Dear Gossips,   

Spoiler alert…

Succession ended as it should have – and was there any doubt? By giving us not what we wanted but what we need. Which is why at the 45 minute mark, when Kendall, Roman, and Shiv are in the kitchen, laughing together, smiling at one another, being affectionate with one another, a scene that the audience spent four seasons “wanting”, we also all knew that we would pay for it with what we would eventually “need”. 

 

On Succession, a moment like that will cost you. After all, haven’t we already been told, and by someone who is carrying it, that “the poison drips through”? Power is the poison. The pursuit of it is what brings on the punishment, both for the characters on Succession and for those of who are watching. 

If you were Team Kendall, you paid the price in the final episode when he did what he did to Roman. It was a toxic embrace, the kind of embrace his father specialised in – cruelty disguised as affection. You have enabled a murderer and an abuser. If you were Team Roman, you ended where it began, congratulations you just backed a total waste of time. Roman isn’t free just because he finally admitted that it and they were all “bullsh-t”. Roman has to live with the truth that everyone was right about him all along: he couldn’t do it. And there definitely isn’t any freedom for Team Shiv because if you were Team Shiv, well, she said goodbye to her “dear, dear world of a father” to living in the world of another man, this time her husband. And it used to be that Tom lived in her world.

 

Now the upper hand belongs to him. 

 

Have you seen this? 

 

This is why names are important. This is why AI will never be able to do what writers do. 

But does that really mean Tom Wambsgans is really the winner? Depends how you define winning. Tom Wambsgans’s superpower is pain endurance and cocksucking the right cock. Tom won by figuring out whose abuse he could take to the top and whose dick he would keep sucking. In this case, it’s the dick of the man who just told him he wanted to f-ck his wife. So, sure, take that as a victory but winning was never the point of Succession. The point of Succession, the “need” of Succession, was always, always came down to this: there are no heroes here. And if the audience wanted it, in other words, if the audience was looking for a hero among these losers, seeking power in this tragedy, well, it would make a fool out of you. This is why this series will go down as one of the very best. Succession never forgot itself. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey