This text comprises spoilers by way of the sixth episode of Succession Season 3.
The wedding between Shiv Roy and Tom Wambsgans is, at this level, constructed on mutual ambition and chilly white wine, and the wine at the least has turned poisonously bitter. On tonight’s episode of Succession, “What It Takes,” because the Roys journey to Virginia to anoint a brand new Republican presidential candidate at an influence brokers’ convention, Tom (performed by Matthew Macfadyen) opens a bottle from his and Shiv’s winery and embarks on an emotional journey. “So it’s biodynamic,” he says to Shiv (Sarah Snook), who seems to not be listening as she absorbs an ATN broadcast on her iPad. “It has fairly a funk to it. You type of have to fulfill it midway, proper? … There’s tons to unpack. It’s not floral. It’s not sugary, or vegetal. It’s fairly agricultural, you realize, it’s, it’s, uh …” Lastly, Tom provides up. “It’s not very good, the wine, is it, Shiv?”
As metaphors go, discovering that the fruit of your marital harvest is much less Chassagne-Montrachet than eau de dung pile is a pithy one. For Tom, slowly being pulped this season by the load of an impending jail sentence that he hopes will win his father-in-law’s favor, it’s only one extra indignity so as to add to the listing. With Kendall (Jeremy Sturdy) excessive on his self-aggrandizing whistleblower tour and Roman (Kieran Culkin) getting nastier the nearer he will get to his father’s favor, my sympathies this season have largely lain with Tom. In personal, he appears haunted, much less by even the specter of jail than by the dawning realization that he may need made a foul guess within the recreation of life. Relating to Shiv, he veers from weak makes an attempt at management—making an attempt to get her pregnant to make sure her constancy whereas he’s incarcerated—to melodrama. (“Mondale’s not effectively. Mondale’s unsettled,” he tells Shiv after the so-named canine eats her pantyhose, his voice trembling with a type of Joan Crawford–in–Child Jane creepiness.) The query for the season is, will Tom really break? Or is the privilege of being even a third-tier Roy so profound that he’d moderately be depressing than surrender it?
The purpose of Succession, the present’s creators and solid have lengthy defined, is to discover how excessive wealth and, by affiliation, energy corrupt a household from the within out. The thought of contamination is often subtextual, although typically overt. A lot of the characters on the present, with the notable exception of the Roy patriarch, Logan (Brian Cox), seem to have redeeming qualities someplace deep down, notably with regard to caring for each other—Roman rescues Kendall from a meth binge; Kendall roars at Logan for hitting his brother; Shiv pleads along with her father to not sacrifice Tom on the finish of Season 2, although it prices her his respect and Tom finally sacrifices himself anyway. Extra typically, although, they conspire towards and even actively injury each other beneath Logan’s affect. Shiv and Tom’s partnership has the doubtful honor of being the one constant, long-term romantic relationship depicted on Succession, which would appear to separate it at the least barely from the familial wrangling over the corporate. However their marriage can also be inextricable from the household enterprise, which leaves it unable to exist by itself phrases. “It’s good to know we don’t have an unbalanced love portfolio,” Tom tells Shiv earlier this season, a cringeworthy assertion that’s additionally gloomily inaccurate.
What this implies on the present is that Tom, the kid of a lawyer who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, owes all the pieces he has to his marriage, and that Shiv, who for a very long time had no clearly outlined position or actual energy contained in the Roy empire, wields authority over her husband any probability she will get. Nearly three full seasons in, I nonetheless can’t determine whether or not Shiv is fascinatingly sphinxlike or maddeningly underwritten, or each. She typically appears to exist much less as a personality in her personal proper than as a foil for the lads round her. Her preliminary retreat from the household enterprise and her profession in politics really feel like an acknowledgment that she’s neither poisonous sufficient nor absurd sufficient to succeed inside the Roys’ firm, Waystar Royco. And but she treats her marriage to Tom—a Waystar government who’s as buffoonish and greedy as her brothers—as a strategy to passively achieve energy with out making herself weak. “I’m joyful to be Tom Roy,” Tom tells her in Season 1, earlier than their marriage, an admission that her standing as a Roy scion supersedes any identification or goals he may need on his personal.
Shiv and Tom’s relationship is so intriguing that real-life marriage counselors and Vanderbilts alike have commented on all the pieces that’s flawed with it. (“There’s a regarding lack of communication and openness, to not point out empathy, between these two,” one psychologist concluded.) They haven’t any palpable chemistry. When Tom made sexual overtures to Shiv in final week’s episode, “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” she recoiled, even earlier than he revealed that he’d been secretly monitoring her menstrual cycle. Nearly each interplay between them is ruled by the exercising or the amalgamation of clout. Shiv has repeatedly examined hers by demanding issues Tom isn’t comfy with: an open relationship, a threesome, even that he go to Logan’s tailor for his fits. Tom, for his half, capitulates time and again, figuring out full effectively that standing as much as Shiv on behalf of his personal wishes means shedding her, and shedding all the pieces that comes with being a Roy.
And but, Tom’s affiliation with the Roys can also be breaking his spirit. Season 3 has inflicted one wound after one other on him, every a reminder of how little he means to anybody. “I haven’t actually slept correctly in about eight days,” he confesses in tonight’s episode. Shiv says that she’s bored along with his obsessive chatter about jail. On the household jet to Virginia, they sit at reverse ends of the aircraft. Within the fleet of automobiles the Roys use, she chooses to trip along with her father. When the Waystar communications boss, Hugo (Fisher Stevens), updates the household on murmurs from the Division of Justice concerning its investigations into the corporate, he tells them that “nobody huge is prone to do jail time … with the notable exception of Tom, clearly. Sorry, Tom.” In my assessment of HBO’s The White Lotus earlier this yr, I wrote that that present has a definite thesis about privilege: Individuals who have it could moderately be depressing than sacrifice even a fraction of their standing. Tom is caught in the identical entice. If his marriage survives, it will likely be as a result of he has determined that the cash is definitely worth the ache.
