Succession & the art of ending
⚠️ Heavy spoilers ahead for the Succession series finale. ⚠️
The Succession series finale aired last Sunday. By most accounts the creators nailed the landing. I thought so too! The show ended coherently and truly. It wasn’t satisfying, though. It didn’t try to tie up every loose end like a Game of Thrones. That’s ok.
Despite all their maneuvering, none of the Roy children ended up running Waystar Royco, the company their father started. Roman sat at a bar, smiling at his insignificance. Kendall watched the Hudson River, still unable to control forces of nature. And, after betraying her brothers, Shiv sat in the back of a car with her husband Tom, who had been named the empty suit successor to Logan Roy.
I really appreciated the ending. Aristotle says the ending of a tragedy should be necessary, it must be inevitable. The actions leading up to the ending define the ending itself such that there’s only one way it could go.
The Succession writers had set up the rules of the world and the ending didn’t bend them at all. Who was best or strongest (or worst) didn’t matter in the end. The structures of power depicted in the show are self-protecting, and reject chaos. Everything the Roys do, that happens during the show, ends up blips on the stock price. The season-long DOJ investigation into the a cruise line scandal peters out and ends in a settlement. The Roys even bet on the stasis of the system when they announced early the results of the election. They relied on the other news orgs following suit with their call; that the system would correct to keep chaos down.
When it came time for a successor to Logan Roy to be chosen, the kids were outside the system, pushing against it. The system chose stasis.
John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, describes two ways a story can end: with resolution or repetition.
By definition-and of aesthetic necessity-a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events, a sequence that can end in only one of two ways: in resolution, when no further event can take place (the murderer has been caught and hanged, the diamond has been found and restored to its owner, the elusive lady has been captured and married), or in logical exhaustion, our recognition that we’ve reached the stage of infinite repetition; more events might follow, perhaps from now till Kingdom Come, but they will all express the same thing-for example, the character’s entrapment in empty ritual or some consistently wrong response to the pressures of his environment. Resolution is of course the classical and usually more satisfying conclusion; logical exhaustion satisfies us intellectually but often not emotionally, since it’s more pleasing to see things definitely achieved or thwarted than to be shown why they can never be either achieved or thwarted. Both achievement and failure give importance to the thing sought; we can feel about it as we feel about values.
Resolution is more satisfying. In Succession, there’s a sense that Roman gets resolution. He recognizes his situation is ‘bullshit.’ Kendall and Shiv, though, are doomed to repeat, and will continue to move and push against their situations.
But it’s repetition. The future sociopathic adventures of Kendall, Shiv and Tom are not part of the story of Succession.
The question of the show was answered, and that’s where we were left. It wasn’t satisfying, but it didn’t need to be. The tragedy of the Roy siblings was that they were only ever creatures of ambition.