You can graft Shakespearean reading to various elements succession: Logan Roy’s resemblance to King Lear, Kendall’s positioning as Prince Hal, and, for a while, Tom and Shiv’s resemblance to the conspiratorial Macbeths. The pair came together in Season 2 when it looked like Shiv would take control of the Waystar Royco and leave Tom as his right hand, and again this season’s Life+ after round Bite and an honest conversation about money, it would seem, smoothed out their months-long estrangement and united them in Lukas Matsson’s corner. But, borrowing a phrase from another work by the Bard, cruel pleasures have cruel ends, and the fight that poisoned the last reconciliation of Tom and Shiv is as telegraphed as the death of Romeo and Juliet. Their fight in “Back Door Party” is a shockingly nasty 180-degree turn for characters who were just having sex and having sex with each other, but it’s fueled by venom and resentment taken directly from previous episodes that presaged everything Tom and Shiv were doomed to fail.

Sophisticated bicontinental heiress Shiv and midwestern normie Tom are a duo of opposites, and in the first season succession repeatedly emphasized their differences. His appetite was uncouth, and her unfaithfulness was shocking; he was a senior in her family company and she wanted nothing to do with ATN conservatism. What they found in their relationship was a degree of comfort and acceptance that Waystar Royco would not provide for Tom and that Roy would not provide for Shiv. But is common outsider status enough to save a marriage? Not when your default communication style is non-existent and denial.

In “It’s Not for Tears,” Tom shares that he is often “very unhappy” and muses on whether he would be happier without Shiv—a revelation she cannot answer, and which leads to a hilarious depiction of Tom channeling his rage. to chew Logan’s chicken. In “Kyantishire”, Shiv’s foreplay with Tom is primarily about being out of his league and not in love with him, revelations her husband pokes hesitantly at the next morning. “Maybe I should listen to what you say to my face when we are in the most intimate place?” he asks, and “Life+” and “Back Door Party” take up the issue again – first positioning Tom and Shiv as emotionally mature adults who can handle and move forward in their marriage without a trace of a past, and then revealing them as vindictive malcontents who easily, even passionately, vent all the insults and indignations they have accumulated, like many shares of Waystar Royco.

All the symbols of Tom’s and Shiv’s problems are here, hiding in plain sight in the insipid, soulless house where Father Sexmas and his scorpion bride are living again after a “little break”. In Life+, Tom and Shiv seemed to turn things around when he admitted that he had betrayed Shiv for money, and her additional confession that she would never do anything just “out of love.” They convinced themselves that everyone knows who the other is, but that illusion doesn’t last long. Tom gives Shiva an arachnid paperweight, which he calls a “joke”, but comparing his wife to a predatory and deadly creature is not entirely pleasant. Is this his version of what Shiv did to him in bed in Italy: cruelty disguised as insolence? Even if it’s a real gift, Tom’s line “I love you, but you’ll kill me and I’ll kill you” is too early a rejection of his relationship to Logan and her relationship to Matsson. Scuffing your sneakers and snapping your ears is one thing, but giggling at your relationship as a farce of betrayal is quite another.

But this sort of understatement is not new to Tom or Shiv, nor is the use of metaphorically loaded objects. to highlight what is fixed between them. When Tom instructs the back door party servers to push the red wine out of his vineyard and Shiva’s vineyard, which last appeared in “What It Takes”, it suggests that their relationship is closer to what it was in Season 3. than any of them would like to admit. . “There’s some funk to it… It’s not very pleasant, is it?” Tom talked about the wine then, and it only got sourer, sharper and more inadvertently reflective of the attitudes of its creators. (Frank says it “smells like a wet dog”, which raises the question: where was Mondale during this party?) A glass of fizzy red fell into the hands of political adviser Nate Sofrelli, with whom Shiv cheated on Tom back in the first season.

At Tom and Shiv’s wedding, Tom forced Nate to pour his glass of wine back into the bottle, an absurd display of class masculinity aimed at the guy who cuckolded him. When Shiv tells Tom in “Back Door Party” that Kendall and Roy are inviting Nate to further sabotage the GoJo acquisition, Tom puts on a poker face (“What do I care?”) before trying to intimidate Nate when he arrives. But Nate didn’t fall for Tom’s bait. He takes the offered glass of wine with a wink and then walks away, denying Tom his triumphant moment of pettiness and embodying a past that neither he nor Shiv had really dealt with. Between Nate’s deadpan presence, Matsson’s offhand hint that he’ll “definitely” fire Tom as soon as he buys ATN, Shiv’s refusal to defend Tom’s cause, and the party people’s dislike of the couple’s “light, fruity red,” tension between the couple just keeps simmering. while the night goes on.

With all these totems of their long-simmering misfortune gathering at the back door, it’s no wonder Tom and Shiv turn on each other. Matthew Macfadyen and Sarah Snook turn this fight into a devastating place, their sharp barbs making the list of the best shots of their injuries and wounds. After initial artificialthe preliminary question that prompts so many attempts by Tom and Shiv to equal each other (“I wonder if we should clear things up”), the dialogue from Will Tracy, who also wrote “What It Takes”, becomes very declarative. . The exhaustion in Macfadyen’s voice when he says to Shiv, “You’ll be fine, you’ll always be fine,” turns from reconciliation to fury: “It’s not my fault that you didn’t get [Logan’s] OK. I gave you endless approval and it doesn’t fill you up because you’re broken.” Tom is in free fall, but Macfadyen delivers these lines accurately, all hesitation and delay gone. When directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman use successionthe usual quick zoom to emphasize Tom’s words, “You were going to see me get sent to fucking jail, Shiv” and “Your idea of ​​who you are, Shiv, is fucking thin,” they add visual exclamation points to his list of grievances.

This ferocity comes as a shock to Shiv, who is played by Snook like she’s behind the times and who is mostly shot close-up by Pulcini and Springer Berman as she fends off Tom’s outburst, fighting back tears (especially when he attacks her ability to be a mother). , unaware that Shiv is pregnant) and frowns, showing haughtiness but looking like agony. But even so, she’s cold-blooded enough to push Tom where he’s most vulnerable, including his family background (“street rat”, “hillbilly”, “local”) and his undeserved ambition (“You’re fucking me for my DNA”; “You are subservient”). It’s all things Tom and Shiv have said to each other before in one form or another, in one form or another, but the pacing and antipathy here gives the impression that the couple were on some level ready for this moment, eager to channel their Stingers and start stabbing.

Admittedly, the intensity of this fight seems to escalate a bit when you think about the whole thing. succession covering one year and the events of the fourth season, in particular covering ten (non-consecutive) calendar days; the bitterness between Tom and Shiv is so strong that it hints at a longer rise and fall of their marriage. But back to Shakespeare’s comparison. Romeo and Juliet took place over the course of five days: their instant attraction at the Capulet ball, their decision to marry, their hasty plan to fake Juliet’s death after Romeo’s exile, their ultimately tragic end. Maybe time becomes out of place when your plans take over and when these cruel pleasures “die in their triumph like fire and gunpowder.” For all Tom and Shiv’s unbridled attempts to balance love and ambition, they were always doomed to failure.