Succession Season 4 Episode 10 Review: A Meal (And Finale) Fit For A King
- Quite simply, one of the greatest TV finales in history — a fittingly tragic way to close the tale of the Roy siblings.
- Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook, please come and collect your Emmys.
- N/A — this already feels like an episode we'll be talking about for years to come.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times at the outset of this final season of "Succession," Sarah Snook confessed she had no idea the show was ending until she sat down for the cast's final table read. This mirrors some of the concerns fans (and myself!) have had over the course of the past few episodes; the future of WayStar may have been getting further from the siblings' grasp, but you could mine several more seasons based entirely on the consequences of their actions.
Creator Jesse Armstrong is a far more insightful writer than that, however, with the masterstroke of this week's finale being the ways in which it vividly sets up the disappointing futures of its characters while closing the book on them. Nowhere better is this displayed than the wordless final sequence with Shiv Roy (Snook) and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), which offers a devastating glimpse into how their lives will pan out now their fortunes have been reversed, told through their body language alone.
Family therapy
The episode's climactic stretch is all the more powerful because, for the first time in the series, the Roys appeared to be breaking free from the shadow of their father. Perhaps the finest sequence this season came shortly after Shiv and Roman (Kieran Culkin) begrudgingly agreed to drop any CEO aspirations they had in favor of backing Kendall (Jeremy Strong), knighting him as Logan's (Brian Cox) true successor in a ritual that involved blending all the leftover food in their mother's fridge into a frighteningly off-putting smoothie: a "meal fit for a king," as they called it.
For a split second, it feels like an emotional breakthrough between the three, a glimpse at what a happy childhood between them could have looked like if they weren't all instructed that they'd inherit the company from a young age. It may be a celebration intended to demonstrate Kendall's takeover, but it represents something deeper — their younger lives were overshadowed by the family business (in Kendall's case, from as young as 7 years old), and now that they've finally got the breathing room to have a conventionally happy moment as children would, they can only comprehend it from the perspective of the company. They've known nothing else their entire lives, and have no other frame of reference to underpin this innocent moment of bonding, but it was the closest they got to capturing what their childhood should have been throughout.
Make no mistake: the Roys have always been overgrown children, largely because they never had a chance to be independent due to their father's overwhelming power. Even when trying to snatch power from his hands during his lifetime, as Kendall made a habit of, they struggled due to always being viewed as kids; whenever they found themselves with a real chance of taking over, their inability to think logically was always clouded by fanciful, power-seeking strategies that were dead on arrival — business as playtime. Reading his eulogy in last week's episode, Kendall stressed that he hoped he had Logan's "magnificent, awful force" within himself, which he does, but not in the boardroom. He's a terrible father, obsessed with coming out on top at all costs, betraying every single personal relationship he's ever forged. Is it any surprise that Shiv panics when seeing a glimmer of Logan come alive in her brother when he's on the cusp of being enshrined as the new CEO?
A complicated love
What "In Open Eyes" demonstrates very well is that these are siblings who ultimately love each other, no matter how much deceit and betrayal they leave in their respective wakes. Roman's feelings for his family are the most apparent, no matter how shrouded in ironic detachment his entire worldview is — but through twisting the knife in the final moments, Shiv's unexpected intervention proves to be a true act of love. She can see her brother about to repeat the same cycle as their father, and knowing that power is no longer a prospect for her, comes to the dawning realization that it will only further corrupt a brother she loves but has drifted away from.
Throwing all her cards on the table, she brings up how he killed a waiter (which, because they're rich, still has yielded zero consequences) and the plainly obvious fact that he just wouldn't be good as CEO — hitting him where it hurts and possibly destroying their relationship for good, but all in the name of saving him from himself. No matter how much he wants to be viewed in the same mold, Kendall is not his father; he destroys everything by accident in pursuit of cementing his status, because he is ultimately a child who has never grown up. Just look back at his angry outburst at Shiv's decision: he's still treating business as a game, and he's the sore loser as he hasn't won the prize he was told was being held aside for him.
It's unclear as to whether the siblings will ever reconcile, but Shiv damning herself to effectively become her mother — dropping any aspirations of breaking the glass ceiling to simply be a CEO's wife — is a painfully realized moment of growth, even as it does outwardly appear to be jealousy towards her brother. "Succession" has always been a show largely about the cyclical nature of emotional abuse within a family, and Shiv has attempted to break the cycle by forcing herself into the margins of it. As she noted, Tom has always fundamentally been a yes-man, eager to "suck the biggest d*** in the room" in pursuit of climbing the corporate ladder, meaning he'll always be too much of a puppet to become Logan's monstrous spitting image. In that sense, there is far more catharsis in this finale than may initially meet the eye, even as our three central characters have either forfeited their dreams or had them snatched away. They're no longer at risk of simply repeating their father's mistakes.
This is the most satisfying ending for "Succession" I could imagine, the family's legacy slipping away from them with a whimper in the boardroom, not a bang. After four brilliant seasons, the Roy siblings are now unshackled from the company and reckoning with having to finally grow outside of it — the perfect elliptical note to play out on. It doesn't feel like hyperbole to call this one of the all-time great finales just days after it aired.