I think we tend to set too much store by Series Finales. Admittedly, where any story finally lands is very important, and, accordingly, the finale will effect the final flavour that any series, in its totality, leaves on the palate. That's inescapable. However, in the same sense that the last page of a novel is less important than its last 25% (usually the bit of the book that contains the meaty climax), generally, the last season of a series matters far more than its eventual conclusion.
If we think back to Breaking Bad we can see a good example of this. Breaking Bad was probably the finest example of a narrative driven drama series ever made (The Sopranos is more of an anthology of thematically related episodes than it is an ongoing series telling a single story, and The Wire doesn't have one overall arc, but rather 5 separate arcs - one per season). If you forget what happens in the last episode of Breaking Bad and, instead, think of its final 8 episodes as one long novelistic style climax, its overall shape feels very different. Its single greatest episode (and undoubtedly the climactic one) is not the finale (not even close) - It's the one three episodes from the end: "Ozymandias". The reason "Ozymandias" remains the best episode of TV ever made is because it just feels "right" as the main conclusion to the events set up way way back in the pilot. It is the episode the whole series was working towards from the beginning far more than the finale ever was/will be. There's a sense of inevitability to it, and even if we couldn't have guessed exactly how things would go down when when we did finally reach the place we come to in "Ozymandias", we knew those dominos had to fall, one way or another.
I think the same can be said for "Connor's Wedding". It's the one episode we've been waiting for since the beginning, and it will, I imagine, go down as the singular episode most fundamental to the Succession viewing experience. It was the series climax (even if it came sooner than expected). It's the one that blows the whole series wide open and which alters it beyond repair. Everything that comes after will now be composed of beautiful falling action; the bomb has already been dropped, the rest is fallout.
Given that it carries this hefty weight, it is just as well that it is so bloody good. It's a close to perfect hour. Very few series have got their main climax so right: Breaking Bad did it with "Ozymandias" (by far the greatest example), The Leftovers did it with "Certified", the final season of The Shield did it, Better Call Saul did it, Six Feet Under did it, and that's probably about it. That was the exhaustive list until today...
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