What's Up With Shiv and Tom?

The last episode of "Succession" seems to have them back together. Will it last? I explore the relationship with a friend

This edition of “TV Watch” was inspired by the surprise, for me, of Tom and Shiv’s (possible) reconciliation this past episode. After last season’s finale, I truly thought that they were finished. Here’s what I wrote right after seeing that episode:

 Shiv comes back to the apartment to “pick up some clothes” and she and Tom dance around the question of whether they are going to call it quits. They’ve been “experimenting” (as Tom describes it to Logan) with a separation in which they agreed it’s ok to see other people. But Shiv doesn’t like not being the electric center of Tom’s world, and she’s also just announced to Nan Pierce (whose pretend squeamishness about money is a brilliant stroke of writing) that there will be no conflict of interest if they buy her empire, as she going to divorce Tom. She possibly feels committed to that, whatever her feelings for Tom are. As for Tom, even though he’s endured years of abuse from Shiv, when he says the prospect of divorce “makes him sad” it’s believable. As with all couples who’ve been together for a while, there are shared memories, unspoken bonds, and implicit “deals” (“I’ll let you be a bitch to me because I know you need to do that to someone in this family”, “I may not be passionately in love with you, but you make me feel safe and that’s worth more than I can say”, “I see a vulnerability no one else does, and that makes me special”) that haunt the thought of actually “splitting.” Shiv herself can’t manage anything as direct as “I feel sad”—and to be honest, I’m not sure she does “feel” sad. Her emotions are a mystery even to herself (or maybe especially to herself.) The girl had an emotionally abusive father, let’s never forget. No amount of successful scheming or clever talk can heal that. Her detachment is a defensive tactic she’s undoubtedly cultivated from childhood. And whether or not she “feels” it, she’s sad. Perhaps the saddest in the whole family. And Sarah Snook shows it to us so well, simply through her facial expressions, which can’t hide what her cool wit tries to conceal.

Fast forward to this past week’s episode, in which Tom and Shiv have sex after some banter about who fucked up the other the most and play a game of “Bitey.”

It’s not the sex that’s the surprise as much as the teasing nature of interaction. I know some people view the Bitey game as illustrating Shiv’s association of love with pain. I’m not sure I agree. The verbal jousting seems, for the first time since their separation, drained of poison—more like the playful “battle of the sexes” of a 1940’s romcom, in which every “I hate you” has the subtext of “I adore you.” Those comedies could include some smacking around too:

Back to the Tom/Shiv scene: After some“very nice” sex, there’s actually some emotionally honest moments—which Tom has tried to have several times in the past, only to be short-circuited by Shiv. This time, Tom refuses to let her make the rules:

Tom: I think... I think I want you. I think I would like this back.

Shiv: Well then, you shouldn't have betrayed me. Phony.

Tom: If I try to say it. If I try to say the truth... It's that when I met you, all my life... I've been thinking a little bit about money... and how to get money, and how to keep money. And you didn't ask me in. Shiv, you kept me out. And I always agreed to all the compartments, but it seemed to me that I was gonna be caught between you and your dad. And I really, really, really love my career and my money. And, you know, the suits, and my watches, and...

Shiff scoffs.

Tom: Yeah. Sure, I know. I like nice things, I do. And if you think that's shallow, why don't you throw out all your stuff for love. Throw out your necklaces and your jewels for a date at a three-star Italian. Yeah? Come and live with me in a trailer park. Yeah? Are you coming?

Truth!! It’s such an unusual thing in this series that Tom has to preface it with “If I try to say it. If I try to say the truth…” If I try. You’d think saying what you think and feel would be the easiest thing in the world. But not in “Succession,” a series in which the standad mode is to speak in code, in truncated and incomplete sentences, always leaving a door open to back out if you’ve mistepped. At work, Tom never says anything until he’s sussed out what’s called for in the situation, and with Shiv, who he wants to be open with, it usually hasn’t been allowed. But in this scene, he persists. And when he gets honest about his love of nice things and then puts Shiv in her place—rightly so—when she smirks (chanelling Nan Pierce, as though she’s above the love of money) suddenly he’s looking really attractive to me (which Tom rarely does, though Matthew MacFadyen was delicious as Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice.)

 

It’s one of the few scenes in which Tom stands up for himself with her, and even though she eventually turns the mood teasingly ambiguous with a joke that may not be a joke but may be a joke but may not be a joke (“Well, I’d follow you anywhere for love, Tom Wambsgans”) in the whole series of events in this episode—from her crying on Tom’s shoulder to “Bitey” to this post-sex conversation—there’s more of a sense of equality than there ever has been in the relationship. Tom is even in the room when she has a phone conversation with Matsson.

