Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers from Season 4 Episode 4 of Succession.Succession is dominated by the messy relationship between Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his children. The patriarch of an extremely wealthy and powerful family, his children grew up chasing after his attention and praise while he barely seemed to give them the time of day. This relationship is at the center of the show, but Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman’s (Kieran Culkin) relationship with their mother is a different story. By the time the show kicks off Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter) and Logan Roy have been divorced for decades. The Roy kids don’t seem particularly fond of her as she’s off living her own life, seemingly barely keeping in contact with them, but it doesn’t seem nearly as hostile as the relationship between Logan and the kids. And this is, for the most part, true. But Shiv has a particularly sour relationship with her mother that we only start to understand as the series goes on.
Who is Caroline Collingwood?
Caroline Collingwood is a woman with her own good reputation. An English aristocrat, not much is known about how she and Logan got married or their time together. What we do know is that they had three children together: Kendall, Siobhan, and Roman. We learn in Season 3 that Logan and Caroline have been divorced since Shiv was a preteen. Caroline is not a very motherly person. She’s caustic like Logan and similarly prone to jab at people. Despite her lack of a close connection to her daughter, in Season 1 Caroline attends Shiv and Tom’s (Matthew Macfadyen) wedding. She spends much of the reception going around and asking guests how long they think the marriage will last until Shiv stops her. She insists it's a joke but given what we see from her later, it’s easy to see that’s not really the case. Later on, she pushes away opportunities to be with her children when they come to negotiate with her in Season 2, and in Season 3 she definitively sides with Logan over the kids in their attempted coup. She’s as cold and distant a figure as Logan but unlike Logan, the kids aren’t desperately chasing her.
What Happened in Italy?
Shiv and her mom have always had the most tumultuous mother-child relationship in the Roy family and while we got hints of it from the wedding in Season 1 and Caroline’s unwillingness to work with her kids in Season 2, it all came to a head in Season 3. Season 3 saw the kids going to Italy to celebrate Caroline’s wedding. While there, Caroline and Shiv have a conversation at Caroline’s bachelorette party that really illustrates where the rift between them comes from. Shiv tries to be defensive of her mother, asking if she has a prenup and trying to make sure the guy she’s marrying isn’t in it to swindle her until Shiv makes a jab that her mother is cold-hearted, and then the conversation turns sour.
Shiv says Caroline never gave her attention, Caroline jabs back that Shiv’s been “a shitty daughter, and Shiv tries to brush it off saying she’s fine but leaving barbs about Caroline being an absent parent. Shiv tells her mother that she was just a kid, only ten, but Caroline corrects her saying Shiv was actually 13 at the time and that she "knew how to twist the knife." Caroline goes on to call Shiv “a piece of work” before ending on the real knife twist, saying she never should have had children and should’ve just raised dogs instead. It shows how Caroline has a twisted view of the situation, pushing blame onto Shiv and her faults rather than accepting any blame herself. This short conversation lasts less than three minutes but perfectly encapsulates the deep rift between Shiv and her mom.
A Mother’s Indifference Hits Different
Caroline blames the distance between her and her children on them wanting to be near their father so much. They never, to her recollection, chased her attention the same way they chased his. And as someone who didn’t naturally take to caring for people, she found it easier to slip out when the opportunity presented itself, justifying her leaving as an act of kindness to preserve the kid’s stock holdings and position with their father. But it's easy to see how much this is an excuse. And we can see this same sort of lack of accountability in Shiv at times. Though she takes so much after her father, deliberately trying to become like him, her ability to strike her loved ones right where it hurts while making herself seem like the victim is something we’ve seen time and again, especially between Shiv and Tom. It's clear that the Roy kids really had no parental figures to look to for support or guidance. It's one thing to have one neglectful parent to feel ignored, or in Shiv's case even hated, by your mother and father when you look to them for support is another. Understanding how deeply these roots of abandonment go between Shiv and her mother reveal an almost child-like hurt in Shiv, despite her attempts to brush it off.
Daddy’s Little Girl
So in Episode 3 of Season 4 when Shiv first asks if something’s wrong with her mother before realizing it’s Logan who’s hurt, it’s a little surprising. An act of worry we aren’t quite used to seeing from her. In truth, Shiv later reveals, she asked about her mother first because she secretly hoped it was her instead. It’s a cruel thought but seeing how fraught her relationship with both of her parents is, we can still understand why she’d rather deny her father’s death than her mother’s. Despite how toxic both relationships are, she still had a strong relationship with her father and one she thought could be mended. Shiv had given up on her mother but not her father and her asking after their mother first was a knee-jerk denial response to the truth of what happened. Her father died, but Shiv didn’t want to believe it. Shiv has always tried to be so much like her father and maybe that’s part of why her mother resents her so much. She’d rather push the blame onto her child for having sought out attention from whichever parent would give it rather than acknowledge her own culpability in her children’s neglect.
Caroline and Logan actually have very similar flavors of emotional abuse. Both were largely absent figures in their children’s lives that they had to learn to do without. They both hate to take the blame and would rather blame their children for their bad relationship than their own bad parenting. And they both think a little too highly of themselves. Some of these traits were passed on to their children as well (ego is clearly something the whole Roy family struggles with) but others manifested in other ways. Shiv seems to struggle deeply with emotional intimacy and asking for what she needs because she never got it from her parents. We can see this in how quick she is to give up on her and Tom once he’s betrayed her. He wants to talk things out with her and see if they can still somehow fix it, but Shiv has learned to cut and run when she’s at a loss.
While Shiv’s relationship with her mom is worse than her brothers', there’s a clear reason why. The contempt Shiv and Caroline seem to hold for each other has no one basis. Caroline’s resentment for her children is a long-held belief and the emotional scars of feeling so neglected have played a large part in shaping Shiv into the person she is today. So like Connor had to learn to be okay without love, Shiv had to learn how to be okay without her mother, or at least try to. Their terrible relationship is borne more from their absence in each other's lives than their presence and yet it left them both as sore spots that ache whenever they cross paths.