“The Question is Why?” is a chapter heading in the 8th inning of Ken Burns' 1994 “Baseball” documentary (the 1960s), because it's a question a reporter asks of Sandy Koufax when he announced his retirement from baseball, at the top of his game, at age 31. Sandy repeats it before answering: The question is why. (The answer is he'd like to use his arm for the rest of his life, thank you very much.)

That's the phrase that came to mind after the final, painful episode of “Succession.” And not because Jesse Armstrong was retiring the show at the top of its game. I just couldn't fathom why Shiv (Sarah Snook), at the 11th hour, betrays her brothers, particularly heir-apparent Kendall (Jeremy Strong), allowing their father's company, Waystar, to pass into the hands of an Elon Musk-ish douche named Mattson (Alexander Skarsgard). 

Shiv began the episode on Mattson's side, with the idea that she would become Waystar's CEO. But she's too powerful, with too many opinions, and Mattson wants a puppet. And that's her husband Tom Wambgams (Matthew Macfadyen). She was the one who suggested he needed an American CEO to allow the deal to go through, but she's going to be shut out. Tom learns this first and does nothing. Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), via Google Translate, learns it second and phones Kendall in Barbados, where both he and Shiv are working to get the vote of third sibling Roman (Kieran Culkin). The knowledge bands the siblings together, and they head into New York with the board votes to squelch the sale. The Roys will maintain control with Kendall as CEO. 

And then she votes against him. She votes for the men who betrayed her. She lives up to her name. She doesn't do it happily but she does it. And the question is why.

Friends who have watched one or two episodes of “Succession” and then quit, often say, “There's no one to root for. All the kids suck.” And sure, kinda sorta. But I've rooted for Kendall from very early on. Someone—and I wish I could find it—wrote that Jeremy Strong has a bone-deep sadness in his performance, a sadness that fits John Berryman's Dream Song #29, which its creators are forever culling for their season finale titles:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.

Wait, I found it: It's Michael Schulman in a New Yorker piece titled “Farewell, Kendall Roy.” He writes: “Strong never lost sight of Kendall's undertow of pain, his head stooped or self-consciously propped up straight. ... Other characters use the show's diamond-sharp dialogue as armor—Roman's wisecracking, Shiv's chess-playing—but Kendall seems the most dissociated from his own banter, as if his real self is wandering out of the boardroom, perhaps straight into the sea. ... More than anyone on 'Succession,' Kendall seems possessed of a soul.”

And Kendall seemed to be growing—I thought. He would never have his father's decisiveness—he held his siblings close, one felt, because he needed them to help make up his Hamlet-ish mind—but he was developing his own brand of ruthlessness. More, he had something his father never had: empathy. And he began to utilize it in a way that worked in the marketplace. When Mattson tweets a jokey Nazi reference (“”Doderick macht frei“) to try to undercut a Kendall press conference, and Kendall hears it in real time, his impulse is not to attack but to empathize: How we all say things we don't mean, things we wish we could take back. It's not only the most human response but the most devastating. It turns the tables on Mattson, at least for a day.

What he didn't do? At the 11th hour, when Shiv showed her shitty hand, he didn't make the argument he should've made. His argument became ”I.“ Me me me. I'm ready for this, I deserve this. It should've been ”we.“ If he'd stuck with ”we,“ if he'd told the board what everyone knew—that Shiv was being brushed aside by Mattson because she was too strong, and he wanted a puppet, and that was Tom, and hey, maybe the U.S. government shouldn't allow the sale because there really is no American CEO of this company—he might've won the day. There was a path but he didn't take it and he loses. He loses everything that mattered to him and shouldn't have. He just gets billions from the deal. And in the end we see Roman in a bar with a martini and a smile on his face, Shiv bereft in the backseat of a limo with her newly powerful but still sycophantic husband, while Kendall walks—is it lower Manhattan?—with his bodyguard behind him, a broken man, looking ready to walk straight into the sea. I haven't ached for a TV character this much since Jesse on ”Breaking Bad."