Naturally, there’s been tons of speculation on fan-pages and in reviews about where this relationship is heading (and how they can have had sex without him noticing she’s pregnant.) I have an answer to the latter (see below *), but I don’t have any special intuition about where Tom and Shiv are heading; the “Succession” writers are far too clever, even for a seasoned tv and movie fanatic like me, who usually knows who did it, who’s going to die, and who’s going to end up together within a half hour of most shows. But their rekindling has renewed my interest in the characters of Tom and Shiv, who—unlike Roman and Kendall, who at this point are seeming pretty transparent, and so kinda boring—are so multi-layered. And that interest led to an online conversation with another viewer of the show who had posted some comments I found insightful and unexpected. We seemed to have a shared dislike of the “taking sides” approach of those fans who were less interested in exploring the characters than who was “winning” and “losing” or who they “hated” and “loved.” I asked if he would be willing to do an exchange with me for this post, and he agreed

What follows is our conversation, which hopefully you’ll contribute to in comments. And then we’ll all have to wait and see what happens in the final episodes of the show.

At his request, for the purposes of this piece my co-author in the conversation shall be called “Handy Barker,” whose alternative pen name is “He Must Be Stopped.” (Don’t ask me to explain!)

THE CONVERSATION:

Susan: I have to say that after the wrenching break-up episode between Tom and Shiv, I really thought they were kaput. But last night has changed my mind. Seems like maybe there’s been some kind of purge of the poison in that relationship. I doesn’t seem as though she’s going to hold his “betrayal” of her against him forever. And there were all those barely suppressed smiles of pleasure which Tom can’t see but we can. Shiv almost seemed to blush in the car when he tells her he finds strategy sexy. And Shiv is no blusher. Or maybe it was just pregnancy hormones?

Handy: Call me a sentimentalist, but I've always seen Shiv coming back to Tom, if only because they hired Mr. Darcy to play Tom. To me, Shiv, like all the Sibs, is a starving little sunflower with almost no petals and not enough parental sunshiny love to equip her for feeling or speaking of love in a mature relationship. So I've always seen it as inevitable that Shiv would cozy up with Tom again: she has to recognize what sunshine feels like from Tom, and especially as an expectant mother, she's facing the best opportunities ever to heal from the trauma of her life being raised by narcisistic parents and cruel broken toy brothers.

Tom, to me, is a Minnesota Nice Guy like Scott Fitzgerald who has two loves---ambition so as to get rich and have nice things, but I also think he truly loves Shiv and wants to help that starving little sunflower grow and develop into a more mature person. I think the evidence in the episodes is clear that Tom is indeed very tender and honest to Shiv when she's hurting. But he also does get angry and bitter when he's been betrayed by the Roys--like on the beach with Shiv when, in my view, she was getting the comeuppance she deserved for operating in Bad Faith in their marriage with that secret open marriage prenup and her wilingness to throw him under the bus--forsaking him above all others--just so their stock price wouldn't drop.

Susan: I agree. But although I think I “get” Shiv—I don’t always like her but I get her—I’ve never been able to get a handle on Tom, not so much in relation to Shiv but as a person “in his own right.” I agree with you that with her he’s tender and patient and emotionally open.  But he’s kind of despicable and wormy in the rest of his life. His manipulation of Greg is truly nasty, in his dealings with Logan he’s totally obsequious (as most of his employees are, but Tom, who is actually very smart, is reduced to being as bumbling as Greg in conversations with Logan), and he seems to have no enduring center at all. Sometimes he seems really sharp-witted; other times he seems totally flat-footed—like when he sits down at the table with Matsson and his gang. If he weren’t so tall he’d bear no relation at all to Darcy, despite sharing the same actor with him.

Handy: I think we mostly agree on Tom and Shiv's relationship and their roles in that. But I have more sympathy for a midwestern outsider working hard to please the boss and rise in the company--even to the point of having to show some obeisance to the boss. I saw that in much smaller form with my Dad and grampa, who both had to toe certain lines in their careers so as to maintain their status as Promising Fair-Haired Boys Who Get Promotions. Which both did, and both felt they were buttering up the boss primarily for the security of their wives and families--which to this day, years after he's dead, Papa is still doing for mom, his first and only girlfriend who's still very cozy in her care center.

Handy: Let’s try something with Tom and Shiv. There’s  a standard empathy continuum for fictional characters that on one end, we judge them and have zero sympathy, and on the other, we sympathize with them and align with them emotionally. So we judge the Wicked Witch of the West, but we sympathize with Dorothy, even though it was the writers, not the witch, who actually threaten to kill Toto. On that scale, if One is Judge Him and Ten is Sympathize with Tom, I'd probably put him at a seven or eight--heavily a sympathetic character for me, because even at an orgy, he feels ashamed and wants permission to screw other women, where, for me, Shiv is a broken sunflower who's easy to judge because she's got no emotional nerve endings that touch anyone else. So to me, Shiv is easy to judge--maybe as a two or three. What say you?

