HBO’s Succession just aired its final episode; a tragic epic of generation-defining proportions. And in doing so, the cursed tale of Kendall, Roman, Shiv and their dad solidified itself as the defining masterpiece of the television format.
Succession is an intricate series which contains many multitudes. On a first impression, it’s easy to fixate on its absolutely pitch-perfect comedy, its razor-sharp political and social commentary or its expertly satirical approach to its condemnation of the uber wealthy. But beneath this shiny exterior, Succession is, at its ugly and rotten core, a brutal autopsy of the violent cycle of abuse and trauma perpetuated across generations.
It’s a fable about the burdens you hand down to your children, infecting them with the illness of your cruelty and forcing them to bear the weight of your own pain and failures until it ultimately destroys you both. It’s an examination of nature vs nurture and ultimately a question of whether or not we can be born with original sin built into us, as a result of evil bred from our parents, forever running away from it but never being able to escape our fate. Or, whether it’s possible to break the cycle and reject our sordid parental destiny.
Logan Roy; the famed but ageing tyrannical CEO of media conglomerate Waystar ROYCO, has four adult children who, as the title suggests, are competing to be his successor. The show centres on Kendall, Roman and Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, his three children from his ex-wife Caroline. And on the periphery in a supporting capacity is his eldest Connor, who comes from a previous relationship and is largely alienated from his siblings.
Though allowing strains of genuine care and affection for his children to bleed through and weave into his barbarity in his own twisted fashion, Logan is a callous, abusive force of nature. He has raised his children on cruelty and under the crushing weight of his impossible to meet expectations. From his first minutes on screen he regularly insults, berates, belittles, gaslights and terrifies them into submission in a pattern that has only evolved since their childhood, trapping them in their childlike vulnerability around him. He makes them resent and compete against each other in his own sick game for his approval and has led to all of the children, bar Connor who is ultimately blessed by being excluded from the family, having an inability to be intimate, vulnerable or maintain a normal relationship, romantic or otherwise. The only way of love they know is in their father’s abuse, as he doles out equal parts affection and fear.
From impoverished beginnings in Scotland before moving to America and building his fortune, fragments of Logan’s own tortured upbringing strike like quick, sporadic flashes throughout the series and inform his parenting. His back is raked with scars, which his children never see, though they are aware of the looming memory of “evil uncle Noah” who raised him and, eventually, of the incident which created the foundation of the Logan Roy we know. He returned home from boarding school ill and, for the rest of his childhood, was allowed to believe that he brought home the polio which killed his baby sister.
With it being ingrained into him as an innocent child that he had poisoned his sister, when it came time to have his own family, it makes sense that Logan saw his role, his destiny, to be to poison them too. In many ways, he resents his children for having such an easy and privileged upbringing in comparison to his own. Even though, as Kendall once points out, it was him who gave them this life. He is jealous of his own children having a stability which he never did in his terrifying upbringing and so, in an attempt to take them down a peg, has to overcompensate by terrorising them. Perpetuating a cycle of trauma and spreading his poison through them until it’s the only way of life they know.
*spoilers for all of Succession from this point onward*
In the first season, Connor tells Roman “Dad’s theory was; you got two fighting dogs, you send the weak one away. You punish the weak one, then everyone knows the hierarchy, then everyone’s happy.” in a peak into Logan’s sadistic, competitive parenting style. And this dog metaphor evolves into a consistent motif throughout the show.
In one of the series’ signature scenes in its third season, their mother Caroline who is mostly absent but makes occasional guest appearances and displays her own deeply apathetic parenting style, coldly tells Shiv that she should’ve had dogs instead of children. And when Shiv retorts with “well you could’ve had dogs, mom”, Caroline offers arguably the defining analysis of Logan’s parenting with “your father never saw anything he loved that he didn’t want to kick it just to see if it would still come back.”
