Succession’s finale was so punishing that my internal organs felt like Roman Roy’s face

SUCCESSION

Judgement:

Verdict: Everything we hoped it would be.

Call me a snowflake awake, but that unforgiving finale needed a trigger warning.

Not about the ‘strong language from the start and beyond’ – it’s the very last episode of Succession (Sky Atlantic), the sweariest £@%&ing show in television history.

We would have been shocked if it wasn’t for strong language.

But we should have been warned that what followed was 90 minutes of drama, so bruising, so punishing that by the end my internal organs felt like Roman Roy’s face – stitched up and bleeding all over.

At the very least, we deserved an admonition: “This program contains intense scenes of psychological and emotional breakdown.

“Don’t stop watching if you can’t bear to see your favorite characters ripped apart, their dreams ground to dirt, their foibles savagely exploited. This is self-destruction on a cosmic scale.”

And before you read on, one more warning – it’s all spoilers from this point on.

Don’t keep reading unless you caught up on last night’s climax. If you don’t want to know how the story ends, well. . . you know what Logan Roy (Brian Cox) would tell you to do.

For Roman (Kieran Culkin), his brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and his sister Siobhan (Sarah Snook), vying to inherit their father’s empire, the latest round of betrayal was worse than anything they’ve done to each other since the succession. started in 2018.

The details are insanely intricate, but the Roy media empire was about to be sold to a weird Swedish internet billionaire and Siobhan (or Shiv) thought she had secured the role of corporate executive – leaving her brothers out.

Instead, sad Swede Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) cheated on her and offered the job to her husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen).

When Shiv found out, she exacted revenge by vetoing the deal along with her brothers.

But at the last minute, she couldn’t bring herself to vote for King Kendall. The Vikings won.

The Roys imploded. “Losers never win,” grinned a smug spin doctor.

That bare-bones summary doesn’t do justice to the many twists and turns, some of which were totally unexpected.

In the opening act, the warring Roys were friends again, just for one night. Kendall revealed the real cause of his obsession with becoming CEO: “Dad promised me when I was seven. He put me down at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton.”

That was right. This murderous civil war was started by a throwaway comment to a little boy in a candy store.

The three returned to childhood and ransacked their mother’s kitchen to make Kendall a “meal fit for a king” – mixing milk, cocoa powder, canned slop and a splash of saliva in a blender, then pouring it over his head .

It was a fragile moment of unity and a slice of slapstick in a script brimming with some of Succession’s most telling, quotable lines. Shiv dismissed husband Tom as “a very interchangeable modular part.”

Matsson revealed his deep-seated creepiness when he explained why he took on Tom instead of the pregnant Shiv: “Why don’t I get the man who put the baby inside her, instead of the baby lady?”

At a house cleanup at Logan’s New York apartment organized by the siblings’ half-brother, Connor (Alan Ruck), the entire clan gathered to lay claim to whatever. artifacts they imagined. They put stickers on their favourites.

Unlucky cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) tried to get a seat at the board table, but instead got a sticker on his forehead, body and soul possessed by bullying Tom.

A video was playing in the regal dining room, filmed at one of their father’s last dinner parties.

Kendall, Shiv, and Roman watched in silence, seeing a side of the old man they’d never known: the real Logan Roy.

He was surrounded by his loyal lieutenants, chuckling at their party tricks. His mistress Kerry laid her head lovingly on his shoulder.

Connor, the only one of his children at the table, got up to perform a nursery rhyme in the foul-mouthed, red-hot style of Logan himself. The gold-plated quarter fell.

Connor, the semi-detached sibling, the one who didn’t care who won the succession battle, was comfortable with his father like none of the others could ever be.

Even more devastating was Roman’s flopped revelation, during a boardroom confrontation, that he and Kendall were probably not even their father’s natural children. Shiv was the only blood relative.

At the time, I feared for Jeremy Strong, a method actor known for staying in character during filming. He grabbed Culkin by the throat and began to claw at his eyes.

Those offices have glass walls. Every executive, all assembled employees and consultants were on hand to witness this climactic disintegration.

But they didn’t see it the way we do. It was really traumatic. Some of us can be forever scarred. There really should have been warnings.