Succession’s finale was so punishing that my internal organs felt like Roman Roy’s face – stitched up and bleeding, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

SUCCESSION

Rating:

Verdict: Everything we hoped it would be. 

Call me a woke snowflake, but that brutal finale needed a trigger warning. 

Not about the ‘strong language from the start and throughout’ — it’s the very last episode of Succession (Sky Atlantic), the sweariest £@%&ing show in television history. 

We’d have been horrified if there wasn’t strong language.

But we should have been cautioned that what followed was 90 minutes of drama so bruising, so punishing that by the end my internal organs felt like Roman Roy’s face looked — stitched up and bleeding all over the place.

At the very least, we deserved some admonition: ‘This programme contains intense scenes of psychological and emotional meltdown. 

We should have been cautioned that what followed was 90 minutes of drama so bruising, so punishing that by the end my internal organs felt like Roman Roy’s (Kieran Culkin) face looked

‘Do not continue watching if you can’t bear to see your favourite characters rip themselves apart, their dreams ground into dirt, their weaknesses savagely exploited. This is self-destruction on a cosmic scale.’

And before you read on, another warning — from this point forward, it’s spoilers all the way. 

Don’t keep reading unless you have caught up with last night’s climax. If you don’t want to find out how the story ends, well . . . you know what Logan Roy (Brian Cox) would tell you to do.

For Roman (Kieran Culkin), his brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and his sister Siobhan (Sarah Snook), battling to inherit their father’s empire, the final round of betrayals was worse than anything they’ve inflicted on each other since Succession began in 2018.

The details are deliriously complicated, but the Roy media empire was about to be sold to a weird Swedish internet billionaire and Siobhan (or Shiv) thought she had secured herself the role as company chief — freezing her brothers out.

Instead, Sad Swede Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) double-crossed Shiv (right), offering the job to her husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen)

The details are deliriously complicated, but the Roy media empire was about to be sold to a weird Swedish internet billionaire (Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy)

This internecine civil war was started by a throwaway remark to a little boy in a sweet shop

Instead, Sad Swede Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard) double-crossed her, offering the job to her husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). 

When Shiv found out, she exacted vengeance by joining her brothers to veto the deal. 

But at the last moment, she couldn’t bring herself to vote for King Kendall. The Vikings were victorious. 

The Roys imploded. ‘Losers never win,’ smirked one smug spin doctor.

That bald summary does not do justice to the multiple twists, some of which were utterly unexpected.

In the opening act, the battling Roys were friends again, just for one evening. Kendall revealed the real root of his obsession with becoming CEO: ‘Dad promised it to me when I was seven. He sat me down at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton.’

That rang true. This internecine civil war was started by a throwaway remark to a little boy in a sweet shop.

The three reverted to childhood, raiding their mother’s kitchen to make Kendall a ‘meal fit for a king’ — mixing milk, cocoa powder, tinned slop and a dribble of saliva in a blender, then pouring it over his head.

It was a fragile moment of unity, and a piece of slapstick in a script that sizzled with some of Succession’s most telling, quotable lines. Shiv dismissed husband Tom as ‘a highly interchangeable modular part’.

In the opening act, the battling Roys were friends again, just for one evening. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) revealed the real root of his obsession with becoming CEO

The three reverted to childhood, raiding their mother’s kitchen to make Kendall a ‘meal fit for a king’

Matsson revealed his ingrained creepiness as he explained why he was hiring Tom in place of the pregnant Shiv: ‘Why don’t I get the guy who put the baby inside her, instead of the baby lady?’

At a house clearance in Logan’s New York apartment, organised by the siblings’ half-brother, Connor (Alan Ruck), all the clan gathered to lay claim to whatever objets d’art they fancied. They put stickers on their favourites.

Hapless Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) tried to win a place at the board table, and ended up instead with a sticker on his forehead, owned body and soul by bullying Tom.

In the palatial dining room, a video was playing, filmed at one of their father’s last dinner parties. 

Kendall, Shiv and Roman watched in silence, seeing a side of the old man they’d never known — the real Logan Roy.

He was surrounded by his loyal lieutenants, chuckling at their party tricks. His mistress Kerry laid her head affectionately on his shoulder. 

Connor, the only one of his children at the table, stood up to perform a nursery rhyme in the foul-mouthed, incandescently angry style of Logan himself. The gold-plated penny dropped. 

Connor, the semi-detached sibling, the one who didn’t care who won the battle for succession, was at ease with his father as none of the others ever could be.

More lacerating still was Roman’s blurted revelation, during a boardroom punch-up, that he and Kendall probably weren’t even their father’s natural children. Shiv was the only blood relative. 

At that moment I feared for Jeremy Strong, a method actor who famously stays in character throughout filming. He picked up Culkin by the throat and started clawing at his eyes.

Those offices have glass walls. Every executive, all the gathered employees and consultants, were there to witness this climactic disintegration.

But they didn’t see it the way we did. It was truly traumatic. Some of us could be scarred for ever. There really should have been warnings.