#hope is not the absence of bleakness but the decision to persist in spite of it

[tomwambsmilk]

Okay I’ve thought about it some more and I think I actually do have exactly one (1) criticism of the finale but it’s not really an artistic critique so much as a worldview one. Both Jeremy Strong and Jesse Armstrong have talked about the fundamental bleakness of the show, and Jesse’s worldview that people simply don’t change, and I think that the ending of the show (particularly the last 5 minutes) has been written and cut to drive this home. I think that’s a really valid artistic vision, I think it’s executed well, and I think it’s not out-of-step with the world of Succession and it’s characters.

But, on a fundamental worldview level…. I disagree.

I agree that many people don’t change, even if given the opportunities to. Change is long and slow and painful, and you can try your whole life and still never fully escape the patterns and habits and worldviews you were raised in. But I don’t agree that there is no hope of change. I believe pretty firmly that people can always try, and they can even make progress, and they might backslide but that what progress they make is still worthwhile.

And because of that, I believe that the ending of Succession does, objectively speaking, have little glimmers of hope in among the bleakness. There is hope for Kendall in him not being CEO, and there is hope for Roman in him not being with Waystar, and there’s both tragedy and hope in that final shot of Tom and Shiv, in them holding hands but not. What is the hope for? I think that’s open-ended. I don’t think it’s any one thing. But I think there really is hope in the fact that they’ve all found themselves back at the beginning. The tragedy, of course, is all they’ve suffered for apparently nothing, in the lack of progress they’ve supposedly made. And yet, in that ‘reset’, in that return to the status quo, as awful as it is… I think there’s hope for the characters. There’s possibility. They very well may not take it. But it’s still there, even if the show itself refuses to acknowledge it.

…. And I think it’s maybe a tiny bit disingenuous not to acknowledge it, actually. In part because the only people who don’t get a bittersweet ending, whose ending feels purely bleak, is the three siblings. And also because, as bleak as Jesse’s worldview may be, the show has always featured some hope, some silver lining, even in its bleakest moments. The siblings fail to go up against Logan but they're finally united in 3.09. In 2.10 Shiv is forced to make a horrible choice which ultimately results in Ken pushing back on Logan. Even in 1.10, the horror of Kendall killing Dodds is tempered by the wide shot of the dance floor to 'Somebody Who Loves Me.' The show has always said that yes, these are bad people, yes, they make bad choices, yes, they harm each other immensely. And yet! And yet there's still something there, some glimmer of love, and the fact that glimmer exists provides some form of hope that maybe they can find their way back to it. Probably, they won't. But they could if they wanted to.

So the choice to end Succession on a series of shots which convey such bleakness and misery, without any glimmers of real hope to offset that, just doesn't sit right with me. But a lot of that is subjective; there's a whole other camp, likely including Jesse Armstrong, that would have found it disingenuous to include those glimmers of hope, because their worldview is fundamentally different than mine. I can't really argue with that. All I can say is that its a choice which simply doesn't work for me.