And the result of his reign of terror and repeated kicking of his children to see how many times they’d crawl right back, is three of the most devastating and intricately conjured characters in media history. Kendall, Roman and Shiv are each uniquely contorted products of their monstrous upbringing. They are fractured mirrors of Logan and are in a constant battle to desperately win his approval, living off each tiny crumb of attention or praise from him like addicts chasing their next hit.
Roman Roy is arguably the show's most prickly and undefinable character. He’s a complicated web of deep self-esteem issues and vague sexual trauma which have shaped him into the deeply disturbed, wise cracking, jokester playboy who never takes anything seriously for fear of unlocking an ounce of his tightly locked up emotions and will make a joke about himself before you get the chance to.
From the crumbs of information that we are fed, Roman was victim to physical abuse in the most conventional way of the Roy kids. As a child, Roman was locked in a cage and forced to pretend to be a dog and eat dog food in a twisted game his siblings got amusement from, to the point that he recounts “I went weird and that’s why Dad sent me away to [military school].” We get the casual disposal of anecdotes like “Dad, you beat Roman with a fucking slipper in Gustav till he cried for ordering lobster, remember?” and “What are you sorry for?... hitting Rome when he was a kid?” In season 2, we witness Logan strike Roman across the face for cracking a joke at his expense, as is his nature.
The justification of this abuse is Logan’s continuous jeering of “Roman you’re a moron” and various other echoes of that same sentiment. Constantly reminding Roman of how worthless he is and keeping him alienated, which Shiv and Kendall often participate in as they have been conditioned to.
There is a deep sexual element to how Roman’s disturbed nature manifests. Though it is never confirmed, one could theorize that there is undisclosed sexual trauma in Roman’s past. Because as an adult, we see him completely unable to be intimate with another person or experience sexuality in a normal capacity. Early in the show he fends off sexual advances from his girlfriend Tabitha, telling her that he’ll only agree to have sex with her if they can make it “wrong”, though he’s eventually unable to go through with it even under those circumstances. We get comments like Shiv’s “You know sooner or later you’re actually going to have to fuck something, right?” and after he storms out of the room, calling her a ‘bitch’ in response, she tells Kendall “It’s not my fault he’s got a sex thing.”
This kind of scathing, unsympathetic commentary is par for the course and again something his siblings have inherited from their father. Logan once speculates as to whether or not Roman is a “f*g” in front of his face. And after an equal parts horrifying and hilarious scene where Roman accidentally sends his dad a dick pic intended for someone else, Logan asks him “are you a sicko?”, “so what is it son? Are you scared of pussy?” and later says; “if you need to get straightened out, get straightened out.” This vile rhetoric is constant towards him. And in the summation of this treatment, Shiv tells Roman in the season 3 finale “You know Dad’s never going to choose you, because he thinks there’s something wrong with you.”
There is also a Freudian knot to Roman’s sexuality, which sees him enter into a perverse sexual relationship with his pseudo mother figure Gerri Kellman, one of Logan’s most trusted high-ups and Shiv’s godmother. This manifests in the form of him masturbating while she berates him with insults and tells him how repulsive he is, giving him confirmation of his worst thoughts about himself. There are various visual parallels used to highlight this dynamic, such as a shot during Roman’s speech at Logan’s funeral which shows his cold mother Caroline, before cutting to Gerri. Freudian influences are directly acknowledged only once when Logan callously jokes to Roman “you may wanna screw your mother, but I am okay in that department, thank you.”
The key to Roman’s character and understanding his many eccentric and disturbed behaviours is the utter lack of self-worth he is fuelled by beneath his barbed exterior. It’s been instilled in him from his earliest memories by his abuse. Of the dog game, Kendall tells Roman “you enjoyed it”, indicating that Roman adapted by ‘enjoying’ his abuse, or at least convincing himself that he did; a common survival mechanism for victims. And upon the questioning of Logan hitting Roman as a kid, Roman immediately retorts with “Oh, no, everyone hit me. I mean, I was fucking annoying.”
