Succession Season 4 Episode 5 Ending Explained: What Happened to Shiv? The Deal with GoJo and the Blacklist?

“Stop sending your blood to people”, We’ve heard a lot of nonsense in Succession, but that’s a phrase I didn’t expect to find in the series. It wasn’t something that Lukas Matsson had thought of either. Succession Season 4 Episode 5 (Kill List) finally focused on the GoJo agreement that we had been dragging since the third season. And he came to shake it all up. The entire Waystar RoyCo management team traveled to Norway to meet the Swede at his company’s annual retreat. They all move at your request because once the acquisition is consolidated and the companies merge, redundancies will have to be eliminated. But having everyone there is something Matsson uses against Kendall and Roman to make them feel insecure as if they’ve decided they’re not capable of running negotiations on their own.

That was one of several “power moves” that the Swede made during an episode in which he added a new condition to the deal: to also stay with ATN. Although the biggest of all was to meet them on top of a mountain and discharge the bladder in front of them, to then leave in a helicopter and leave the “CEO Bros” waiting for the funicular to return, like any mortal in the subway station. The two brothers, especially Roman (who, despite having made the pre-duel, can’t stand the pressure or insults to his father’s memory after seeing the photo Connor sends him), had decided to blow up the deal by circulating rumors that the environment was tainted between both companies, and doing a screening of the disaster that will be Waystar Entertainment’s next movie, Kalispitron: Hibernation, but Mattson had other plans and got away with it.

Succession Season 4 Episode 5: Summary Recap

The fifth episode of the fourth and final season of Succession has the evocative title of “Kill List” and is directed by Andrij Parekh, while the script was entrusted to four hands by the duo formed by Jon Brown and Ted Cohen, always obviously supervised by the showrunner Jesse Armstrong. An interlocutory episode which, in addition to marking the mathematically exact turning point of the season (the current one will consist of ten television appointments), also marks a sudden change of setting: from the United States to the blinding natural beauty of the Norwegian fjords.

Succession Season 4 Episode 4 Ending Explained: What is Matsson’s Rush For?

It is not clear why Mattson is in such a rush to take over the company, and he is willing to pay more money for the shares. In general terms, we can interpret that GoJo, being a technology company, maybe in some kind of crisis and need to increase its assets. Or maybe it’s just a whim and you’re not used to having your offers turned down. But that’s not important. The most interesting thing about this episode was the dynamic between Matsson and Shiv and how “Pinky” became the alpha leader of “the kids”. Or “the tribute band”.

Matsson and Shiv

Unlike her siblings, Shiv isn’t nervous about the trip because she has nothing to prove to the GoJo president. In Kendall and Roman’s interactions with the other party to the agreement, there is a power game with unwritten masculine rules that Shiv is not part of, due to the decision of her brothers and because she is a woman. One day after having promised her that they would decide everything between the three of them, the two brothers voluntarily decide to leave her out of the agreement and make the decision to sabotage it. Meanwhile, she has welcomed ATN’s purchase offer with open arms because she “is a toxic asset”. More now that she campaigns for free for Menckel, the leader of the extreme right, in the morning shows. While they are meeting clandestinely in the woods making Greg leak information that complicates the deal, so that when it doesn’t come to fruition it looks like there was no other choice, Shiv is having a more productive private meeting.

Pinky “Dances” Whatever it Takes?

Matsson sounded her out to explore whether he had a better chance of dealing with her rather than his brothers and Shiv entered the game for sure. In this episode, it becomes clear that she has more social skills than Kendall and Roman. Unlike them, she made a career outside of dad’s company, because she knows how to read people better, and because having grown up in a patriarchal family she is used to dealing with male egos. Although she despises what she stands for and her “Cryptobro” attitude, Shiv made Matsson feel relaxed with her, sharing a drink and naturally accepting the offer of drugs, although she did neither, because she is pregnant and because I knew he wasn’t going to notice because he’s a narcissist.

And when the Swede told her the crazy story of how he had sent gallons of his blood to his communications chief, Shiv was neither surprised nor disgusted. As if she was telling him that she had sent him emoticons on Whatsapp, she barely reacted. He simply advised him the most sensible, which although obvious, no one had told him: “Obviously it’s a stupid idea.” Don’t send your blood to people, don’t send Ebba away, and considering how much of your blood is in his possession, forget about denying the story. “You’re cool. You’re non-judgmental and you know how to take a joke. You remind me of your father,” Mattson told her, making her day and night.

The Blacklist?

In that same conversation, which was also charged with a powerful energy of sexual tension, Shiv left Gerry and Karolina in a good place. It is no coincidence that both they and Tom, her husband, are the three people who had their position at stake and do not appear in the end on Matsson’s blacklist. List which, by the way, Jess got. This was an episode where we can say “fuck the patriarchy” as Kendall said in that awkward way in Season 3 Episode 3. Greg wasn’t on the list because Lukas didn’t even know who he was, which almost seems like a nod to Logan’s role from the last episode where the cousin was listed with a question mark.

What Happened to the GoJo Deal?

Partly following Shiv’s first piece of advice, which is obviously no less accurate, Matsson raised the offer to buy the shares to $192, a price well above the $146 they had hoped to get. And he called Frank directly to make it official, thus fulfilling the threat he made to Kendall and Roman on “Mount Doom”: to leave them aside and deal with the old guard. It’s an offer that’s impossible to refuse, so everyone immediately starts celebrating and congratulating the boys on completing the mission so successfully. A bitter triumph because they must pretend, they are not surprised even though the opposite of what they wanted has happened.

But Mattson knows that they are and when he calls Shiv to ask for a photo of their faces without a preamble or further explanation, the series confirms that she knew what was going to happen, in case it hadn’t been enough that seconds before she told Tom that he could fire Cyd himself. Taking over ATN on his own is something Tom had always dreamed of. He said it dozens of times to Shiv in the second season when it seemed that she was going to be the successor and it seemed that she did not listen to him, but she did. This can be both a show of affection and the idea that she can manipulate Tom and thus control ATN.

After going through her lowest and most vulnerable moment in the previous episode, Shiv feels powerful again, even having sensitive information about Matsson in her hand if she needed it. And we already know that when she wants she can be very persuasive, remember when she convinced the witness of the cruise ships to accept financial compensation for her silence (2×08). We don’t know how long the high will last though, because this is Succession, and board positions change from day to day.