Succession is all about power—who has the most, who can wield it the best, and who is disastrously blinded by it. So, as we did last season, every week during Succession’s fourth and final installment, The Ringer checked in on how the hierarchy at Waystar Royco shifted with each passing episode. Even after Logan made a deal with GoJo (and screwed over his kids), everything was still in disarray—and to steal a line from another HBO series, chaos can be a ladder.

1. Tom Wambsgans, CEO

A fascinating theory about Succession’s endgame emerged last week: Giving Tom the last name Wambsgans, it went, was very intentional and in fact inspired by an early 20th-century baseball player. That player, Bill Wambsganss, is best known for turning the only unassisted triple play in World Series history. Meanwhile, there were three Roy kids vying for the top spot. You see where this is going.

Those kinds of rabbit holes are fun to jump down, but you don’t need to fire up Baseball Reference to find the bread crumbs Jesse Armstrong and his team have dropped re: Tom the CEO. They’re in the way he ripped the chicken off Logan’s plate, the poster for the final season, and even the basic plot to King Lear, long said to be Succession’s inspiration. But my personal favorite isn’t subtext at all—it’s the moment in the Season 3 episode “What It Takes” when Tom drops the Midwestern nice and delivers Kendall a bit of sober reality. “My hunch is that you are going to get fucked,” he says after Ken outlines his umpteenth plan to dislodge Logan. “Because I’ve seen you get fucked a lot.”

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Like us, Tom didn’t know at that moment that one day, he’d be the one doing the fucking. And that’s what makes Mr. Wambsgans’s rise all the more remarkable, even if it was destined to be him all along. Tom arrived on our TV sets as an interloper—an outsider marrying into a powerful family, simply for love, he said. And over the course of four seasons, we saw him treated like a puppy dog to kick to see if he’d come back: by Shiv, by her siblings, by fucking Karl. Yes, Tom is competent and hardworking (and loyal, until he isn’t). But he was also one of the boars on the floor, a Christmas tree for white-collar criminals to hang their felonies on. He barely survived knife fights with Cyd and got somewhere at ATN only because of his proximity to Logan, who did call Tom son once, but maybe only because of UTI-induced confusion. As recently as a season ago, it seemed that Tom would be more likely to have a complex relationship with his toilet than have a chance to sit on the Waystar Royco throne. But you can’t plan for a triple play—all you can do is be ready when the ball comes your way.

It turns out all of Tom’s load swallowing was the prep work, because when Matsson needed a pain sponge, well, let’s just say the initial vibe meets went well. When called upon, Tom is more than ready to sing for his supper, even if that means eating red meat and boiling tar for his foreseeable future. Sure, he’ll still have to take a little shit—he knows his new boss wants to fuck his wife, the love he supposedly married for is in serious peril, and he will have to continue to suck the biggest dick in the room—but he played the game on his terms, and he’s now emerged victorious, having pulled off the once unthinkable. Not bad for a highly interchangeable modular part.

Let’s put it another way: Some people are born on third base and think they hit a triple. Others are born far from it and have a knack for tagging people out as they round the bases and head for home. (Who knew the baseball scene from the pilot would be another bread crumb?) Here’s to hoping that Tom’s most worthy opponent from this point on is a plate of cod cheeks and not the Incredible Fuck Brother Bandwagon. 

2. Jesse Armstrong, Mark Mylod, and Co.

Speaking of the Tom bread crumbs, we’d be remiss to not explicitly shout out the people who laid them. Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong, frequent director Mark Mylod, and all the creatives who made this show go deserve every ounce of the accolades they’ll receive in the wake of the show’s conclusion. The conventional wisdom is that Succession started off slow, that it took half of a season before it got any good. But reflecting on the arc of the story, it’s hard to argue that Armstrong and his team didn’t have complete command of the series from Episode 1, Scene 1. Armstrong took King Lear, mixed in the most creative fucks you’ve ever heard, and made it sing. In lesser hands, Succession could’ve been Billions With Better Scenery or Arrested Development for People Who Read The Atlantic. And maybe it was those things a little, but it was also so much more than that—it was a deeply cynical show that somehow forced you to care about proxy battles and the worst people ever dreamed up. It was as funny as it was repellent, deeply intelligent but not afraid to get stupid when necessary. (“We here for you” is my generation’s “Who’s on first?” and no one can tell me otherwise.) Succession had heart—even if that heart was coal-black—and in a world where HBO can’t even be HBO as everything is reduced to content, it was high art. (The colors went, to borrow Tom’s parlance.) And to end this story here—at the peak of its powers and popularity—is a lesson for Kendall Roy, if not for all of us.