In her novel Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn famously wrote that “a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort”. This is a quote which I have often seen associated with all four Roy kids. However, nowhere does it ring as true as it does with Roman. From when he was barely cognisant, Roman has been abused and told that he deserves to be abused, given constant justifications for why, by simply existing, he had brought it on himself. So, he genuinely still believes, even as an adult, that he is deserving of constant abuse and mistreatment. That’s his purpose and he just has to absorb and internalize it all.
Though he was beaten around by his father for his entire life more than his siblings, and reduced down to nothing, in a perverse result, it is Roman who shows the most authentic love and affection for his father and siblings. It’s Roman who, when Logan is sick in the first episode of the show, treasures one of his cardigans that smells like him. And it’s Roman who is utterly broken when he dies. When he is unable to follow through on giving the eulogy and breaks down, Roman Roy morphs back into a small child right in front of our eyes. He sobs and stares at his father’s casket, asking his big brother “Is he in there? Can we get him out?”. Later that episode, at the site of his burial, Roman mutters “he made me breathe funny”, a rare admission of the despicable abuse inflicted on him by his father which is only more chilling following his expression of how much he misses him despite this.
Roman’s adult life which sees him frozen in a childlike vulnerability and simultaneous inability to express real emotion, is the result of him internalizing this abuse and becoming so accustomed to it, he doesn’t know how to function without it. It’s why he can't’ get off sexually without someone belittling him. It’s why, after Logan’s death, he craves and seeks out the familiarity of the abuse.
In season 4 episode 6 Kendall has footage of Logan digitally edited to say that “Roman Roy has a micro penis”, which he sends to Roman to poke fun at him. But the episode ends with Roman looping the audio over and over, getting comfort from giving himself a hit of his father’s denigration which he has been in withdrawal from and has no idea how to live without. And later that final season at the end of the penultimate episode, after breaking down at the funeral, Roman willingly goes into the thick of a violent mob of people who hate his family, actively seeking a beating to comfort him and replace the void now left where his father’s abuse previously lived for almost his entire life. Because no matter how many times Logan Roy kicks him, Roman will still come crawling back every time.
However, in the series finale which sees Waystar ROYCO be taken away from the children once and for all, it is arguably Roman who after everything, has the closest resemblance to a ‘happy ending’. Our first sight of him in the finale is another glimpse at that little boy, dressed like a child, with stitches and bandages on his head, and hiding out in his mother’s house until his siblings come to retrieve him. He is recruited back into one final push for the kids to takeover with Kendall at the helm.
But as we progress towards the climactic board meeting, Kendall begins to increasingly push himself further into the Logan-shaped hole in the Roy orbit. After belittling and playfully slapping him on the back of the head at their father’s funeral in an incredibly Logan-like manor, this culminates in a sickening scene between the pair in their father's office, the primary location of so much suffering in their lives.
When Roman breaks down and is unsure of whether or not he can go through with the vote, Kendall brings him in for what initially appears to be an affectionate embrace. But as Roman leans into his big brother and allows himself to be wrapped in his arms, Kendall begins to roughly push Roman’s head into his shoulder. He grinds his face down and keeps him trapped there against protests of pain, ripping open Roman’s fresh stitches. And as he’s doing so, he kisses the side of his head. It’s a sick marriage of love and abuse and the deep interconnectivity of those things in this world. One can’t exist without the other for the Roy kids. And perhaps it’s the moment which signposts Roman’s eventual support of Shiv when she decides she can’t let Kendall take over.
But as his siblings are wallowing in their failure, our final glimpse of Roman Roy is him sitting at a bar alone, drinking a martini and softly, melancholically smiling to himself. In season 1 Roman Roy tells his siblings in the Waystar office that “this place was essentially a cage to me”. And as he sits sipping his martini, four seasons later, in a tangible sense it may not seem like much has changed in his life over the course of the four seasons. But now, finally, Roman is free. He may not have broken the cycle, but he has at least broken out of his cage and removed himself from being the beaten dog at its centre.
