With Open Eyes
The episode follows Logan's three youngest children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) as they attempt to sway Waystar board members before the vote on GoJo's acquisition of the company.
[b] The siblings become emotional watching a home video of Logan enjoying a dinner with Kerry, Connor, and his senior cadre, where Karl sings Robert Burns' song "Green Grow the Rushes".
The siblings race to the Waystar headquarters to amass an opposition to the deal while Tom berates Greg for leaking the news of his appointment as CEO, leading to a brief physical fight between the two.
[3] In crafting the ending, Armstrong stated that he had the idea of Tom as the company's successor for "quite a while", feeling it reflected real-life figures who "drift upwards and make themselves amenable to powerful people.
Club opined that the ending was true to the essence of the series, which he argued was less a "prestige drama about the terrible things people do for power" and more "a show about idiots, fucking up.
"[8] "With Open Eyes" received widespread critical acclaim, with reviewers praising the cast's performances, Armstrong's script, Mylod's direction, and the emotionally and thematically resonant conclusion to the series.
The website's critical consensus states, "Delivering maximum devastation while feeling preordained from the very start, "With Open Eyes" closes out Succession on a note that rings bitter and true.
He wrote: "With his engineering of this ending, creator Jesse Armstrong has done what great writers often do: Make us guess wildly (and ridiculously) over a conclusion that was right in front of us all along.
"[10] Brian Lowry of CNN called the finale "riveting", writing, "All the key relationships played out in ways that felt perfectly attuned to where the show had been building over the course of this extraordinary season.
Dominic Patten of Deadline called the finale "pure palace intrigue in sight and sound", praising the "marvelous" performances of Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfadyen.
[13] Carol Midgley of The Times called the series' conclusion "inspired and superbly executed", singling out the "magnificent nuance" of Macfadyen's performance.
[14] Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone applauded Strong, Culkin and Snook for bringing "nuance, power and comedy" to "characters who could have been caricatures in even slightly lesser hands.
Sepinwall felt the finale to be "the feel-bad ending the show has always been building toward", citing the "incredible" concluding scenes as the episode's strongest, while calling the rest "entertaining, albeit perhaps not as memorable as several of this season's other installments.
I suspect that it might not be, in practical plotting terms; (...) there's no ending Armstrong could craft that could satisfy both the desire we all have for a dramatic conclusion to this story, and the show's inherent satirical nature.
Instead, it was the latest in a string of humiliating defeats, and the ultimate one, with Kendall failing in his quest to take over for his late father Logan as CEO of Waystar Royco.
But at the same time, it was a fittingly grand final act for Strong, as he found an exquisite pathos in Kendall’s downfall and put the finishing touches on one of the best TV performances of the past decade," adding that "it was a tragic ending for a tragic character, and though Kendall was far from perfect, Strong’s unforgettable performance made his flaws fascinating, right down to the final shot.