“I don’t feel like I’ll be able to write anything as good as this again,” Armstrong said in the post-episode breakdown. And sure, you don’t simply shit out pantheon-level shows the way that Logan spouts out fuck offs. But I’d sure like to see Armstrong try again.

3. Lukas Matsson

If the events of Succession are a game for anyone, they certainly are for the world’s most handsome blood-bricklayer. Matsson gets exactly what he wants: the right to tinker under the hood—both with Waystar and maybe even with his U.S. CEO’s wife. (At least under the right circumstances—sorry to get weird.) The only reason he’s not higher up on this list is because it ultimately doesn’t matter to him. Lose the board vote, and he’s still got one of the biggest properties in tech, despite it being built with blood bricks and juiced India numbers. There are no stakes for Matsson, just playthings, and his ability to play is even more enjoyable for him without the Baby Lady bossing him around. He’s the Joker in a pair of Kyries or Caligula in a Scandinavian palace. You don’t want to get inside that mind, but it sure is fun to watch it work.

4. The Person Who Drew the Cartoon of Shiv and Matsson

We at The Ringer appreciate when great art adorns great writing. I’m personally ready to give the Suge Knight Source Awards speech to woo the illustrator away from the bimonthly magazine world and to the best damn sports and pop culture website/podcast network/did I mention we have TV shows now company around. You’re gonna love drawing Nikola Jokic. 

5. Roman Roy

Kendall may have wanted to kill Logan, but the family sex pest always felt like the most oedipal-coded of the Roy Boys. So, it’s appropriate that when we first spot Roman in “With Open Eyes,” he’s hiding out at what’s become his pity-spank jerk dungeon: Mom’s humble Barbadian abode. But when the camera finds him, he looks nothing like the crypto-fascist in slim-fit dress shirts that we’ve come to love and loathe in equal measure. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt fit for a little boy, accessorized with stitches in his head as a painful reminder of when he tried to be The Man. He’s, in Lady Caroline’s words, very fragile, and for proof of that, just note that Roman’s got no comeback for this line:

The story of Succession, ultimately, is about three kids vying for their father’s love—those rare rays of light that Shiv eulogized last week—as much as it is about their fight for whatever morsels of power Dad let them scrap over. But more so than Shiv or Kendall, Roman was hung up on the former. Maybe it’s because he grew up getting locked in dog crates, or maybe it’s because he once got his tooth knocked out while ostensibly defending his father, but Roman always seemed more susceptible to those emotional appeals than his siblings. Just look at Logan’s last real scene, at the close of “Rehearsal” earlier this season: It’s not the promise of a new gig as Chief Fire-Breather at ATN that hooks Roman; it’s Logan’s plea that he needs his son to survive his upcoming wars. 

That makes it all the more gutting when, in the finale, Roman voices the truest words ever spoken in the show: Logan didn’t give a shit about his successor.

There’s a brief moment before the board vote when Roman flirts with the idea of why not me (which immediately leads to the most uncomfortable TV hug since Tony and Christopher in the final season of The Sopranos). But for the most part, Rome is done with the horse race—if Kendall wants the haunted and cursed bauble, let him have it. He just doesn’t care anymore.

But when Shiv’s doubt takes hold in the boardroom, Roman springs to life: He just doesn’t care anymore. If Logan wanted none of them to have it, then why should any of them have it, especially the one whose name was almost certainly crossed out of the will? And when the conference room sidebar devolves into a full-fledged melee, this brings out Roman’s inner nihilist—the same one who may have imperiled the future of liberal democracy a few days earlier while shouting, “Nothing matters.”

A bruised and bloodied Roman has accepted what Logan told his kids in the karaoke room—that they are not serious people. That they are bullshit. While Shiv may deny the finer points and Kendall may not want to hear that at all, the thought is freeing for Roman. He gets to go back to where he began at the start of Succession: rich in wealth and depraved in spirit and enjoying every moment of it. 