Siobhan Roy, as astutely noted by fans online, has had her name shortened to Shiv, the term used to describe a makeshift weapon intended to inflict violence. This is indicative of Shiv’s uniquely horrific battle as Logan Roy’s only daughter and how her life’s pursuit has been to cut the vulnerability out of herself like a cancer. She has had to make herself hard and impenetrable, as a survival mechanism against being born female, which she has been bred to believe is a cursed affliction. One of the first things she does when eulogising Logan at his funeral, after sharing an anecdote about she and her siblings always playing outside of his office as small children only to have him savagely yell at them, is to simply state that “it was hard to be his daughter”. She follows up with the cutting analysis that “he couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head.”
There is so much subtext to Shiv’s attempt to make herself as impenetrable as possible to survive this hardship, evident even down to her wardrobe. Season 1 Shiv who is happily outside the family business and is still her father’s little girl has a softer look with long, curly hair and warm colours. But once she throws her hat in the ring for successor and truly enters the battle for Logan’s approval, she sports a sleek bob like a helmet and almost exclusively wears pant suits in a cool colour palette. It’s her armour. The closest she can get to being respected is to become one of the boys.
But the tragic fact of the matter is that Logan Roy is many things, and a dominant misogynist is one of them. We know that he had Connor’s mother locked away in a psychiatric hospital when Connor was a child and that, regardless of her own deep flaws as a parent, he took the three kids away from Caroline upon their divorce, leaving her with essentially no relationship to her children. From being part of a ratpack of sleazy men including close friends like Lester, who the kids affectionately nicknamed “uncle Mo” as teenagers in a play on the term ‘molester’, to covering up a massive sexual abuse scandal onboard the Waystar cruise line and having a steady line of young mistresses, Logan makes no attempt to water down his blatant disregard or objectification of women. And no matter how much Shiv desperately tries, she will never be taken seriously by Logan, or frankly by anyone in this male-dominated field.
Logan plays with her emotions and expectations when its beneficial to him, making her think at one point that he wants her to be successor, until he’s publicly asked who the successor will be and refuses to name Shiv, exhibiting the tragedy that he never truly saw her as fit for the role. He casually dismisses her contributions, like at the annual shareholder meeting in season 3 when she’s trying to talk to him and, in front of her peers, he screams “will you stop buzzing in my fucking ear!” And in one of Successions rare on-the-nose acknowledgements of such a theme, Logan tells Shiv “You’re a young woman with no experience” and when she sarcastically notes “a woman – that's a minus”, he viciously yells back “well of course it’s a fucking minus!”
Just like the Roys have been bred to pile in on Roman’s self-esteem issues, we get similar parallels of Kendall and Roman adopting and echoing their father’s misogyny. Roman’s constant quips and one-liners include a slew of blatantly misogynistic insults and taboo sexual innuendos towards his sister. In season 4, episode 8 during the election in which Roman is ruthlessly gunning for the victory of white supremacist, sexist, republican candidate Jeryd Mencken, he is repeatedly cruel and callous towards Shiv’s legitimate fears and points of rebuttal against putting their weight behind Mencken. And while performatively yelling “fuck the patriarchy!” at public events and portraying himself as being at the cutting edge of wokeness, in private Kendall takes an undermining jab at the increasing centring of feminist narratives in the current social and political climate when he spits out a cruel “only ‘cause you’re the girl. Girls count double now, didn’t you know? […] it’s only your teets that give you any value.” And after promising her that they would remain a united trio and not cut her out when taking over as CEO and COO after Logan’s death, her brothers break this almost immediately by freezing her out and leaving her in the dust. Showing that, just like their father, they never truly saw Shiv as an equal despite her desperate efforts.