Susan:  In his relationship with Shiv, I give Tom an 8 on the sympathy scale. And as I am an emotional and (so I’m told) nurturing type myself I find Shiv pretty repellent in that relationship. Maybe I’d give her a 3 at most, knowing how she’s been brought up. But in her affection for her brothers, her obvious love for daddy despite all, her thoughtfulness, and her treatment of employees, etc. I give her an 8.  Whereas Tom—I just don’t know. I’m sympathetic to his floundering in the situation he finds himself in, but don’t have much respect for him in the workplace. Whereas I respect Shiv for her ability to hold her own in that horrible environment. And I guess I do “see” her nerve endings, perhaps easier for me as a woman whose career was in a male-dominated discipline (got my degree in philosophy!) For me, they are sort of mirror-images of each other: I love the fact that Shiv is the smartest person in the room and I bristle when she’s not taken seriously (both by fans and characters on the show), but I fully recognize that she’s the Wife From Hell. Tom, in contrast, is a Great Husband, but a weasal at work.

Handy: In terms of sympathy for Tom, I have two favorite Shiv/Tom scenes. The Open Marriage Prenup scene, because Shiv is so easy going, assuring him it's all cool, and Tom is all shock and huge gestures and amazed faces. It's really a role reversal of a guy tricking a girl into sex or some adventure she didn't sign up for, and Shiv is so casual "It's okay, we're both adults, so..." But it's the WORST way to start a healthy marriage.

My second Favorite Shiv/Tom Scene is on the stairs in 4:5 where Tom is sitting below her and incanting how he cared for her when they first met, with her claim that "I like it all". It's so hard for a guy to do such an intimate scene like that where he's 90% sure he won't gain a single step with her. And she doesn't give him an inch. She's like a cat: he can beckon all he wants with soft words, but she'll walk away, prance around and look bored, but when she feels like it, she'll come padding back to him, assured by herself that she has agency. And denying he had anything to do with it.

That moment is still cooking with me, but it's a beautiful scene. Matthew's line readings move like a hummingbird, they just have no weight, can hover, and go in any direction. You can hear the vast experience with Shakespeare having to make massive archaic language float and hover so as to enchant a girl's heart. I'm glad they didn't give the part to Vin Diesel. Though the car chases would've been better.

Susan: Just imagining a Vin Diesel in that scene makes my head explode. But it’s so interesting how differently we “read” the stairs scene, not so much in terms of Tom but in our judgment of Shiv. What stands out for me is that she is the only one of the three sibs expressing regret over their final power-play with their father—as well as the only one lamenting the loss of the sibling’s temporary unity when they begin squabbling over the CEOship (“It's felt good. Us, right?” She says to Roman, “And now, does this... feel good? Like, does that feel good?”)  And then, when she speaks of her having “lost something” I can’t help but think of the fact that she’s pregnant. When she mentions the grandchildren Logan might have had, Tom mocks the idea that Logan cared about that. And that’s not crazy, given how abusive Logan’s been to his sons and daughter (and, at Thanksgiving, to Kendall’s son Iverson.) But Logan can be tender, too, as he is with the same grandson the morning after Kendall is saved from drowning. “Are you all right, son? Your dad was okay, you know. He was okay.”  They’re sitting close together and he’s reading to the boy from “Goodbye Mog,” a sentimental children’s picture book. Of course, that kind of reading matter will never do. Too babyish, not enough masculine action. But still. He’s behaving like a grandpa.

I suspect “Pinky” knows both sides of Logan—the tough but also the tender—having been a girlchild. And she knows that a new baby is the one thing she can give him that he can unambivalently love—at least for awhile. She was the baby of the family herself once, and I’m guessing that as long as she did as she was told, Logan probably pampered her as he couldn’t pamper the boys (lest they turn out to be pussies.) It couldn’t last; she soon got the message that to be respected you couldn’t be a little girl. You had to toughen up.

But, as Tom knows, the little girl is still craving that love; she just can’t ask for it anymore, it makes her too vulnerable. So, when Logan seems to be offering her the CEOship, Shiv asks over and over, “Is this real?” And when he insists it is and she starts to believe it, her face is transformed into that of a delighted child, beaming, lit up. Of course, within moments, she’s all business again, discussing the conditions for the job.

It’s only when she talks to her likely unconscious father on the phone that she literally sheds decades of armor, fingers trembling, her voice pitched an octave or two higher than usual. The boys call him “dad”; she calls him “daddy.”  Her hands suddenly look like those of a little girl, and she can barely operate the phone.

