Where Do The Roy Kids Go Next? Succession's Creator Has A Few Ideas
This post contains spoilers for the "Succession" series finale.
One good turn deserves another, except in the world of "Succession." Jesse Armstrong's endlessly quotable saga of the monstrous Roy family and their global media and entertainment empire has always been a tragedy at its core. Nothing desirable can happen to the show's characters without something awful occurring to balance out the scales and the series finale held true to that. No sooner had siblings Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Shiv (Sarah Snook) buried the hatchet in the episode with a late-night swim and a smoothie so disgusting it's only "fit for a king" than they were divided once more, maybe permanently this time.
Just as Shiv was about to cast the final vote solidifying Kendall as the heir to their late father's (figurative? Logan's chair looks comfy enough) throne and killing the Waystar Royco-GoJo deal, she switched sides — though not before a vicious showdown with Kendall and Roman that left them with gaping reopened emotional wounds and, in Roman's case, an actual reopened gash on his forehead. Yet, in true "Succession" fashion, nothing Shiv said to Kendall during their final confrontation was wrong. Not only would he have run their father's kingdom into the ground, but the fact remains he was also culpable in someone's death. That he had the audacity to then turn around and claim he had lied about that only served to bolster her point.
Now, with their inheritance gone and their relationship with one another possibly shattered beyond repair, what comes next for the trio? "They don't end," Armstrong commented in a behind-the-scenes featurette. "They will carry on. But it's where this show loses interest in them because they've lost what they wanted, which was to succeed, this prize their father held out."
A detour and a barren place
Of the three, Roman might be the best off, as suggested by the final shot of him in the series finale sitting alone in a bar looking relieved (or something like that). "He [Roman] could have easily been a playboy jerk with some slightly nasty instincts and some quite funny jokes," Jesse Armstrong observed. "He could've stayed in a bar, being that guy and this has been a bit of a detour in his life." There's a hopelessly naive part of my brain that would like to imagine Roman taking his newfound mountain of money from the WayStar-GoJo purchase and donating much of it to the library where he's started volunteering. Note the emphasis on "hopelessly naive."
Shiv, on the other hand, has made her bed with Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and now has to lie in it alongside her husband and the newly-anointed CEO of Waystar Royco. In retrospect, we probably should've known that the ultimate yes-man on "Succession" would eventually be the one to come out on top. But after all the terrible things Tom and Shiv have said and done to one another, it's "a rather terrifying, frozen, emotionally barren place" for both of them to be, as Armstrong put it. Like I said earlier, nothing good happens to anyone on this show without some balancing of the scales.
"There's a lot of that game to play out, but that's where we leave it," said Armstrong. I would add that Shiv and Roy's entire relationship, down to the final shot of them holding hands in the series finale (if that's what one can call "holding" hands), echoes that of Nick and Amy from "Gone Girl" while also not-so-subtly paralleling that between Logan and Caroline (Harriet Walter). Who says romance is dead?
'I think that will mark his whole life'
This brings us to Kendall, Logan's first-born son (Connor who?) and the Roy offspring who built their whole existence around being a "cog" in the WayStar machine, to quote Kendall directly. Ol' Ken firmly believed he was the heir apparent to his family's realm since Logan told him he was exactly that as a child. He only really seemed to waver in that belief back in season 2 after, you know, that whole manslaughter thing. In a way, though, he was right: Kendall was, in a sense, the Chosen One who ushered in a new era for his father's kingdom. These Chosen Ones never fulfill their destinies the way they expect, do they?
Because of this, Jesse Armstrong doesn't see Kendall's brief tenure as WayStar CEO as a "detour" for him the way it was for Roman. In Armstrong's words:
"This will never stop being the central event of his life. Maybe he could go on and start a company or do a thing, but the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status his dad achieved are very low. I think that will mark his whole life."
This is what makes the flexibility of Kendall's water motif so meaningful. Water has served as both a symbol of rebirth and death for Ken, so what does its return during the series finale's closing scene symbolize for him? Is Kendall ready to finally give up on trying to be the ruthless, sadistic magnate his father was and instead focus on actually being a half-decent father to his kids — something Logan never was to his own children? It's another hopelessly naive fantasy on my part, but with "Succession" over and done with (for now), it's one I can continue to cling to.