There is a scene which is in contention for my favourite of the entire show and is devastating on such a primal level. It’s a refracted display of the horrifying nature of the way only mothers and daughters can touch each other so uniquely close to the bone. I’m paraphrasing, but it's the embodiment of that famous quote about how a mother can resent her daughter because she looks at her and sees everything she never had while a daughter can resent her mother because she looks at her and sees everything that she will one day become. It occurs in Italy in season 3, on an evening when Shiv and her mother smoke a cigarette together.
Speaking to her for the first time completely unvarnished and with no reserve, Caroline deploys a takedown of her only daughter with “You were thirteen and you knew how to twist the knife. You knew then and you know now. And I might cry.” Shiv sarcastically retorts with “Oh yeah? Where’s the onion?” in a display of her inability to allow herself to be vulnerable, even in this conversation which feels like the most raw and honest moment she will ever get with her mother. When Caroline responds with the killer “You were quite a piece of work. You were my onion. You are my onion.” Shiv concludes with “Yeah well, you’re my fucking onion.” And in a lifetime defining admission, Caroline tells Shiv “Truth is, I probably never should’ve had children.” It’s one of the most crushing and ugly exchanges of dialogue you could ever conjure between two people and Shiv simply braces herself through it.
The final season sees a more literal manifestation of both Shiv’s battle with the disadvantages of womanhood in this race, and her deepest fears of reflecting the ugliness which lives inside her mother, in the form of pregnancy. It’s something she conceals like a dirty secret and treats like a disability more often than a blessing. And after the scene in season 3 when her own mother essentially tells her to her face that she should never have children and would be an awful mother with “Some people just aren’t made to be mothers”, she is staring at a mirror of what she believes she is destined to become; her mother. A broken, lonely woman who was never once truly allowed inside the room and could never bear to unarm herself, even with her own children, leaving her a hollow shell of a woman.
The central driving force of Shiv’s narrative throughout the show is her fascinatingly turbulent relationship with her husband Tom Wambsgans. From middle class roots, with a hunger to claw his way into the one percent, Shiv and Tom’s first season of the show begins with him proposing to her in the hospital while her father is potentially dying. And it ends with Shiv, after they have just gotten married, proposing that they have an open marriage, to make herself feel better about the fact that she has already been cheating on Tom with an ex-boyfriend throughout their engagement. Each of them having exercised forms of entrapment on the other, the foundation of their marriage is volatile, and a dark seed of resentment towards her is planted in Tom. After a second season of her negging him and showing little respect for him to make herself feel more powerful, he tells her “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you, would be less than the sad I get from being with you.”
Still though, these masochistic broken people in a tug of war for control in their fraught relationship stay together and in a key scene in the third season where the pair are “roleplaying” during sexual foreplay, Shiv tells Tom “That’s why you love me, even though I don’t love you.” With the horrifying truth of this statement bleeding through the “roleplay”, Tom responds with a hearty “fuck you.” Even when questioned about it the next day, Shiv responds with the despicably playful and cryptic “I may not love you, but I do love you.” In retrospect, this may be seen as the moment Shiv seals her own fate. As the season ends with a The Godfather inspired ending of Shiv, after she and her siblings have been devastated by being crushed into the ground by their father once again after a failed takeover, seeing her father through the doorway sinisterly smile and pat Tom on the shoulder, indicating that it was him who kept her outside and betrayed her by giving Logan the heads-up on their plan.
The final season is a reconning with years of warfare between them, like their blowout argument in episode 7 which results in dagger after dagger, including Tom, who doesn’t know at the time that she’s pregnant, echoing her mother’s claims that Shiv would be a bad mother. And Shiv transparently claiming that she doesn’t even care about Tom. But through the vicious conflict, the season ultimately sees Shiv doomed to her mother’s fate and for the cycle to reset.
Because at the crux of Shiv and Tom’s poisonous marriage is Shiv’s complete inability and/or unwillingness to show any vulnerability. To her, it’s evidence of her innate femininity which she cannot shed, and so she has made every effort to sever it, to the detriment of her marriage to a man who genuinely did love her. Be it by consistently disregarding his attempts at authentic emotional bonding, negging him with subtly undermining comments or flinching away from his attempted physical affection when they’re in the office and she doesn’t want anyone to see her in a human moment. In a defining analysis of their relationship, and a statement that is now laced in irony considering the ending of the third and fourth season, Logan calls Shiv a “fucking coward” in the season 1 because, as he tells her; “you’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you because you don’t want to risk being betrayed.”
This observation exhibits both Shiv’s superiority complex over Tom and where she gets the confidence to belittle him so much, as well as highlighting her greatest fear of being betrayed, which would indicate her having put raw emotion out in the open only to have it crushed. To her it’s a worst-case scenario she must avoid at all costs. And so, she has taken preventative measures like marrying a man she sees as inferior and less cutthroat than her, and locking away her emotions tightly, preventing him from truly getting close to her. Though of course the tragedy of the matter is that even these measures don’t protect Shiv.
In season 4, episode 5 when he asks about the state of their marriage, Shiv tells Lukas Mattsen that she and Tom broke each other’s hearts. But this heartbreak is tragically all too familiar to Shiv in a transcendent sense because, as her former stepmother Marcia says to Shiv of Logan at his funeral “he broke your hearts too”. Because in a lifetime of savagely contorting herself to fit into a mould where she might be taken seriously by her father, Siobhan Roy cut away so much of herself and shrunk herself down so small, that in the end she had nothing left of herself. And still, no amount of self-mutilation was ever enough for her father to respect her, leaving her with an eternal heartbreak baked into her.
And in arguably the most deeply depressing ending one could possibly have, Shiv is cut out of a chance to take over once again and Tom, in a final nail in the coffin of betrayal, takes on the CEO role she had been promised. However then, the last time we see Siobhan Roy, she is waiting in the car for her CEO husband Tom and is evidently choosing to stay with him and have a family as her only chance at moderate success for herself. And as he opens up his hand in a silent demand for her to take it, knowing she no longer has any room to say no, she reluctantly obliges.
In her face in that final moment is a reflection of every single one of Shiv’s worst nightmares having come true. In the end it is Tom who took on the insidious mantel of Logan Roy, replacing Logan as the domineering force for Shiv to bend her will towards. And after spending a lifetime brutalising herself to avoid ever being like her mother, detesting everything about Caroline. She has become her and is doomed forever to be the distant mother and subservient wife of the ruthless CEO. That’s all she’ll ever be.
And finally, the centrepiece of Succession for the length of its run is Kendall Roy, who will no doubt go down in history among the greatest fictional characters of all time. Divorced, increasingly estranged from his children, plagued by substance abuse and reduced to isolation, Kendall repeatedly plunges to depths of despair so deep, at times every second he carries on living seems to bring on excruciating pain. But at the core of Kendall Roy is a constant push and pull. It’s the pursuit of trying, despite everything, to be good and to do good. And it’s the temptation to give up and succumb to the darkness when you are beaten down so many times in that pursuit.
The tragedy of Kendall Roy is seeing him spend three seasons trying to take down his father, to slay the beast that has haunted him since childhood, only to shatter so completely when Logan is actually gone. It is then when he realises, in the grand tradition of Michael Corleone, that the only way to fill that void and perhaps his true destiny all along, has been to become Logan. It’s the only sense of purpose he has.
Kendall’s introduction comes as he is expecting his father to step down and name him as successor, having dedicated his life to following in his father’s footsteps of success. As we uncover in the finale, the burden of being successor was forced upon Kendall when he was only seven years old, Logan grooming him to see this as his only possible destiny. This is what makes it so cruel when Logan pulls the rug out from under him and insists on remaining CEO. This propels Kendall through a season of trying to take his father down in revenge, condemning him for his cruelty and convincing himself that he could be better. But the season ends with Kendall, while attempting to secure cocaine, committing vehicular manslaughter when he and the young waiter who he is in the car with, crash off a bridge and into a lake and Kendall, frozen with fear, leaves the young man to die.
