Done!

Spoiler Alert: If, for whatever reason, you have not yet watched the series finale of Succession, read no farther. And, whether you read this or not, by all means watch the series finale!

I was right about at least one thing. Unsurprisingly, Lucas Mattsson did betray Shiv. That pales in comparison, of course, only to Shiv's final betrayal of Kendall; but it perfectly facilitates the alternately heart-warming and sad scenes of the "sibs" in their semi-final reconciliation and their final breakup. What a way to end the series!

It is hard to end a successful series. Finales do not always live up to a series' promise. But this one did.

At last, it is time to answer the question that has been the leitmotif of the entire season: Who will replace Logan as Waystar CEO? In reality, however, the actual corporate succession was always a secondary theme to the intra-family destructive dynamic among the sibs and their collection of comparably damaged underlings. For all their horribleness as people and the harm they have done to the world, they still remain people like us - richer than we will ever be but otherwise like us - desperately desiring love and respect and repeatedly (and finally) failing decisively to achieve either.

Stipulate again that that these are all very bad people. The poison has really dripped through, to quote Kendall. Nor are any of the "sibs" suitable to run the company. "I love you," Logan said, in his last words to his children, "but you are not serious people." That said, the "sibs" qualify as traditionally tragic figures whose well deserved unhappy fate nonetheless moves us profoundly. At one point or other I have rooted for each of them to win something (if not necessarily CEO, but at least something). From day one, of course, the story has revolved around Kendall's arc - a promised heir, repeatedly frustrated, a failed son who periodically rises to the occasion only to fall again. Kendall began the series with lots of money but unfulfilled aspirations and self-induced failures and ends it even more money but having lost everything else - his lifelong ambition (since age seven) to be CEO, his father, obviously, but also his wife and his children and, of course, his siblings. He could yet start his own business and maybe do any number of other things with his billions, but he will always be alone and unloved.  All he has left is Colin (not unlike his father at the beginning of this fourth season). Colin's life also appears empty (and he could conceivably yet perhaps turn on Kendall and report him to the authorities for his  misadventure with the waiter!).

Meanwhile, Shiv - having dethroned Kendall at the very moment that was supposed to be crowned - seems ready to settle down in her new subordinate role as wife of the new crime boss. ("Boss" may be too flattering to Tom, who admittedly has gotten the high status he always wanted, but he will likely have little power and lots of humiliation. What normal person would choose to be a "pain sponge" for a boss who wants to have sex with your wife?) Shiv's betrayal of Kendall clears the way for her to reengage with her hitherto at best transactional marriage. ("Are you interested in a real relationship?” she had earlier asked Tom.)  Will Tom and Shiv stay together and raise the next generation of damaged failsons? Will Shiv, who is not as smart as she thinks she is but is still smarter than her "empty suit" husband, become the power behind Tom's uneasy throne?

And what of Roman? From the start he seemed to have the least promise, and he also ends up at the end very rich but also very alone. He seems personally undone and truly done with it all. Of course, he is still rich enough to do any number of interesting things with his life and his billions, but he doesn't really seem to want to do anything at all, now that the poisoned CEO chalice has eluded him also. Perhaps, that passivity is liberation? As Kendall said to Roman, "Maybe you're well adjusted, and I'm a business psycho." More importantly, Roman got to utter the self-evident (but seldom admitted) truth when, during the climactic sibling conflict scene, he acknowledged, "we're nothing."

The finale opens with the two sides (Kendall and Roman vs. Shiv and Mattsson) armed and ready for battle before the board meeting. We've been through enough with this family to know that a lot will happen in the episode and that the sides may switch, maybe more than once, and that the seemingly predestined winners will likely lose. Along the way, however, we get treated to the family's most incredible highs and lows. Roman, having been injured in his atypical encounter with the non-rich world, has fled to his mother. Shiv and Kendall fly there too in order to win Roman over. (It still amazes me how these people can just get up and get into a private plane and jet off somewhere as if it were just the most normal thing in the world!)

While with their mother, they learn the truth about Mattsson's plans and so forge an alliance. In the process, they reenact what seems to have been something of a childhood game, which reminds us yet again that these three were really once kids together, and that at some level they still hunger to recapture that childhood closeness. Even Caroline seems to soften enough to express some pleasure at seeing them apparently on the same side. (Wisely, she thinks the GoJo deal may be an opportunity for them to free themselves.) Those family feelings get reinforced in one of the series' relatively rare, but very charming familial scenes. In their father's (now Connor's) apartment, they all watch a video of Logan and some of his cronies all acting like normal, nice, fun-loving human beings, all of which triggers their own childhood memories and they (for the last time in the series and perhaps for the last time ever in their lives) share a tender moment and hold hands together. Part of me would have liked it to end there, as if that could possibly be perpetuated, as if Waystar and the succession struggle could disappear and these people could really just become a functional family. But there were enough minutes left to suggest something more had to happen, and so, seemingly inevitably, came the traumatic, tragic ending.

So much has been said about Succession's relationship to our present decadent social reality. In the end, it seems to me that, above and beyond what it may be saying about rich media moguls and dysfunctional failsons, it combines the universal story of our human desires for love and respect, often corrupted by our own or others' tragic flaws, often frustrated by our own mistakes (and, dare one say, sins) with a painfully on-point presentation of our contemporary American society, governed by greed, dominated by the entire panoply of the Devils "works and pomps."