The course of a board meeting ne’er did run smooth, and in the finale of Succession last night, the Roy siblings got send-offs of the loftiest kind. Such were the riches of Shakespearean tropes you could pick any you fancied and make it fit: here was Kendall, taking on Logan’s figurative mantle as a latter-day Lear, cast out into the wilderness and gazing out into the stormy Hudson with his loyal Fool – slash Colin – standing at a discreet distance. There was Roman hiding on an island doing his best Caliban, a disfigured monster both wounded and despised by those who raised him. There’s Shiv in the back of the car, deciding she’ll leave the damn spot exactly where it is as she and Tom cement their alliance of business-bloodlust.
It would be fair to say that Jesse Armstrong’s final episode gave us all the high-stakes drama we might have hoped for, as the scions of the Roy dynasty showed themselves at their most vulnerable and also their most repugnant. (It also gave us not one – but two! – fist fights.) But wait – what about the jokes? Succession is a comedy-drama after all. Yes, there was the “meal fit for a king”, in which Shiv and Roman made a barf-a-rama milkshake for the apparently anointed Kendall (maybe that’s what King Charles was chugging behind that curtain?), although that was arguably the only mildly dud moment in the otherwise thrilling episode: a case of the-actors-are-having-more-fun-doing-this-than-we-are-watching-it. Luckily for everyone though, there was Peter.
The Roys’ mother, Lady Caroline Collingwood, has long been the show’s secret comic weapon. I’m not sure if you have to be British to fully appreciate quite how brilliantly she’s written (and acted, by Harriet Walter), but her chilly displays of affection and casual (and, importantly, funny) cruelty are devastatingly good, and her key role in the final episode was a gift. But what’s better than Lady Caroline on her own? Lady Caroline with a shyster fancy-man! Peter, who appeared for the first time in season three, is also an inspired portrayal of a very certain brand of upper-class English oleaginousness – hair a little longer than it should be; a surprising ability to tan; a lack of two pennies to rub together.
To be honest, it did seem somewhat against the run of play that it was to Lady Caroline’s leaky Bahamian retreat (“I seem to have landed myself the only hell-hole in paradise”) that her three children fled for their private showdown. Was her chilliness starting to thaw? Was she drawing the three of them, finally, to her birdlike bosom? Ah, but of course not! She had invited them for dinner for a paltry meal (because yes! Posh people are unbelievably stingy with food. It’s an actual fact) so that Peter (another savagely good bit of acting, this time by Pip Torrens) and his “absolute whizz” friend Jonathan could pitch their indescribably bleak vision for a “no bells and whistles” care home facility.
To be honest, it might actually have been – by stealth – the darkest moment in a blissfully dark episode in which every character was somehow delivered a satisfactory ending despite none of them (except, maybe, at a push, Lukas Matsson), being meaningfully satisfied themselves. And yet there was a moment of light: the Roy kids finally having a modicum of revenge on their mother’s succubus husband in the most slapstick of ways – by Roman licking Peter’s “special cheese”. It wasn’t witty, it wasn’t clever; it was blissfully, sillily dumb, and heartily deserved. So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