Logan uncovers this and the season ends with an absolutely chilling scene which sees Logan’s cruelty and bizarre love for his children wrapped into one. He indicates that he is aware of what happened with the waiter and, though not explicitly voicing this, his obvious implication is that he is holding this over Kendall and Kendall must now give in and bow down to him. But all of this is communicated through a tenderness and as Kendall breaks down in tears, Logan simply holds open his arms and Kendall dives into his embrace. In a moment which transports you back to a little boy and his father, the same way we see a small child in Roman at his father’s funeral, Logan soothes a crying Kendall and tells him “You’re my boy. You’re my number one boy.”
Season 2 is devastating in Logan’s manipulation of Kendall, essentially keeping him around as a beaten, docile dog who follows him around and surrenders to his every demand. In a sick twist of fate, it is only then, when he has been completely broken and stripped of his dignity, that his father shows genuine affection for him. When Kendall tells his on-again-off-again girlfriend Naomi Pierce “He loves me, he does. It’s just a wrong kind of love expression”, Naomi tells Kendall “Ken, he loves the broken you. That’s what he loves.”
When Logan tries to make Kendall the “blood sacrifice” to take the fall for the massive Waystar sexual abuse scandal, Kendall claims his agency back in a wonderful twist in which he exposes Logan on live TV. Though, even this victory is short lived as season 3 sees Kendall beaten down into submission once more. This time, however, in the tradition of Logan indoctrinating his children into his abuse and competitive parenting style of passing the behaviours onto each other, Kendall’s siblings carry out the majority of Logan’s dirty work. Be it Shiv slandering Kendall publicly as a drug addicted head case or Roman bullying and physically pushing an already vulnerable Kendall to the ground at his birthday party. Kendall is enemy number one to Logan and therefore, to stay in his good graces, the only way for his siblings to survive is to join the pile-on.
Though Roman is the avatar for physical violence at the hands of Logan in the show and is who Logan has the least amount of basic respect for, in a deeper sense it is Kendall who Logan has been locked onto as his target since he was a child. He made Kendall the first in line for succession, cursed him with the weight of it and then hated him for it. It is Kendall who Logan keeps trapped on a hamster wheel, allowing him to build himself up and grow confident once more, just so he can beat him down again in a sadistic pattern.
In probably the most monumental scene the pair share, the penultimate episode of season 3 features a quiet showdown over dinner between father and son. An utterly defeated Kendall who has been broken down beyond repair begs Logan to let him out of this cycle once and for all. After saying “Dad, we can’t do this bullshit forever”, Logan, like the cat unwillingly to stop playing with his mouse, delivers “maybe I want you close” with a smirk.
Kendall understands that at this point his last remaining chance of being a ‘good person’ in any sense is to escape from his father’s cultches rather than trying to reinvent and imorove the system he’s already in.“I can’t. I tried. I thought that I could change things. But I’m not as - there's things you’re able to do that I can’t, maybe” he explains, before delivering the blow “You’ve won because you’re corrupt and so is the world.” And the most devastating thing about Kendall finally admitting “you know, I hate to say this, ‘cause I love you, but you’re kind of... evil” is that even now, he can’t condemn his father’s despicable actions without qualifying it with his love first.
He gives one last plead of “let me out, okay. Pay up and let me out. I don’t wanna be you. I’m a good guy.” But Logan, who is ruthless in his torture of Kendall, retorts by once again punishing him with a reminder of the incident which has paralysed him with guilt and self-loathing; “How long was that kid alive before he started sucking in water?” The scene concludes by Kendall once again, almost as if he desperately needs to convince himself, saying “I’m better than you.” The episode ends in an apparent attempted suicide with Kendall letting his head drop into the pool and in a complete and utter breakdown in the finale, he tells his siblings “I thought I could take us all out of it. I did... I did try” and “It’s fucking lonely... I’m all apart.”
