As she eulogizes her “dear, dear world of a father” in the penultimate episode of HBO’s Succession, Siobhan Roy repeats the pattern that’s made her such a brilliantly frustrating creation across the show’s four tectonic seasons: she tiptoes up to the edge of the truth, only to retreat from the harshness of its glare. As children, Shiv recalls, she and her brothers would sometimes play outside their father’s office, and he’d burst into the hallway to yell at them, insisting on peace and quiet while he ran one of the world’s most powerful media conglomerates. “What he was doing in there was so important, we couldn’t conceive of what it was,” Shiv says. “Presidents and kings and queens and diplomats and prime ministers and world bankers. And. . .” Then she pauses, swallows, and withdraws. “I don’t know. Yeah.”

A wiser person might have pushed on and said, “And we still can’t conceive of it. And neither could he.” They might have acknowledged that this collective inability to conceive of the scope of Logan Roy’s power has set fire to the world outside the church’s walls. But Shiv, like the rest of her kin, is not wise. She’s just rich. And as Succession barrels toward a supersized series finale, it’s underlining the fact that she and her silver spoon–sucking siblings may never learn how to be anything else.