Naturally, he’s the only one of the three kids we see smile in his parting shot.

6. Gerri Kellman

Our Molewoman Queen got limited screen time this season, and she never did get the dick pic blackmail moment some of us were hoping for, but she is spared from Tom’s corporate chopping block. (After getting fired twice in one season. What a survivor.) Plus, that drink that Roman imbibes in his final scene? A vodka martini with an olive, his stand-in mommy’s signature order. Sadly, we’ll have to rely on fanfics to know how this all serves her interests, but we’ll always have Tern Haven.  

Unranked (but Truly the No. 1 Boy): Nicholas Britell

We’d be remiss to go through this entire ranking without paying our respects to the man as responsible for the feel of Succession as anyone: the composer and maestro of the show’s score. It’s not just the theme song. Britell outdid himself this season, evoking beauty, sadness, and horror with equal measure in his cues. The composition that soundtracks the finale’s closing scene captures the show’s essence as well as any Jeremy Strong dead-eyed expression or Mark Mylod zoom in. We’ll be listening to whatever he does next, but in the interim, we’ve got the just-released Season 4 soundtrack to tide us over. 

7. Connor Roy’s Stickering System

I’m still finding it a little hard to follow the stickering perambulating circuit, and admittedly, it puts the second-tier bereaved at a disadvantage, but props to the one and only Eldest Boy for figuring out how to claim what truly matters to him. You see, while his half-siblings were out plotting and scheming and shoring up board votes, Connor was hanging out with Logan during his final years. That virtual Dinner With Pops that’s playing on Connor’s TV is a virtual affair only for Kendall, Roman, and Shiv. But Connor was there, in the flesh, soaking up all the sun he could while Dad was still around. (And as my friend Sean Yoo pointed out, “I’m a Little Teapot [Logan’s Version]” is a better tribute to Logan than anything Kendall and his boy Squiggle could cook up.)

In the end, Connor didn’t win Kentucky, and if Mencken doesn’t prevail in the Wisconsin courts, he may not even get that Slovenian ambassadorship. But he did get to put his stickers on what he wanted: the medals, the house, the girl, and, most importantly for him, the real memories with his father. (Given the timing of Logan’s death, Connor was also spared the indignity of making his dad’s losers list alongside “Clinton the first, but not the worst” and other presidential also-rans. Even from beyond the grave, Logan gets the last laugh.) It’s the cleanest “win” in all of Succession. Connor Roy may have been interested in politics at a very young age, but us Conheads will be interested in our liege until our final days. We’re not saying Connor would’ve made a better CEO. (Naturally, that’s unsaid.) But he leaves Succession as the sibling we’re most jealous of, formally inventive to the end.

8. Willa (Ferreyra) Roy

If Tom was the most successful interloper on Succession, then Willa was the closest runner-up. She’s got her heart set on a cow-print couch and an open relationship. (That two-week itch gets the best of us.) She’s got a new play coming in six to eight months. (Here’s hoping The Times is kinder to Sands Part Deux.) And best of all, if Jiménez prevails and Connor has to stay stateside, she may get to keep her new husband all to herself. And that’s the biggest prize at the antique shit show.

9. Cousin Greg Hirsch

Greg is a less successful interloper than Willa, if only because it’s harder to be considered a success when you get labeled as a Judas by your company’s new boss. But let me offer a defense of Greg’s actions in the finale: He thought he was protecting not just the Roy family, but also Tom, who spoke to Greg in only cryptic allusions about what a post-acquisition Waystar would be like for our Nero and Sporus. (Perhaps you noticed the castration line—don’t think that Jesse Armstrong is gonna build a scene around the biggest sicko in ancient Rome and not have it pay off in the finale.) You gotta hand it to Succession’s no. 1 information hoarder: He was indeed standing in the center of the fucking universe with the knowledge to fucking take down solar systems, just not in the way he thought. He was just trying to dance with the folks who brought him, not the Swede who made him dance with an old man.

But even though a broken Greg almost made a big ol’ mess of a Tomlette—and even though he finally got a clean shot on Tom, who’s apparently powerless without his water bottles—he’s spared one last time by his protector’s affinity for claiming human furniture. (And Connor’s stickering system. Again, genius.) In one of the finale’s only plainly warm moments, Tom assures his guy that he’s got him. Maybe Tom values him simply for being a Disgusting Brother or for Greg’s Costco Machiavellianism, or maybe Tom sees the Roy cousin as another outsider clinging tight to the corporate ladder. But there’s a legit love there. What was he gonna do with a soul anyway?

