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A week on from the Succession finale, nothing feels quite like it did. We've tried licking a big lump of forbidden cheese all over, freezing some nobbies, pitching low-quality retirement-slash-prison complexes to disinterested billionaires. It just isn't working. The buzz of trying to work out which of Kendall, Shiv, Roman or Tom was likely to end up at the top of Waystar-Royco's greasy pole won't come back.
But that hasn't stopped people relitigating that question, and particularly that final time we see Shiv and Tom driving off into an uncertain future. Some saw a lot of The Graduate's closing shot in it – one of director Mark Mylod's favourite films, by the way – while others saw Shiv opening up a possible future front to take another shot at the big chair by placing her hand in Tom's. Showrunner, writer and all-round dramaturgical savant Jesse Armstrong, though, has explained to Variety that he saw it as "a moment of equality" in a deeply weird, unbalanced relationship.
"Chilly, rather terrifying equality, but equality, which has never been the case in that relationship before," Armstrong said. "Tom has always been subservient. Now he has this status, but his status is contingent. That’s kind of what the whole episode has been about.
But while Tom appears to have been sealed he is, as Shiv reminded him earlier on, an empty fucking suit. Lukas Matsson loves him now, but could easily bin him. That gilet stuffed with his hopes and dreams would suddenly look very flaccid.
"Shiv’s status is as all the kids are — secure," Armstrong said. "It’s secure in a financial sense. She has billions of dollars. She has wealth that could never diminish, whatever happened to the world. And she also has a name, which will sort of haunt her and make it interesting, to a certain degree, for the rest of her life, and that can’t be taken away from her. Whereas Tom’s position could be taken away in the click of fingers."
Armstrong pointed out that that not-quite-hand-holding in the back of the car – "a remarkable dry hand on hand" – was equivocal. "It’s not really even human contact. It’s a sort of two pieces of porcelain or something."
That idea of Shiv keeping a toehold in the family business does carry some weight for Armstrong though. "Certainly you could see the situation being a clever stratagem by which Shiv remains in play," he said. "Maybe that thought will occur to her tomorrow or the day after. But for me, the show’s ended at this point and the story is over and that’s where I think they end up."
