Spoilers For Succession Season 4
Oh my god! I feel so f**king empty, the tragedy, the humor, the lies, and the truth. I mean if there is a perfect end to anything this is it and “With Open Eyes” we welcome the end of one of the most historic television ever.
The HBO series Succession created by Jesse Armstrong, has finally ended with its fourth and final season and today we are talking about I guess my feelings on the finale episode titled “With Open Eyes.” Following the last episode’s events we knew that we were heading into the endgame of the series and in the typical Succession way we are ending it in a boardroom filled with people wearing grey and black suits.
We start the episode with Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) side losing almost all of the votes with Roman (Kieran Culkin) nowhere to be found and Shiv (Sarah Snook) thinking she has already won. But as we go on we find out that Roman is staying with his mother in Barbados recuperating after getting injured in the last episode. His mother informs Shiv about his whereabouts but when Kendall asks her she deflects both Shiv and Kendall end up at their mother’s house trying to get Roman on their side and that is where we get some of the most innocent moments with the Roy siblings that we will ever see.
In the beginning, all of them are fighting but when Kendall finds out that Mattson (Alexander Skarsgård) is going to renege on his deal with Shiv, he informs her about it and after some discussion, all of the siblings agree that Kendall should be the next king and we get this moment of siblings being siblings when they get back in the house and decide to coronate Kendall with a “meal fit for a king.” In this meal, Roman and Shiv put everything from egg to eggshells and cinnamon to Shiv’s spit. Kendall then drinks some of the death juice and then Roman pours the rest of it on his head.
After this moment I felt like there is nothing the Roy siblings couldn’t do together, but this is Succession after all and we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop, and low and behold it dropped in a massive f**king way. The board sits down and the votes are split right in the middle between Kendall and Matson’s frontman CEO Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) leaving the deciding vote to Shiv, who walks out of the board meeting saying that she wants a moment to think.
Kendall and Roman follow Shiv into another room and that’s where a huge fight breaks out between all of the siblings when Shiv says that Kendall can’t be the CEO because he wouldn’t be good at it and also killed someone. In reply to that Kendall lies and says that he never killed anyone and he lied to them in Season 3, and he would be a good CEO. The fight continues and there is a very tragic moment when Roman says that we are all bullshit over and over mirroring what Logan said in the second episode of Season 4 that the siblings are “not serious people.”
The board finally decides with Shiv taking Mattson’s side and Tom being crowned as the new CEO of Waystar. We end the series with Shiv and Tom in a car barely holding hands, Roman in a bar drinking, and Kendall taking a lonesome walk near the Hudson River accompanied from a distance by Colin reminding us of Logan in the first episode of Season 4.
We all knew that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for anyone in this series and I objectively know that all of them are terrible people but that doesn’t mean that this finale didn’t make me feel sad for each and every one of them because I really wanted Kendall to win and become the killer he never was in his father’s eyes, and maybe in the future he starts a company which is even more successful than Waystar, but this day will never not be the most crucial moment of his life when he lost everything including the company and his siblings.