10. Greenpeace

We haven’t heard from Ewan’s favorite charity since Greg said he was planning to sue them. Coincidence? We think not, even if that lawsuit violates Grandpa’s first rule of, uh, whatever he’s talking about here.

11. Stewy Hosseini

Maybe the only character on Succession who could make Roman’s sex life seem normal. Stewy went from wobbly at the episode’s start to siding with his boy Ken in the board vote, despite having as much evidence as anyone that it was a terrible idea. And yeah, it didn’t work out, but Stewy’s richer than he was when Succession began, and by not landing a non-exec chair position, he’s free to remain a complicated individual, pursuing weird sex and bad drugs. (Honestly, pancakes, waffles, and kissing guys on Molly seems like an ideal soft landing for a guy like Stewy.) This dude went from being Kendall’s college coke buddy to leading a hostile almost-takeover of a media giant. For his next act, I hope he takes an actual shit in the actual Guggenheim.

12. The Sandies

Would’ve ranked higher if not for the syphilis. And even though that may have been just a Waystar rumor, as Rhea Jarrell would say, it’s unpleasant on the tongue.

13. The Meal Fit for a King

Let’s see if we can get all the ingredients right: a pair of sprouting potatoes, zero percent milk, wartime pickles, hot sauce, ranch dressing, eggs, and a bag’s worth of frozen knobbies. Then maybe ham, maybe burrata. And definitely Shiv’s spit. A healthful tonic, if your idea of healthful is violent diarrhea. I’m mostly surprised Ken didn’t shit the bed again—literally speaking, because metaphorically, well, we’ll get to that.

But the silliest scene that Succession ever aired is also one of its most gutting. This was three kids who had been pitted against each other for as long as they could remember sharing laughs and feeling free to be themselves. It’s impossible not to think of the kids playing outside of Logan’s office, getting yelled at for making too much noise while Dad slowly corrupted the world and stole their youth. This is a glimpse of a life they could’ve had if Logan wasn’t Logan and if Waystar never existed. It’s a moment of innocence and camaraderie—and the last moment they’ll truly share together before Ken has to wear Shiv’s spit, both literally and metaphorically. 

14. Lady Caroline Collingwood

In the most generous reading of her character, Lady Caroline is the only one who gets it from the beginning. She knows not only Logan’s true nature, but also her daughter’s. She knows when to cash out and walk away with the flat in London, and she knows to not let a big board meeting spoil a nice dinner. She has the confidence and power to broker a Marcia-Kerry truce, and she knows when to call a Caribbean air clear. (And she has really good takes on eyes. She’s right—face eggs are super weird.)

But she was never able to occupy the same space in her kids’ minds that Logan did—just remember Ken’s eulogy to his father that conveniently left out his mother’s role in making the kids. Maybe that’s owed to her parenting style or because she’s the type to call her kids to Barbados for a pyramid scheme pitch. Or more realistically, maybe it’s because, as Shiv says in her eulogy, Logan was a “world of father.” (Like Cronus must’ve been a world to his kids.) 

Still, Caroline speaks with a weary knowledge of where this all leads, so when she suggests her kids take that offer from the awful Swedish man and use it to start a new chapter, she’s not exactly wrong. Otherwise, they could end up like her: in the only hellhole in paradise. 

15. Succession’s Location Scouting Team

One last look at the stunning vistas and sprawling shores that defined the look of Succession for four seasons.

Now, we have only the White Lotus’s justifiably bloated budget to live vicariously through.

16. Shiv Roy

When was the exact moment that Shiv changed her mind on the board vote? Was it when Kendall called Stewy a “grilled cheese with a sucked dick,” signaling Waystar would forever be a bro zone? Was it hearing Kendall’s lackluster, perfunctory presentation to the board, in which he treated Waystar like his birthright and his alone? Or was it seeing Roman hesitate before voting yes, all while bleeding from his forehead thanks to his big brother’s warm embrace?

Any one of those moments in a vacuum could’ve done it. But I contend Shiv was willing to go along with the bloc until she heard Kendall’s reaction to Roman’s vote.

