees things clearly enough to give voice to their hopelessness: "We are bullsh--," he says. "I'm telling you that because I know it, okay? We're nothing."

The series closes on a muted image of Kendall zombie-walking through the park with Colin (Scott Nicholson), his father's bodyguard, a few feet behind him, a direct reference to a shot of Logan from the first episode of Season 4. How appropriate for a season so focused on repetition: going back to the start to understand the end. "With Eyes Open" illustrates this by inviting its ghosts in (Lawrence Yee, mentioned for the first time since Season 2) and staging recreations of events we've already seen (Stewy, in the final vote, corrects his Season 1 betrayal of Kendall). The house is irrevocably haunted with memories of itself, with the malevolent spirit of Logan Roy. Succession never could have ended any other way, because it was always going to end how it began, which is why the truest fate imaginable for the Roy siblings is for them to lose the company. With none of Logan's potential heirs in charge of his legacy and the deal he wanted going through exactly as he intended, he wins, even from beyond the grave. To lose the role of CEO, the last remaining vessel of Logan's love, is to lose themselves. In other words, they are going to die. In other words, they are already dead.

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