How Will Succession End?

 

How will Succession end? In another few days, the whole world will know, and all speculation will cease. Until then, however, the world has been inundated with such speculation, which will only increase in the run-up to Sunday's grand finale.

Roman having precipitously (but hardly unsurprisingly) fallen out of contention at the end of episode 9 (leaving an opening for Kendall to hit it out of the park with his spontaneous eulogy), Kendall has clearly positioned himself as head of the family ready now to claim the crown originally promised but denied him four seasons ago in the series' pilot. (The story sort of started with Kendall's loss. Will it then end with him, either winning or losing?) This time, however, the challenge to Kendall's takeover comes from his sister Shiv, who is allied with Gojo's Lucas Mattsson in his attempt to take over Waystar, which she hopes (based on the flimsiest of assurances) to run as its American CEO, presumably freezing out her brothers (and maybe - or maybe not - her husband).

Of course, neither Kendall nor Shiv has had much of a successful track record over the course of the series' four seasons. Both are smart, but neither as smart as he or she seems to think. Kendall has fallen repeatedly, but has shown a resiliency that has brought him back from the lowest depths into serious contention at this point. Shiv, for all her scheming, has been repeatedly outmaneuvered, by her father, her brothers, her husband, and now maybe by her ostensible ally.

Maybe neither will win the prize. Maybe Mattsson and the dubiously designated President-elect Mencken will seek power, domination, and control through someone more malleable and pliable for their purposes. So how about Greg as CEO? A horrifying thought, but this series has been all about horrifying people thinking and doing horrifying things. (One of the series' singular dramatic accomplishments has been how successfully it has portrayed some of the world's worst people in a way which makes them more than occasionally seem sympathetic.) 

But, while Greg has his fans, others have more plausibly suggested Gerri, an obviously more meritorious choice, although this is definitely not a celebration of meritocracy! This show is all about those who have getting more and those who don't have getting even less. Either way, one highly plausible scenario is certainly for the Roy "sibs" to end up doing what they do best - failing. Remember Logan's last words to them: "I love you, but you are not serious people." Shiv rightly calls Kendall and Roman "dumb and dumber," but in truth they are all failures - even Connor, although he at least seems to stand more of a chance than they of making a moderately happy marriage.

Obviously, who will or will not succeed Logan is a central theme of Succession. That is the show's title, after all. But Succession has always been about more than just who will become CEO. It is, first and foremost, a family story, a family tragedy of stereotypically "Shakespearean" proportions. For most of us most of the time, I think the family story has been central. But there is also a larger socio-political dynamic, as the family dysfunction spills out into the larger world from which the Roys are largely insulated and isolated. Has ATN (the show's unsubtle surrogate for FOX) damaged America as Logan has damaged his family? Have both America and the Roys been irretrievably damaged by predatory capitalism as personified in Logan? It was Kendall who asked whether the poison drips through, and it is he who shows how much it has done so by showing himself finally to be truly his father's son, and like Logan giving up trying (in Uncle Ewan's words), and becoming instead the kind of disastrous dad and corporate monster that Logan was.

Amidst all the horror, however, it is good to remember that this is a family story and, as such, it has its tender moments, now and then, in each season when the characters' humanity is allowed to poke through from their damaged selves - scenes such as the "sibs" recreating their childhood during a break at Shiv's wedding in season 1 or the tender hug between Kendall and Shiv when Kendall tells her he will not be the one in season 2, or the three seemingly just enjoying each other's company early in season 4 and their grieving hugs after Logan's death. Others too occasionally demonstrate human feeling and a capacity for reconciliation. Think of Caroline reaching out to Kerry at the funeral and the shared grief (mixed seemingly with a sense of liberation) of Logan's four women seated together at last in the same pew.

What would I like to see happen? What would be the best outcome for these unhappy damaged people? Perhaps if Mattsson got his way with Waystar and ATN and the "sibs" got out and reverted to their earlier plan to buy Pierce and somehow learned to run it somewhat successfully together, recovering some of the fragmentary good feelings they had enjoyed earlier in the final season, while Connor and Willa settled down to genteel life in Logan's old apartment, that would be perhaps the best possible outcome for the family, especially if Shiv and Tom tried to make a go of it now that they are to be parents. I don't actually expect any of that. The ending, I fear, will likely be darker. For not only are they all terribly damaged people, but they have, wittingly or not, done a lot of damage in the world from the macro level (President Mencken) to the micro (the dead waiter). Only in a fairy tale world would all that get wiped away, but some rough justice may be at play in the catastrophic collapse of the house of Roy.

Jackie Onasis, whose real funeral was held in the same church where Logan's TV funeral was, once famously said, “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.” I think a lot of ordinary people - the kind Logan still had some grudging respect for but his children can never connect with - would agree with her. At bottom, Succession is a sad story about one generation after another doing a bad job raising their children, with catastrophic consequences. Likewise on a macro level, the likes of Logan and Kendall, having failed as parents, fail as flagrantly to care for the world they live in. It cannot end well!