But when Logan dies suddenly in season 4, completely fracturing the universe of the Roy kids who were eternally frozen in a childlike state, at the whim of their father, Kendall stops believing that he can be better than Logan. Instead, to fill the void of his father’s absence, he finally surrenders to his fate of becoming him. And we quickly witness him devolve into a representation of everything he once despised about his father.
In the season 2 finale when Kendall asks if Logan ever truly believed he had what it takes to take over, Logan tells him no because “You’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.” And in a moment as drenched in meaning and significance as the christening in The Godfather which sees Michael Corleone formally submit himself to full, uninhibited evil, season 4, episode 4 ends with Kendall making his first ever truly ruthless, Logan-inspired business move. And as a sinister smile slowly unfurls across his face, a killer is born.
As we witness Kendall eulogise his father at his funeral, “You’re kinda evil” and “I don’t wanna be you. I’m a good guy” has been replaced by “That magnificent, awful force of him […] my god, I hope it’s in me.” Kendall, who was originally making efforts to be present for his children and showed tenderness towards them, attempting to break the cycle of Logan’s abusive parenting, is now essentially estranged from the kids who want nothing to do with him. And just like Logan did to Caroline when he mercilessly took full custody of the kids, Kendall plans on doing the same to his ex-wife Rava. Kendall’s disingenuous claim to Rava that his actions are “all for them” is eerily reminiscent of Logan Roy’s season 1 “Everything I have done, I’ve done for my children.” And of course, neither man is being truthful about their motivations
Kendall, who previously defended Shiv from the insulting daggers of Logan, imitates her stuttering in episode 8, in a cruel, below the belt tactic used by Logan when he mimics her voice in the season 3 finale. Kendall who, when Logan slapped Roman in season 2, jumped in with an impassioned defence of “NO! DON’T FUCKING TOUCH HIM!” is the one who now slaps Roman on the back of the head while cruelly mocking him for breaking down when attempting to speak at their father’s funeral, and then busts open his stitches in a violent embrace.
The tragedy at the centre of the generational cycle of abuse is that when you spend a lifetime conditioned by fear and victimhood, many think that the only way they can ever break out of being a victim and gain a sense of control and confidence, is to abuse others in turn. By placing others beneath yourself and inflicting suffering upon them, you are naturally placing yourself at a higher point of power and control and thus, seemingly having removed yourself from victimhood only by becoming a perpetrator. The cycle continues.
In the climax of the final episode, Shiv, in presumably some combination of a sick realization of her destiny to be CEO Tom’s wife and a recognition of her brother shifting into their despicable father, pulls the plug. Telling them she’s tanking the vote in a scene so explosive it results in a physical altercation between the siblings, Kendall tells her that if he can’t take over Waystar, he may as well be dead. He tells her that this is the only thing he knows how to do. His whole life has led him towards believing that he has no potential and no purpose beyond filling his father’s shoes.
And so, when that’s taken away from him, he has nothing. On the night of her wedding years prior, Shiv told Tom that “Love is, it’s like 28 different things. There’s fear, and jealousy and revenge and control.” And though he is blind to it in that moment and utterly devastated by the emptiness he feels creep in and consume him, perhaps what Shiv did was really the ultimate act of love. She saved him from becoming their father. In the final shot of the show as Kendall sits on a bench in central park, there are endless readings of the contorted combination of loss and freedom and grief playing across his features.
Because Kendall, Roman and Shiv have all lived through decades of the cut-throat Olympics of business they were born into and each armed themselves with defences of cruelty and abuse in their fight for survival. But HBO’s Sucession, the defining masterpiece of television, is really all about three children who have wanted nothing else for their whole lives other than for their Daddy to love and respect them. And it’s a Shakespearean tragedy about how ultimately, nothing they could have ever done would have achieved that. And when their father is no longer there like the sun for them to orbit around, the only way they know how to live is to seek out familiar patterns, starting the cycle all over again. Because, as Kendall poses in season 4 episode 8; “maybe the poison drips through.”
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