“That’s fucking right.” Three words that likely undid the siblings’ alliance—and with it, Ken’s claim to the throne and his mental well-being. 

Maybe we can pinpoint when Shiv made the decision. What’s harder to assess is whether this was the right move for her. Up until the night before the board vote, she envisioned a different future: She was going to vote for the sale, blindly believing that she’d be named Waystar’s CEO. But then Greg turned on his Shazam for Swedish, and within hours, Shiv laid eyes upon the most dramatic TK ever committed to film.

In the heat of the moment—and even the next day, when she learned Tom was in line for CEO—it made sense that she’d want to vote with her brothers and against Matsson. It’s a spite vote, and you can’t love Succession without loving at least a little bit of spite. But even though Lukas played her like a pregnant cello, Shiv spent enough time around politics to understand that there’s a larger board to work. She was more likely to be boxed out in her brother’s vision than in the alternative. Kendall may chalk it up to another case of “cunt is as cunt does”—Succession’s version of John Galsworthy—but this was Shiv forcing her brother to fit a whole woman in his head.

Plus, there’s the matter of family. Not the one she was born into, but the one she’s creating. 

17. Holding Hands

Think back to the close of Season 4, Episode 1, “The Munsters,” as Tom and Shiv lie on their bed on the precipice of divorce but holding on to whatever piece of the other they can still grasp.

Now juxtapose that with Tom and Shiv’s open-palm handhold, back together, as they ride off into a predictable future.

Which version seems more like people who care for each other?

Sunday’s finale finds Shiv at her most vulnerable: making a plea for a real relationship with the husband she has spurned countless times, but only now that all the terrible things underneath have been said. Tom is glassy-eyed but isn’t exactly quick to reciprocate on that—no, he’s fought and lost on that front before. Still, he’s smart enough to recognize her offer for what it is. Siobhan Roy cannot stomach the thought of failing a test.

Shiv exercised her autonomy in the boardroom, but one worries about her domestic life. Is she destined to end up with the worst of both of her mother’s husbands? The seat-sniffer and the tyrannical CEO? Are scheduling opportunities enough to keep a marriage alive? And what happens when the brightest star in the Roy family gets snuffed out so the empty suits can shine?

Unranked: New Jess

We’re sorry, we just really liked the old Jess. We hope you fare better, though. 

18. Karolina Novotney

Someone was going to cut Hugo’s throat on Sunday. Glad for all of us in Klub Karolina that our girl was the one who did. 

19. Hugo Baker

This dude likely doesn’t even top the Succession Dog Power Rankings, depending on whether Tom and Shiv are driving home to let Mondale out to pee. Woof indeed, buddy.

20. Frank Vernon and Karl Muller

Karl’s beautiful rendition of “Green Grow the Rashes” likely deserves its own spot in these rankings, and so does Frank running like his testicles are on fire. But Succession’s versions of Frog and Toad deserve to go out how we best knew them: holding on to each other, waiting for the golden parachute to deploy. They’re two of Logan’s oldest colleagues—though it’s debatable whether he ever liked either of them half as much as us fans did—and even if they won’t survive the Wambsgans administration, they’ll do just OK. So long as Karl doesn’t have another panic attack.

21. Tellis

All right, now we’re listing the financier Shiv hates. We’re firmly in corporate cockroach territory. Let’s skip ahead to what really matters.

22. Peter Munion’s Cheese

Mr. Lady Caroline finally got to play “Daddy’s Here” by putting drops in Roman’s eyes. And if you think that sounds sexual, wait till I tell you about what Roman did with Peter’s special cheese. (Side question: What kind of cheese do we think it was? Mimolette? Grana Padano? Emmental? All we know is he gets real boring about it, so it’s probably some dumb shit like Cheshire.)

23. Peter’s Friend Jonathan

Imagine this: You tell your buddy Peter about an amazing investment opportunity—one with unbelievably creamy margins. (Hey, he loves dairy.) He tells you about his wife’s three billionaire kids, who all happen to be drawn to bad deals like moths to a flame. (A moment of silence for The Hundred, which would be currently faring better than The Messenger.) So you put on your best lilac polo, get your Fred Armisen–meets-finance-bro ass on the next plane from Monaco, and ready your presentation. And then some C-suite backstabbing breaks out before you even get to the good part of your pitch. Well, welcome to poor Jonathan’s life.

