Following Succession’s gripping finale – in which a successor to the late CEO Logan Roy was appointed at last – clairecohen explores why things were only ever going to end one way for his only daughter.
It’s all so pathetically basic, when you think about it, like Nan Pierce’s taste for cheap wine. The women who survived in the world ofwere those who played the game like men, like Gerri and Karolina. Others – Marcia, Kerry, Rava – were defined by how the Roy men treated them. Shiv emerged as a blend of both: realising that her game-playing had given her the power to crown a king, but that she would only ever be the woman standing behind the man.
That’s what happens when the world’s most influential men can reach the top without ever needing to step back and consider women as rounded, living, breathing people, worthy of attention. As fulsome entities, rather than disposable atoms of your own empire and ego – wives, mistresses, assistants. “My father couldn’t hold a whole woman in his head,” as Shiv put it at Logan’s funeral, in perhaps the most devastating critique of this family’s woman problem.
If all this makes it sounds as though Shiv was a feminist, though, don’t be fooled. She was, after all, the one who persuaded a woman who was sexually assaulted on a Waystar Royco cruise ship not to testify. Her battle against the tidal wave of misogyny she faced was not for the greater good, only her own. And, until the final series, she arrogantly believed that she might be winning.
It was her pregnancy that finally brought about a reality check. In her bid to become the company’s new American CEO, she told Matsson that she’d be “one of those hard bitches who takes 36 hours of maternity leave, emailing through her vanity caesarean”, but she knew that her ability to run with the men had been compromised in their eyes, and the unspoken knowledge that ran through the final episode is that she couldn't take over where Logan left off, because she was about to pop a baby out.
Shiv’s was a story about a girl who played the rules of a misogynistic world and was swallowed whole by them. Who was so busy trying to become her father, that she didn’t realise her only option was to become her mother instead – a squirming fish caught on a line, unable to break free of her biological destiny, and the men who could never hold a whole woman in their heads.
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