Warning: Succession spoilers ahead.
Let’s face it – Succession’s Shiv Roy is no stranger to accepting the sour end of a deal, or being subjected to the patriarchy.
And during the show’s final episode, this was no exception. As the battle for CEO raged on in the wake of Roy patriarch Logan’s death, GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson seemingly goes back on his promise to make Shiv US CEO as part of Mattson’s ownership of Ways Royco. Instead, he begins to favour Shiv’s sometimes-estranged husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew MacFadyen).
‘I wanna f**k her, a little bit... and under the right circumstances, she'd f--k me, too,’ we see Matsson tell Tom at dinner, just being completely gross about Shiv’s pregnancy. ‘[I thought], why don't I get the guy who put the baby inside her, instead of the baby lady?’
‘[Shiv's] smart, but I have plenty of ideas,’ he adds. ‘I don't know if I need more ideas.’
It’s about as misogynistic as it gets. And yet, at the very last minute, Shiv goes back on an alliance between her siblings that would’ve seen her brother Kendall become CEO, instead backing Tom for the job instead.
The final shot of her laying her hand on her victorious husband’s in the car after the news hits feels passive and resigned, not to mention giving very luke-warm and distanced vibes when it comes to their marriage.
So, why did Shiv change her mind and vote against the Roy family? Here are a few theories.
She couldn’t bear to see her brother as CEO
Many have said that it’s not about Shiv choosing her husband, but more that she couldn’t bear to see her brother Kendall become CEO – and have to work with, and essentially under, him.
Matthew McFadyen even said in an interview with TIME: ‘The truth is, I don’t know, but I never thought that she chose Tom. I thought she had not chosen her brother.’
Is it because Kendall ‘killed someone’ in season one?
Shiv tells Kendall that 'it can’t be you because you killed someone', referring to the season one plot line when he forced a waiter to drive while high, and he died when their car went off a bridge.
Even more chillingly, Kendall replied ‘which one’, so that’s comforting – could he have killed multiple people? We wouldn’t be shocked to be honest.
She did what she could to be closest to the centre of power
Maybe Shiv’s choice really was a cold, calculated decision – when she saw her name had been retracted from the deal, she did what she had to to be in closest proximity to the power of CEO.
And that’s always going to be through her husband (no matter how much he may betray her) than through her brother.
She chose the father of her child in the hopes they could make it work
This is an optimistic one. Was she thinking about preserving her future family, and supporting her husband? Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but it could be that she saw an opportunity to build a less dysfunctional family than the one she’d grown up in.
So she decided to throw Kendall under the bus in the hopes she’d be able to build one.
Is she trying to save Kendall from becoming their father?
Could her ‘betrayal’ actually be a way of her trying to stop toxicity from passing on to the next Roy matriarch? It may be a reach, but Shiv may have ended up voting the way she did to break the cycle, to stop Kendall from ruling the empire the way their father had, in the hopes of a better future.
The pressure of being the final deciding vote was too much
Some have said there may not have been any logic to Shiv’s decision at all.
It may be as simple as this – the pressure of being the final vote that would crown her brother as CEO became too much, causing her to vote against it.