Well, well, well… That one sure took its sweet time, did it not?
The first forty-five minutes here at times felt frustratingly bereft of rhythm: the video reel flashbacks to you-know-who a bit out of the blue. The Tom-Shiv-Matsson weirdness slightly overplayed. The Kendall-has-lost-the-plot stuff too hammered home. Connor and Greg, meanwhile – Succession’s most reliable suppliers of comic relief – were, respectively, nowhere to be seen and reduced to peripheral character status.
The latter fact was particularly maddening given that we were instead introduced to more than half a dozen new characters – studio heads, set designers, video editors, speech consultants – who all had a couple of minutes’ (very, very serious) speaking time, all served basically the same purpose – to look aghast at Kendall’s big picture ideas – then disappeared forever.
But boy, did that climactic quarter of an hour then make up for it all.
It was apt that Living+, the final season’s sixth episode, took place almost entirely in Los Angeles. Because Kendall and Roman’s stewarding of Waystar Royco very much had the energy of cool NYC budget-indie directors summoned to Hollywood to direct their first blockbuster… and totally losing control. Spontaneous firings. Scripts ripped up and re-written. Stage sets spun around overnight. Their plan to deliberately scupper the Mattson takeover deal now obvious to most.
All this and then a distinctly unsexy project – Living Plus is, in Shiv’s words, “a prison camp for grannies” – that they have to sell in to the investors at a conference. “I think it’s hard to make houses seem like tech,” says Greg. “Because we’ve had houses for a while.”
Given so much screen time was devoted to showing us that Kendall had gone mad – him watching the whimpered unveiling of stage clouds he had ‘seen in Berlin’ was laugh-out-loud funny – we should in retrospect maybe have guessed that Succession’s writing team were red herring-ing us. But when it came, the eldest sibs’ presentation was genius: both as a plot twist and as a pitch.
The soft fonts on his big screen backdrop were clearly based on Apple’s. Which made sense, because this was a performance straight out of the Steve Jobs playbook. Kendall’s rebrand felt perfectly in sync with the solutionism era: in which gyms have basically become nightclubs, slightly better phone cameras are made to seem like life essentials and spaces to sit and work on your laptop have been reinvented as cult compounds. Suddenly Kendall was making a retirement village with top-of-the-range healthcare and the occasional movie star swinging by feel almost visionary.
He pulled it off by, finally, giving up on his dad impression and all that execrable rapid fire tech-speak, and instead doing things his way. Vulnerable, damaged, batshit, stupid, incredibly cheesy... it was the equivalent of that rap back at the end of Season Two bringing the house down against all the odds. “It’s like physical social media!” he proclaimed, and you almost felt like getting up and applauding with all the grey-haired, grey faced investors. Mattson’s deleting of his tweet was the icing on the cake. Kendall is in the driving seat. For now.
The coda of this episode, too, was perhaps the most moving two minutes or so of Succession ever. Roman torturing himself by playing the clip of his dad belittling him, over and over, was very, very sad. Tom and Shiv trying and failing to suppress their smutty smiles to each other? Verging on the heartwarming. And then watching Kendall collapsing into the waves, at peace having finally achieved something, almost made you want to route for this most unrootable-for of TV characters.