Thankfully for me personally, I’m not exactly sure what Jonathan was pitching—sounds like an MLM wrapped up in assisted-living facilities, so we’re not quite talking Living+ here—but it’s still a tough break. If I were him, I’d still be trying to recover from their rudeness. Though, I guess I’d be more concerned that someone would “get me” on this.

24. Nan Pierce

Third time’s gotta be the charm, right? One day, a Roy will buy PGN, but I suspect Nan, Naomi, Kendall, and even Baby Wambsgans will be long gone by then. 

25. The Guy Who Got on the Elevator With Kendall

He presumably witnessed that whole conference room meltdown, and he still jumped in with Ken. What kind of a hurry would you have to be in to do that?

26. Colin, the Bodyman

After Logan’s death in Episode 3, my friend Paul Thompson zeroed in on one of the defining shots of the episode: Logan’s longtime head of security, Colin, watching the plane like a dog whose owner died but who still curls up by the front door, waiting for their master to arrive. At a moment when everyone was jockeying for the pole position or trying to control their narrative, the closest thing Logan had to a friend was devastated. 

He’s still in a state of shock when we see him again in “Church and State,” the series’ penultimate episode. He’s been seeing a therapist—a detail Kendall exploits to get him to come work for him, as Colin did for Ken’s dad beforehand. And yes, it’s a smart move to reassemble the best of your father’s team, but there’s also something deeper at play: Colin is one of the last people to know Kendall’s secret about the waiter. Keep your enemies close and the people who could turn you over to Scotland Yard no more than an eyelash away.

Colin accepts Ken’s offer—shelter dogs aren’t often choosers, after all—but it doesn’t go as planned. One has to imagine Colin thought that Ken would become CEO and chart a new course for Waystar Royco, and maybe the younger Roy would be more open to a two-way friendship. Proximity to another titan of industry, another great man, he probably thought.  But that’s not what happens. The vote goes sideways, and what’s left behind is a husk of a human being where Kendall Roy once stood.

In the closing moments of “With Open Eyes,” we see Colin trailing Kendall as he ambles through the park, much like Colin did for Logan in the season opener. Except Kendall is directionless—still in shock, still searching for purpose. Ken slumps onto a bench, and just out of focus, over his shoulder, stands Colin. He’s a stark reminder of all the terrible things that Kendall has done—the Grim Reaper in a peacoat, if you choose to look at it that way. But, in another light, it’s just Colin being true to who he is: a dog loyal to his owner, no matter what his owner has done. As Mark Ravenhead can probably tell you, even Blondi was loyal to her owner. 

The Absolute Depths of Emotional Hell: Kendall Roy

Kendall Roy first appeared on our screens back in the opening moments of Season 1, meekly rapping along to a late-period Beastie Boys song. It’s pantomime—someone else’s words that he’s struggling to keep up with. This was our first hint that Succession would be the Tragedy of Kendall Roy. What follows only confirms that: He was too hubristic, too power hungry. He was a business psycho just good enough to be not good enough for the job, but that didn’t stop him from plotting and scheming against everyone he shared DNA with. Taking over the company his dad built wasn’t just a goal; it was something he was owed as the Eldest Boy (even ignoring that he was not, in fact, the Eldest Boy). This was Kendall’s song, and he rapped it loudly. 

While Logan was alive, Kendall tried to position himself in opposition to his father. His dad was focused on broadcast networks like a dinosaur, so Kendall went out and got Vaulter. The cruise ship stuff bubbled up, so Ken dialed up his faux feminism. (Sir, you are the patriarchy.) Even when Kendall was saying goodbye to Logan, who was dying on the floor of his private jet, Kendall had to be clear: He loved Logan, but he couldn’t forgive him. In Kendall’s mind, Kendall was not a killer—not the one his father wanted him to be and not the one who watched the waiter drown only to have his dad help cover it up. He was better than that. Better than Logan, at least.

But this season, after Logan died, something curious happened: Kendall began to try to grow into his father’s fitted shirt by doing his best impersonation. The mountaintop negotiations with Matsson, the Living+ investor day presentation, his attempts to barter with Daniel Jiménez: There were bits of Dad in all of that. It felt like a bit of cosplay—heavy is the head that wears the luxury logo-less hat—but it also felt right to Kendall. Enough so that he could brush sage words from Nate at the tailgate party: “You’re not Logan. That’s a good thing.”

