Succession: Jesse Armstrong On The Roys' Futures & Why We Won't See Them

Contains spoilers for "Succession" Season 4 finale, "With Open Eyes"

"Succession" Season 4 is over, and for viewers who have wondered which Roy sibling could possibly take over Waystar Royco, the answer is finally here: Absolutely, positively none of them. Four seasons of designer suit-wearing toil and turmoil come to a head in Season 4 Episode 10, in which Shiv (Sarah Snook) delivers a crushing blow to Kendall (Jeremy Strong) by using her deciding vote to approve the GoJo deal. As such, the true winner of the game is GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) ... and the long-suffering Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), who ends the series as the scapegoat-like CEO of the company's U.S. operations. The Roy siblings, for their part, are left licking their wounds.

An argument could be made that the series finale always had to end this way, and as "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong said in Max's "Controlling the Narrative," there's a very good reason why the series doesn't show what happens to the Roys after their immediate reactions to the GoJo deal: The show is called "Succession," and the story is over the second it becomes apparent that no one in the next generation of Roys has what it takes to succeed Logan (Brian Cox). 

"I thought about all their stories," he said. "You know, they don't end. They will carry on. But it's sort of where this show loses interest in them because they've lost what they wanted, which was to succeed — which, you know, was this prize that their father held out."

While the "Succession" finale is content to leave the Roys where they are in the GoJo deal's aftermath, they all do have an ending of sorts — and, in a way, their final scenes give their futures away. The three children each deal with the fall of their empire in their own fashion: Roman (Kieran Culkin) allows himself a bitter smile over a drink, Shiv heads toward the future in a limo but is stuck in a difficult marriage with a much-maligned man who's now more powerful than she is, and a shaken Kendall sits on a seaside bench with a shellshocked look on his face.

All of these final images subtly hint where the characters stand, and where the future might possibly take them. Shiv, for instance, indeed finds herself in a strange business limbo. "Shiv is still in play, I'd say, in a rather terrifying, frozen emotionally barren place," Jesse Armstrong described the character's ending. "But she has got this kind of non-victory, non-defeat."

Roman, Armstrong says, has come a full circle over the course of the show, and essentially reverts back to being the same person he was when "Succession" started. "He is that guy still," the "Succession" creator noted. "And he maybe easily could have been a playboy jerk with some slightly nasty instincts, and some quite funny jokes. He could've stayed in a bar, being that guy. And this has been a bit of a detour in his life, I would say." 

In their own ways, Roman and Shiv may both have eluded the best and worst possible outcomes, but as his expression in the final scene of "Succession" shows, Kendall's defeat is far more profound. 

"For Kendall, this will never stop being the central event of his life, the central days of his life, central couple of years of his life," Armstrong analyzed. "Maybe he could go on and start a company, or do a thing. But the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status that his dad achieved are very low."

The "Succession" finale is now available for viewing on Max.