Now, a dynasty has been toppled, and a new set of rulers has been crowned. And, as ever, the arc of the Roy universe bends toward the deal. Here’s how it all went down.
The morning before the vote
It is the eve of the board vote, and everyone is assembled in their battle rooms. Over a news anchor voice-over, we learn that the U.S. government sees no issue with the GoJo/Waystar deal, meaning that the path is set for Lukas Matsson to acquire the company.
Kendall is in the office, in the thick of trying to sabotage the deal. As is often the case with Ken, he’s convinced, in a way no one else is, that he has the votes. He has four votes by his count, though admittedly Roman is nowhere to be found, and he can’t say with certainty how his younger brother will land.
Shiv, however, is in the nondescript hotel room serving as Matsson’s war room. There, the mood is lighter, and Shiv is still under the impression that, when Matsson takes over, she will serve as his domestic CEO. Like Ken, Shiv isn’t sure where Roman is either. Matsson, meanwhile, is sizing up whether Tom Wambsgans would be a good fit for the new company.
“Tom will honestly suck the biggest d— in the room,” Shiv snaps, a scathing defense of Tom’s value to Matsson, who doesn’t want someone who will actually, you know, make decisions. “Love is in the air,” Mattson deadpans.
The talk gets interrupted by a call from her mom, Caroline, pacing back and forth in her house somewhere in the Caribbean. Roman is with her, and she’d like Shiv to come and support him. Shiv agrees to go, but tells Matsson she’s doing it to “nail” Rome to their side, in a bid to get unanimity across the board. Ever aware of the corporate narrative, Shiv says she wants to avoid a whole “Lady Macbeth” situation. Shiv taking out the sitting king? Never that!
Within a matter of hours — maybe less — Shiv boards a private plane and places a call to her husband, Tom, who’s fretting about his job prospects with the acquisition looming. Rather than talking business, Shiv actually gets vulnerable with Tom. They flirt, in the simultaneously toxic and endearing way they have over the past several years. Shiv floats that despite all the terrible things they’ve said and done to each other, their partnership could prove convenient in the post-Waystar world. ”
“You’ve fallen in love, finally,” Tom says. “You’ve fallen in love with our scheduling opportunities.”
When Shiv gets serious, asking Tom if he would be interested in a “real relationship,” his answer is noncommittal. “Honest to God,” says the man who’s been wrapped around Shiv’s finger for years, “I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Kendall has got his mom on the phone and, despite her waffling — or because of it — is able to read between the lines. Roman is with Caroline, and reasons that Shiv is bound to be on her way. Ken decides to join them.
The evening before the vote
At a gallery event in New York — the latest in a series of corporate bro dates between him and Matsson — Tom is unloading his anxieties about his job security to Cousin Greg. He’s worried he’ll get fired, which, he makes sure to remind his fellow “disgusting brother,” would be detrimental for him, too. It’s here we learn that our beloved Gregglet, who we first met puking out the eyes of a theme park mascot, is “this highest paid assistant in human history,” making $200,000 per year.
Later, over dinner, Tom soft pitches himself to Matsson: He’s a simple manager, he says, a guy who just wants to juice revenue and obey his boss. Oh, and by the way, he has no real scruples about his product.
“I give the customer what he wants … I don’t think it’s my place to give dietary advice,” says Tom, who also boasts having excessive vigilance and a high tolerance for pain and physical discomfort, as anyone who has seen him play “Boar on the Floor” knows by now.
Matsson seems to like what he hears. He’s got plenty of ideas, and he can’t be bothered with someone else’s. Now, for the real dirt: Matsson confides that he has no intention of letting Shiv run the U.S. side of the company. She was “pushy” about the whole, you know, gassing up his subscriber numbers in India. Plus, he wants to sleep with her. What he’s really looking for in his U.S. head, Matsson shares, is a “pain sponge” to absorb the blows.
Tom looks unsettled but, like a good pain sponge, doesn’t push back. Later, he reassures Greg that they’re going to be okay but refuses to disclose details.
Greg wanders over to the bar where Matsson is chatting up his partner in Swedish. Our favorite cousin has the wherewithal to pull out his phone and record the conversation on a translating app, and finds out that Shiv is being cut out of the Matsson deal.
Tensions are high at Caroline’s house. Ken is intent on salvaging the deal, Roman is banged up and not particularly keen on any of it, and Shiv wants to know why she’s the bad guy after getting pushed out of her brothers’ takeover plans. She’s also confident that she’s already won.
The vibe shifts later that night at a candlelit dinner on Caroline’s patio. Ken receives a call from Greg, who is eager to swap his newly acquired intel.
“If I give you something incredible, will you give me something amazing?” Greg asks Ken. What he wants is “full quad” status, which Ken, I guess, kind of agrees to. Greg spills: Shiv’s out.
Ken pulls his siblings from the table to the pool to conflab, leaving Caroline at the table with a fish dinner that’s getting cold. Shiv doesn’t believe she’s been cut out, but Kendall insists. When she tries to call Matsson, no one picks up. She learns she’s been erased from the deal announcement draft, and oh, by the way, Lawrence from Vaulter has been taking meetings with Matsson.
Kendall goes into full negotiating mode while Shiv tries to wrap her head around what just happened. Ken is convinced he’s got the votes. Shiv and Roman? Not so much.