The scenes in which I have the most sympathy for Tom are when Shiv is oblivious to his feelings—which may be putting it mildly about some exchanges—like when she proposes an open marriage on their wedding night. It’s not the idea itself that’s so cruel, it’s the way the disparity between their feelings for each other leaks out in her awkward/smooth attempts to justify doing the marriage “differently.” I think it’s the first time that Tom realizes that she doesn’t love him in the same passionate way that he loves her—a wound that gets opened over and over again throughout their marriage. And her emotional intelligence is so stunted that she doesn’t even realize how hurt he is—not until the beach scene, after she’s thrown him under the bus in the business meeting and he comes right out and tells her how unhappy he is. Having been told straight out, she’s on the verge of tears, realizing the pain she’s caused and the damage she may have done the relationship. But then, in characteristic Shiv fashion, she gets herself together in a rather impersonal “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Handy: For me, the worst is earlier and he's still trying to find his footing--like when he phones her when he's at the Kinky Underground Party and she tosses off casual heartless remarks like "Have fun! We're both adults." because she knows she's already been knocking boots without permission. It's cavernously insensitive compared to venting her hatred of him in Italy, because to Shiv, though he's her loving husband and adores her, Tom is just a wad of gum she's scraping off her new Manolo Blahnik black pumps.

Susan: Yeah, being treated like a wad of gum is no fun. And while I have sympathy with Shiv’s need for control and her guarded, self-protective shell, I have no sympathy at all for her unwillingness to reassure Tom the morning after she tells him she doesn’t love him as part of dominatrix sex play. That face she makes when she says “you want me even though you know I don’t love you.”! Her eyes are gleaming, and it’s a rare moment when Sarah Snook actually looks unattractive. She needs an exorcism.

.

Even as it’s happening, the viewer gets the queasy feeling that this isn’t just foreplay, and the next morning, Tom isn’t feeling so great. He’s unnerved—as he has frequently been by Shiv’s behavior with him—and begging for reassurance. But Shiv, looking particularly voluptuous in a skin-tight dress that highlights her butt and tummy is a demon-goddess who dismisses his insecurity with talk of freezing eggs—which of course only makes Tom feel worse.

Handy: Your mentioning Shiv as a demon goddess has reminded me of something.  One game I often play when a show I'm writing or watching is approaching the end is to play an Improv game called "Last Line" where you try to guess a last scene and last line for the show--either one that's preposterous or one that's likely. For this show, after the election's over, we follow a hand-held camera through the Royco yacht, down the halls as we hear both Shiv and Tom making slightly naughty sexy time talk to each other with giggles and shocked gasps, and we push through the door to see Shiv in a  resplendent Pregnant-Bellied black leather S & M cat suit with her whip which she rakes over his limbs. But someone's in the bathroom--presumably a young cutie Shiv has arranged for this Threeple. Shiv pops him a few more times and there's authentic enjoyment, and then Greg jumps out from the bathroom in a Kinky Batman outfit with bare buttocks and shouts out in great concern: "I forgot the Safe Word!"

What's Shiv's Skeezy Meter level for being put in that costume? I'm assuming she'd hate it. But my Y chromosome renders me blind to that.

Susan: Every woman who knows she’d look good in one would want to appear in a black leather cat suit.

Handy: Okay, see now, THAT'S useful information I couldn't get from most women. That line is so wise and honest, I'd call that a Dolly Parton line. But how does a woman like Shiv know she looks great in the cat suit? Is this information a man can tell her, does she need to hear it from a trusted Saucy Friend over margaritas, or does she figure that out on her own? Beware: you are breaking down millennia of Male Uncertainty.

Susan: That’s a great question. I realize that I originally answered too glibly, because that “knows” is such an elusive thing for a woman. It’s possible that what I had in mind was a fantasy (rather than a reality) of female self-confidence. As in: “If I looked like Shiv I’d love to get into a black leather cat suit and play.” But then, when you ask, “how does Shiv know?” it reveals the soft spot in even that sentence, because it’s possible that on some level Shiv doesn’t know herself. She’s gorgeous, of course, we all know that. But does she know that? I guess some women do. But in general, no matter how many compliments we receive, we almost never think we look great—because we have a gorgeous Shiv in our heads that we measure ourselves against. And I’m betting even Shiv does!

(*) How could Shiv and Tom have sex and he not know she’s pregnant? The season started filming in July, and Sarah Snook wasn’t even pregnant at that point (she’s due this month) so she couldn’t have been very pregnant during the episode. We know she’s not as far along as 20 weeks, as on the phone the doctor refers to her “20 week scan” as in the future. And lots of women only show in fuller breasts but not stomachs until pretty far along. (In this clip—see link below) from the premiere showing of this season, she looks very pregnant—but the season was wrapped up at that point.) Also, Tom and Shiv may not have gotten fully undressed (reaching there, admittedly, as Tom is buttoning his pants and Shiv has changed her clothes.)

Sarah Snook’s pregnancy

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