[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Succession, “All the Bells Say.”]
One of the elements which stood out the most about Season 3 of Succession was location: specifically, a shift to the sun-dappled splendor that is rural Tuscany, site of both Lady Caroline Collingwood’s (Harriet Walter) wedding and her betrayal of her children. While the HBO series has always been aesthetically lush, with an emphasis on the elegant homes and offices in which the Roys seem born to dwell in, having some of the series’ most ugly behavior to date take place in such a beautiful place seems like the ultimate distillation of the show as a whole.
The finale once again featured the Roy children coming after control of the company, this time in an effort to prevent tech mogul Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), a.k.a. “Hans Christian Anderfuck,” from acquiring it. Unfortunately, the leverage that Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) thought they had in their back pocket — a condition of their mother’s divorce settlement that ensured they’d have approval over any potential deals like this — vanished after Caroline made her own deal with Logan (Brian Cox), rendering the younger Roys powerless.
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And of course, that’s the cruelest thing to take from a Roy: not life, not love, not even really money, at the end of the day. But what the final battle of this episode proved was that Logan’s sons and daughter remain children — not just in their parents’ eyes, but in the eyes of the world. And there’s real question as to whether or not they’ll ever be capable of growing up, because real consequences are things that happen to other people, not Roys.
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