Another great episode of SUCCESSION this week. Maybe my biggest takeaway, and one that I'm going to write about, is the way the episode creates conflict amongst the three kids, and you see them each fucking over the others—especially Kendall and Roman screwing Shiv—yet somehow you end up feeling for each of them. Like, start of that ep I am 100% Team Shiv, and in a way that doesn't change. But then once Kendall's all alone I am so rooting for him, too.
There's a lot to unpack there.
But today I just want to note the way the episode ends. Kendall, on his own, floating on his back in the Pacific. It's clearly a baptismal moment; he's come through something, his own self-destructive tendencies, and come out the other side.
And what's brilliant about that end image of him floating is the way that it calls back to him in the pool at the end of 308. There he's really at his lowest point: having killed someone at the end of season one, he's now got his father—who of course got him out of it—holding it over him, telling him he'll never be free of that. He's basically trapped. And at the end he's floating on a raft, drunk. But the episode ends with him passed on, his face in the water, his beer floating away like an image of his soul. It was a huge question mark whether we hadn't just seen him die.
How brilliant to take that image and flip it on its head—or on its back, as it were—to represent what is really his resurrection. Where he was face down and drowning in despair in 308, now he's face up, floating without even needing a raft to hold him.
One of the things I adore about the final season of great series is the way that they revisit its key visual metaphors, events and lines of dialogue. Together those moments are the imaginative landscape of the show, that is, the landmarks of the show as it exists in our minds. To offer any kind of callback is great fan service. But to do what Georgia Pritchett & Will Arbery do here, to take such a moment and use it in a whole new way, is both deeply emotionally satisfying for the audience and carries the water for so much story. Kendall floating on the ocean tells us everything that we need to know about him without a single word having to be said, and it does so 1000 times better.
We should all be so lucky as to write on the finale of a great show. But the same principle applies to the end of a season, or even the end of a pilot. What can I revisit at the end of my piece that casts that moment in a whole new light?