“We have to go into battle with a king,” Ken argues with them. Ken, of course, thinks the king should be him, but as the siblings reveal to one another, they’ve all been promised the keys to the kingdom by their manipulative father. Ken was promised it when he was seven; Shiv was promised it, too; Roman was promised it last. They wheel and deal at rapid clip, walking from the garden to the shore of their private beach.
As Ken decides to take a break and go for a swim, Shiv and Roman look on. They both agree Ken will be terrible, but Rome, at least, can kind of see it for his brother. When it comes to what Logan wanted, though, this much is becoming clear: “I don’t think he wanted to give it to any of us,” Roman says.
So, naturally, Roman and Shiv joke about killing their brother, Ken. (Just a little light murder.) In one of the more heartwarming displays of the entire series, Rome and Shiv swim over to Ken to announce what they’ve decided. They were going to kill him, they said, but they’ve decided to anoint him instead.
Waystar Royco is “haunted and cursed and nothing will ever go right, but we give it to you,” Roman says.
Back at the kitchen, Roman and Shiv decide to crown their older brother with “a meal fit for a king.” Gathered around a marble kitchen island, the meal is the kind of concoction only a sibling can make: a blender of brown sludge, the gross combination of a dozen foods that should never go together — and Shiv’s spit. Ken gulps it down. Roman makes a big display out of licking his mother’s husband Peter’s cheese.
Caroline is glad that they can all agree on something besides what a terrible mom she is.
“Well,” Caroline says, to Kendall. “On your head be it.”
Team Roy is a unified front at the start of the day. They land in New York the morning of the vote, departing to Waystar headquarters in three separate black SUVs.
They stop over at Logan’s old home — now Connor’s — where he explains his system for divvying up all the items in the apartment, something involving stickers and reverse alphabetic order. They are interrupted by a video of Logan not long before he died, sitting at a table with Connor, Kerri and his three loyal Waystar execs, Frank, Gerri and Karl. The video is Logan at his most affable: the table shares limericks and old songs, and Connor does an impression of Logan singing “I’m a little teapot.”
The kids look enraptured by the father they’ve lost, Roman perhaps most of all. Afterward, Shiv sees Tom at the house. He plays dumb when she says she’s been cut out of the Matsson deal, but discloses soon after: The new U.S. head is going to be him. Shiv is aghast and, before stomping off, calls Tom an empty suit.
Afterward, Tom pulls Greg for a word in the bathroom. Greg doesn’t admit he was the one who gave the goods to Kendall, but Tom has sorted it out. They scuffle in what looks to be the end of their beautiful, disgusting relationship.
Back at the hotel, Matsson is rallying his troops, yelling at them to get on their phones.
Enter the glass cage. Everyone is trying to plant the seeds to secure their future, even the capable and competent Karolina. The Roy siblings are confident the GoJo deal will die today. Until, that is, Roman sees Gerri who, for whatever reason, he wasn’t prepared to see. Roman crumbles, catching his reflection on a mirrored counter, fixated on the wound healing over his right eye. He asks Ken why he wasn’t the one to take over the company?
Kendall pulls Roman in for a tight embrace, which ends up popping Roman’s stitches. “It could have been you,” the elder Roy tells his brother.
In the boardroom, a mélange of dark suits take their seats. It’s time for the vote.
There are no surprises: Ewan Roy votes against the deal, as do Roman, Kendall, Dewi and Stewy. The rapid pace of the meeting comes to a halt when it comes to Shiv. She panics and leaves the room, leaving Kendall to bolt after her. At 6-6, Shiv, it turns out, is the tiebreaking vote.
In another conference room, tensions erupt between the Roy kids one more time. Shiv says she’s changed her mind and that she thinks Kendall would be a terrible leader.
Kendall’s counter is solely about Kendall: Who else can he be, if not Logan’s successor? “I’m like a cog only built to fit one machine,” he says.
But Ken isn’t fit to be CEO, Shiv presses on, because he killed someone — a server at her wedding. Backed into a corner, Ken can’t admit to the crime he had already confessed to his siblings. He “false-memoried it,” Kendall says; it didn’t happen. Shiv and Roman, meanwhile, are horrified by this turn.
“I love you,” Shiv tells her brother, “But I cannot stomach you.”
“I’m the eldest boy,” Ken yells (alas, poor Connor). Roman sticks his own dagger in his brother’s back — Well, he counters, if Ken wants to push that argument, Shiv, at least, has a bloodline to pass the company down to (a dig at Kendall’s adopted kids). Kendall lunges at his brother and the two scrap in the room — while the board members look on. It’s time to give it up, Rome tells his brother: “We are bullish—. We’re f—cking nothing.”
Retreating back in the boardroom, Kendall tries to keep the negotiations going. But it’s done, Frank says. They sold to GoJo.
Roman is the one to sign Waystar away. Tom will lead the new company — “Stargo?”
Gerri is staying, Karl and Frank aren’t, and Greg? Tom assures Greg he’s “f—ed it” before placing a sticker on him: their twisted brotherhood is intact.
We leave the Roys with Roman at a bar alone, sipping a martini, his wound gummy with blood. His expression is inscrutable.
Tom joins Shiv in a black Mercedes. Shiv congratulates him, and Tom offers up his hand. She takes it wordlessly, and the pair stare off, together but in their own worlds.
We leave Kendall in a park, alone save for his security guard. The waves of the Hudson River roll before him; Lady Liberty is on the horizon. He takes a seat as the afternoon begins dimming into evening. A gilded cog, at last and finally, without a machine.