In the ‘Succession’ Series Finale, the Poison Drips Through
As the fate of Waystar Royco came to a head, the seeds Logan Roy sowed decades ago bore their disgusting fruit
Since the beginning of Succession, Logan has promised the Waystar Royco throne to each of his children—sans Connor—like a parent dangling keys in front of a newborn. The prospect of taking over the company and winning their father’s approval has followed each of the Roy siblings like a specter: As Kendall tells Roman and Shiv in Succession’s series finale, “With Open Eyes,” Logan floated Waystar to him as early as when he was 7. Under Logan, the pressure of such ambitions was a rot that festered within the Roys and informed their respective faults: Kendall is impulsive with a history of addiction; Roman has a bottomless well of snarkiness that masks deep-seated insecurities; and Shiv made a political career in defiance of her father while marrying someone she could control through a power imbalance. But what felt like life-and-death stakes for the Roy kids were always something else entirely for their father. “What you kids do not understand, it’s all part of a game,” Logan told them back in Season 1 after falsely leaking to the press that Kendall had a relapse, a twisted glimpse into the worldview of a man who looked down upon everyone from his C-suite Mount Olympus.
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Logan comparing preparing his kids to stab each other in the back over control of the family business to a game became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: In his own words, they are not serious people. He never raised them to be. If anything, all Logan did was poison them—just as he poisoned the world. As recently as the antepenultimate episode of the series, Kendall worried that he wasn’t being a good father, confiding to Shiv the kind of vulnerabilities the Roys are loath to share—even among one another. “Maybe the poison drips through,” Kendall said.
If there’s any major takeaway from “With Open Eyes”—actual Waystar successor notwithstanding—it’s how much those concerns rang true. As the siblings gear up for a contested battle over the future of the company coming down to a board vote while also taking a detour to Barbados to visit their mother—being obscenely wealthy has its perks—Shiv believes that GoJo founder Lukas Matsson has the numbers in his favor. What Shiv doesn’t realize is that Matsson is going to renege on his promise to install her as Waystar’s new CEO and instead go for Tom. While Matsson tells Tom that he’s worried about appointing Shiv because of a mutual attraction between them, it’s evident that he’s insecure about the public perception of their partnership: A glossy magazine feature included art of Shiv controlling a Matsson marionette. (As for the appeal of Tom, he’s a yes-man who only cares about proximity to power and how to keep it, even if it means nodding along to someone saying they want to fuck his wife.)
Incredibly, it’s Greg who tips Kendall off about Matsson’s plans with the help of a translation app on his phone. (Dominic Toretto would appreciate Greg’s family loyalty in this matter.) That puts Shiv, Kendall, and Roman in a similar position to where they were at the start of the season: They can either lose the chance to keep Waystar within the family or work together. This time, however, they’d have a stronger claim if only one sibling was tapped as CEO. Following his emotional breakdown at Logan’s funeral and the messy aftermath that included goading a protester into hitting him, Roman essentially puts himself out of the running without saying anything. (Roman is also sporting a gnarly cut on his temple that required stitches.) Considering she was recently colluding with the opposition, Shiv wouldn’t be a viable candidate either. That leaves Kendall, who gets the begrudging approval of Roman and Shiv before they anoint him with a disgusting smoothie made from what they could scrape together in the kitchen. (The three of them playing with their food while continually shushing each other so they don’t wake up the rest of the house underscores the childish nature of the endeavor.)
Once again, the momentum is in the Roys’ favor as a collective, but old habits die hard. From the moment that Kendall sits in their father’s old chair at Waystar HQ, it becomes clear that Shiv isn’t comfortable with her brother taking over the company. As for Kendall, the closer he gets to his ultimate goal, the more he becomes like his father. When Roman admits to having second thoughts about the vote and whether he should be the one appointed as CEO, Kendall brings his brother in for a hug: an embrace that’s become more and more common among the siblings as the show has gone on. But instead of consoling Roman, Kendall forcefully pushes the wound on his brother’s head into his shoulder: a sickening (and somewhat subtle, given the public setting) form of physical abuse that hearkens back to Logan. (Logan hit Roman once in the series, during which Kendall came to defend his brother, and it’s heavily implied that he was abused as a child.)
While Kendall uses violence to keep his brother in line during the board vote, Shiv lives up to her name and decides to leave the room with a 6-6 deadlock. Shiv says she doesn’t think Kendall would make for a good CEO, and when she brings up his involvement in the death of the cater-waiter, it seals his fate. Kendall denies that it ever happened and says that he was using the moment to earn her and Roman’s sympathy. That tear-jerking confession, back in the Season 3 finale, was perhaps the most intimate and honest conversation these broken people ever had—Kendall was so authentic back then and so certain he never wanted to succeed his father, and it’s come back to bite him. Upon realizing that he’s going to lose the very thing that’s defined his entire life, Kendall attacks Roman in a fit of rage before Shiv runs out of the room and casts her vote in Matsson’s favor.
That means, yes, Tom is the new CEO of Waystar Royco: a position he earned largely through obsequiousness and knowing which person to hitch his wagon to at the right time. From Shiv’s perspective, that technically keeps the company within the confines of her marriage, but as she and Tom drive off together following his victory, he lays out his hand, and she limply places hers on it. By refusing to allow another sibling to become CEO, Shiv has created a hell of her own making. The power dynamic in their relationship has now completely shifted in the direction of Tom. It’s the maxim of Succession in miniature: a character so determined to stop someone else from winning that it comes at the expense of their own happiness.
More than anything he accomplished as a titan in the world of media, that is Logan’s ultimate legacy: ensuring that the cycle of trauma and abuse once inflicted upon him was passed down to his children, each of them damaged in their own unique way. Throughout Succession, the siblings took turns inhabiting their father’s worst qualities, threatening to undermine American democracy in the process. But for all the devastation these siblings have brought upon themselves and the country, it was never going to fix their fundamental flaws. “We are bullshit,” Roman says to Kendall as it dawns on him that they’ll lose the company. “It’s all fucking nothing.” The very nature of Succession might have been a game to Logan, but the fatal flaw of his children is that they never amounted to anything more than pieces on the board.