The final weeks of Succession were marked by Kendall’s even sharper turn toward his inner Logan. Ewan’s eulogy to his brother was an attempt to grapple with the cancer that was Logan Roy; Kendall’s was a rebuttal—not of his father’s awfulness, but rather the suggestion that being like Logan is inherently bad. Roman’s breakdown at the lectern was not a chance for Kendall to offer his brother sympathy; it was an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage, to remind his brother he “fucked it.” Those moments of the finale after the siblings learn Shiv is being played aren’t a chance for reconciliation and solidarity; they’re an opening to consolidate power. In a vacuum, each of these moments may have evoked that certain glint in Logan’s eyes. But they obscure the reality that seemingly everyone besides Kendall understood: He wasn’t Logan, but the good thing seemed to be drying up. 

The main thing that Kendall misunderstands about Logan is that, for all of his many faults, he worked to get where he got. Long before he launched satellites and started wars and threatened democracy, Logan was a young boy who had his heart hardened by life and loss. The idea of a self-made billionaire is hard to swallow given all that we know about capitalism, but by all accounts, that was Logan Roy, builder and destroyer of worlds. Maybe that’s why he saw a little of himself in Tom Wambsgans. And it’s probably why he negotiated with everyone from Nan Pierce to Jeryd Mencken the same way—trying to meet them on a human level, because you’re not owed anything, even if your name is on the side of the building.

And that’s the context Kendall lacked when he waltzed into the boardroom for the vote in Sunday’s episode. He couldn’t be bothered to dignify the other side’s perspective. He couldn’t even be bothered to pitch himself or his vision for the future. Instead, he stood there, with the blood from his brother’s forehead on his suit jacket, and essentially said, “This is mine. You will give it to me.”

The boardroom scene and showdown in the nearby conference room will go down as one of the finest stretches of 21st-century TV, not because of the stakes of the story—it’s long been argued that no character on Succession is worth rooting for, and that’s not completely wrong—but because rarely has one character unraveled in such an earned way, expertly plotted and true to the story. In the moments after Shiv tells him she won’t vote for him, he’s reduced to begging. “I don’t get to do this, I might die,” he says, blind to the fact that his siblings just killed him. Conked him with a coconut and let Frank and Simon worry about the murder admin. 

The details from there are ugly (Roman calls Iverson and Sophie a couple of “randos,” Kendall nearly goes Mountain vs. Viper on him), but the most stunning bit revolves around Chekhov’s dead waiter—the detail we’ve been waiting to resurface since the moment that hatchback landed in the river. Kendall shared this with his siblings in a moment of weakness outside their mother’s wedding, and they assured him it would be OK. But now Shiv is bringing it up as a reason Ken can’t be CEO. Which, strictly speaking, may be true. But it’s also wielded like a weapon—information saved for a special occasion, then used to smash someone’s fucking face in, just like her husband knows how to do.

Ken stammers. His admission was just a joke, he says. Maybe even a bonding exercise—a trust fall off a skyscraper with the plexiglass removed. But it’s too late. Whether he was telling the truth before or is now is inconsequential—he’s either a killer or someone who would lie about it. And no matter which is true, he’s still not the kind of killer Logan wanted him to be. (Besides, it’s hard to be a killer when you’ve been firing blanks this whole time.)

As he boards the elevator with his $1,000 haircut disheveled—never to step foot inside his family company again—Kendall is as broken as we’ve ever seen him. He’s inherited all the worst parts of his dad: his greed, his apathy, his desire to wield power with sick cruelty. But he got nothing that made Logan Logan—none of the comfortableness in any room he walked into, none of the understanding of what it’s like to lead a pirate ship into uncharted waters. And now Kendall’s a business psycho without a business, the Eldest Boy without a family. That’s how the Tragedy of Kendall Roy ends. I’m not sure Kendall could explain to you how it got there, but if you play the track, he may be able to rap along to it.

Justin Sayles

Justin Sayles is an editor, writer, and producer who covers primarily pop culture. He’s also the host of ‘The Wedding Scammer’ and the world’s foremost expert on Jose Altuve’s bad tattoo.