We begin with a moment of relief. Kendall did not die in the swimming pool (or, as his loving brother Roman puts it, become “Kurt Cobain of the fucking floaties”). Comfry saved him – though for what seems an ever more present question in Kendall’s mind, as he reappears at the villa after a night in hospital for observation still virtually catatonic with guilt and grief.
After that, the finale screws begin to tighten and – some of Roman’s best jokes of the season aside – don’t let up for the next coruscating, magnificent hour; probably the best, amid stiff competition, the show has ever done.
The rot – or should we say super-rot, given the family we’re dealing with – sets in when Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård, giving a lovely, light performance as the friendly fellow who will finally blow the Roys to pieces) decides he needs to be in charge of the new company if the merger between his and Waystar is to go through. Logan (Brian Cox, given a small, devastating monologue about the state of the US and modulating seamlessly during it from unassailable force to man who might – just might – be weary of the game) sends Roman back to the wedding villa (“My mom’s getting remarried to a bowl of porridge, it’s all terribly moving”) so he can talk to Matsson alone.
At the villa, Greg is still courting his European duchess (“Off a couple of haemophiliacs and you’re king of Luxembourg!” says Tom encouragingly), the siblings stage a semi-intervention with Kendall that actually induces more of an emotional crisis in Connor (“I didn’t see Pop for three years but your spoon wasn’t shiny enough?”) and prompts Willa to comfort him by accepting his proposal. “Fuck it,” she says. “How bad can it be?” Ah, Willa.
After the wedding of Mommy dearest, at which Shiv gives – well, let’s call it a stirring speech, news reaches Shiv, Roman and Kendall that Logan is about to sell his empire, their inheritance, to GoJo. They convene in a dusty back lot for an extraordinary scene in which Kendall, sinking to the ground, confesses his role in the death of the waiter at Shiv’s wedding and his brother and sister must find, from somewhere buried by years of dysfunction deep within themselves, a way of comforting him in his despair. In another programme this would have been the apogee of everything. Here it comes but halfway through the finale, and the remaining half hour only builds from there.
In a car to Logan’s villa, the children put together their plan to prevent Logan closing the deal and push him out of the company instead – “Full coup,” says Kendall, coming back to life before our eyes – via the supermajority they and their mother, Caroline, have that can block any change in control. Shiv calls Tom to get him onboard, too, and though Roman is unhappy they enter the villa united. And they stay so. But they forgot, alas, that they have not one parent who doesn’t love them, but two. While they were carpooling rebellion, Logan was on the phone to Caroline and persuaded her to change the terms of the divorce agreement that gave them the supermajority. The game has been switched. And it is over. Roman begs Logan not to close the deal – for love of them, he says. “You should have trusted me,” is Logan’s only answer. “Because I fucking win.”
Again, a lesser show would have rested happily on its laurels there. But who told Logan the children were coming? Enter Tom, his soft features all concern for his wife and the blow she has been dealt. But Shiv saw her father press his shoulder as Logan left and knows that the Wambsgans worm turned. Because of the love she didn’t have for him.
The third season of Succession started well then perhaps wandered a little far into the corporate weeds and let the family stuff, the emotional heft, fall by the wayside. But the second half gathered everything back up and the last four or five episodes were first-class rehearsals for the sheer perfection of the finale; the story tighter than ever, the writing acute and subtle (and never more so than in the callback to Tom’s story of Sporus when, after Shiv’s call from the car, he asks Greg to throw his lot in with him once more), brilliantly funny and wounding by turns.
A fourth season is now in the offing. It’s hard to see how they can top this one. But isn’t that what we always say?
