Succession Finale: Dissecting Shiv's Messed Up Motivations

Beware of spoilers.

“Good tragedy should feel inevitable,” said Succession series finale director Mark Myeloid. And boy did the Succession finale feel tragic. The best tragedies don’t leave you angry or upset—they leave you an empty husk of who you once were. But when the devastation passed, we were overflowing with questions, the loudest one being: What the fuck, Shiv?

With one decision, Shiv Roy detonated a bomb. Just as the siblings were about to triumph over Lukas Mattson’s GoJo deal, Shiv decided to stab everyone in the back with, well, a shiv. With a name like that, we should have seen it coming.

In the end, no one won—because no one really wins in these never-ending cycles of abuse. But it’s a testament to Succession’s god-tier writing that the finale could be interpreted in a thousand ways.

Here’s our breakdown of Shiv’s messed up motivations, which essentially burned the Roy family legacy to the ground.

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Shiv did it for selfish reasons.

The easiest way to interpret Shiv’s decision is simple: Shiv wanted to stay in power, even if she had to choose her husband over her brother to get it. Her selfish motivations overrode any sense of loyalty and love for her family.

If Kendall got the votes, Shiv would have likely been given an executive position, but she would have been forced to see her brother triumph over her. And as Shiv said to Kendall in the finale, “I love you, but I can’t stomach you.”

The sibling rivalry took over every drop of her common sense and made her make a decision to ensure that her brother wouldn’t win. Because she didn’t need to win—she just wanted Kendall to lose.

Shiv did it for Tom.

After Roman and Gerri, Shiv and Tom Wambsgans had the weirdest dynamic in the show. Wambsgans started the show on the back foot, perpetually stuck in his wife’s shadow. Logan Roy said it himself, “You (Shiv) are marrying a man fathoms beneath you.” But as Shiv and Tom’s relationship deteriorated, so did Tom’s decency. And the worse Tom treated her, the more Shiv wanted him. Call it toxic, but it made for great writing. By the end of the show, Shiv wanted Tom back more than Tom wanted Shiv back.

By making the decision to back Mattsen over Kendall, Shiv proved her devotion—and lost herself in the process.

But Tom isn’t as powerful as he’s made out to be. As per Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, “His power comes from Matsson. Those figures who drift upwards and make themselves amenable to powerful people are around.” Tom is, as he’s always been, another empty suit. Mattson is Tom’s new Logan. He’ll remain in power for as long as Mattson likes him, and Shiv will fall in line.

Shiv did it for her brothers.

Another way of looking at it is seeing Shiv’s subconscious altruism. She saw Kendall’s incompetencies and saved him from setting himself up for failure. She saw Roman’s obvious desire to go and made the decision to set him free.

Or maybe Shiv saw Kendall adopting the worst parts of Logan and decided to save her brother from becoming their father—by sacrificing herself to become her mother.

“Maybe the poison drips through,” said Kendall in Episode 8. He proved just how right he was when he denied killing someone, assaulted his brother, and pushed his pregnant sister.

Another altruistic reason might have been that she finally believed what Logan had been telling them all along: “You are not serious people.” In the penultimate episode of Season 4, Shiv recounted a story of her and her brothers playing and making noise outside of their father’s office. Decades later, they’re not so different. “We are bullshit,” said Roman so eloquently in the finale.

Shiv is stuck in a cycle of abuse.

“As with Tom’s betrayal at the end of Season 3, everything was always working toward this idea of Shiv ultimately sabotaging herself and sabotaging the deal,” said Mylod.

Succession has essentially been a four-season story of one family’s generational trauma. The Roy cycle of abuse destroyed every child of Logan Roy, and they, in turn, were willing to destroy each other. Shiv is a victim of that abuse—and an enabler. The Succession intros were hinting at it all along.

In the intro, you can see Logan Roy’s hands on the shoulders of a young Shiv. Fast forward to Season 3, and the same image is mirrored with Tom in Logan’s place. With Logan dead, Shiv was forced out of her father’s shadow. But as a woman in the patriarchal world her father created, Shiv couldn’t hold onto power on her own. So she found another man’s shadow to stand under.

“Shiv is still in play, I’d say, in a rather terrifying, frozen, emotionally barren place. But she has got this kind of non-victory, non-defeat,” said Armstrong.

Shiv unknowingly set her siblings free from the cycle of abuse but restarted it in her own family. She reduced herself to the role of a wife and mother, relying on her shaky marriage to maintain a semblance of power. Meanwhile, her unborn kid will grow up with a power-hungry father and an absent mother. She is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Feminist and writer Bonnie Burstow once said: “Often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”

And so the glass ceiling remains unbroken, as Logan Roy always intended.

The fact that we glean multiple motivations from the finale is just further proof of Succession’s killer writing. When it comes to television, Succession is the GOAT. Rewatch the modern-day Shakespearean tragedy now on HBO Go.