(A whole litany of Succession spoilers ahead)
For those who don’t watch Succession, here’s the quick recap of what happened last night:
Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) hear whispers that their father Logan (Brian Cox) is planning to sell the family company, Waystar RoyCo. The heartbeat of the entire show is the question of which Roy sibling will ultimately become the head of the company, but this sale would essentially cut them all off from power. It’s a big deal. But wait! When Logan got a divorce from the trio’s mother, there was a part of the agreement that said they could overrule him if they don’t agree with the buyout and essentially boot him from the throne. They go to Logan ready to lay down this trump card, but it turns out that somebody has alerted the patriarch to the group’s plan, and Logan has called their mother and changed the terms before the trio even got there. Logan has squashed their attempted coup, the siblings are powerless, and everything is going wrong all because someone tattled on them. But who would do such a thing?
Enter: Shiv’s husband, Tom Wambsgans.
Oh Tom. Sweet Tom. The midwestern boy who married into the Roy family and has been watching from the wings and absorbing abuses from Shiv (like her asking to have an open relationship on their wedding night) and dealing with the sad he is with her. The Roys rarely, if ever, go through any sort of character changes. Their one objective is always power - power within the company, power as their father’s favorite, power over each other specifically. But Tom is not a true Roy. After watching his wife and in-laws play the game for so long, he has learned a few things about who wins and who loses. So Tom, the man who the other siblings mocked early on is now in a position of power that has eluded all of the actual Roy children for seasons. This guy. The guy who perfect the “closed-loop system” in season one. He has come out on top.
This reveal, and this betrayal, is so incredibly decadent because it’s been a slow burn whose seeds were planted as early as season one. I don’t know if the show’s creators had the idea that Tom would eventually do something like this to Shiv, but the result feels both wholly surprising and inevitable. Shiv has been particularly hard on Tom this season, even with the threat of his possible jail time looming, and yet we all (wrongly) assumed that Tom would absorb it because that’s just what he does. Except suddenly he fights back! And all the isolated incidents leading up to this are re-contextualized. They are not individual snowflakes that have simply blown away in the wind, in reality, they are an avalanche in which he has trapped Shiv and her brothers.
In the same way that people watch scary movies because they like feeling frightened, people (myself included) watch mysteries because we like feeling the anxiety of uncertainty. The payoff for that prolonged anxiety, though, is the rewarding feeling of catharsis once the mystery is solved. Succession operates under a similar idea of prolonged uncertainty with the central question being who, in the end, will finally win a kiss from daddy? While Kendall seemed closest to the prize in season one, Shiv became the favorite in season two, and Roman held the reins in season three. The insularity of it all, or the idea that the successor was going to be one of the Roy children, lulled us into a false sense of security. Shiv wasn’t even working for Waystar RoyCo at the beginning of season one yet we knew she’d be roped in. Kendall went publicly against the company at the end of season two, but fighting against something still connects you with it in one way or another. Through it all, we focused on the Roy children, but in watching them fight with each other we forget that there are those on the sidelines watching it too.
Now, the Roy siblings have no power, their father knows that they planned to betray him, and soon the company they assumed was their birthright will be snatched away from them. I have no doubt that these children will continue to bite and scratch their way into the company by any means necessary, but it’s going to be a supremely difficult task and it’s all because we underestimated Tom and overestimated how easily our three musketeers could be taken down.
Late in season one, Logan tells Shiv, “You’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you because you don’t want to risk being betrayed.” People have been brushing Tom off for the entire run of the show, yet it was exactly that attitude that allowed him to slip under the radar. So how did he manage to pull off such an epic power grab? Well, because he’s Tom Fucking Wambsgans.