Veep’s Series Finale and the Hollowness of Getting What You Want

“What did it cost you?” “Everything.”

It’s undoubtedly silly to try to draw too sharp a line between Veep’s series finale and Avengers: Infinity War, But for those of us steeped in both, it’s also awfully hard to disaggregate them. Selina Meyer is not Thanos, despite their parallel, all-consuming quests and shared status as snappy dressers. Selina’s goal is much more one of direct personal ambition, in contrast to Thanos’s faux-altruistic aims (and hers has a much lower body count to boot). And yet the costs, at least in a spiritual sense, are the same.

Because like Thanos, Selina gets her wish. After so much striving, so much conniving, so many lines crossed, she finally becomes the President of the United States — not just for a few months, but for a full term.

All she had to do to get there was: make a deal with the Chinese to let them undo the diplomatic liberation that made her politically relevant again, watch her closest advisor have another heart attack, make an ignorant and endlessly repulsive man her Vice President, see her other nearest advisor resign in disgust at that fact, relegate her one-time protégé to working for the new VP and thereby preventing her from advancing beyond where she started, ensure that another of her one-time young lieutenants is drummed out of politics, outlaw gay marriage to gain votes while firmly and finally estranging her from her daughter, and throw the one person who genuinely, truly loved her under the bus.

If they really wanted to show solidarity, the guys would all be wearing floral print suits.

In short, Selina sold her soul. That is impressive, if only because it’s surprising Selina had much of a soul left to sell. This series has consistently depicted the players on Team Meyer as utterly and completely mercenary, not letting any supposed scruples get in the way of their climbing the political ladder, and happily elbowing one another whenever necessary or possible. Selina in particular has been happy to throw anyone and everyone to the wolves when it suited her.

And yet, there’s something about the change that erupts in her when a (maybe?) dying Ben tells her that she knows what she has to do. It feels as though she enters a new state of utter darkness. With one blistering dress-down, she eviscerates Tom James’s chief of staff and orchestrates her unexpected rival’s untimely political demise with a #MeToo moment. She sells out to whatever interests are necessary to win her the nomination, regardless of the effects that has on her allies and erstwhile friends. She’s even willing to make a pact with the most repugnant man imaginable, who brandishes the most repugnant ideas imaginable, if it gets her what she wants.

There’s a well-placed irony in the fact that, after all of the insults, all of Jonah’s ridiculous ideas and his dump-truck-of-deplorables-laden speeches and gestures, he ends up in the VP slot. With so much horse-trading and compartmentalizing going on here, that becomes the ultimate gesture of futility. Selina knows full well, and vents her frustrations, at how the Vice Presidency is a useless drawer into which unloved politicians are shoved and forgotten about. Having that be the final destination of Jonah’s pathetic trajectory feels appropriate.

That said, the genuine stock and trade of politics has never been Veep’s specialty, and so some of the brokered convention hoopla on the path to Selina’s ascendance and Jonah’s relegation becomes tiring after a while. The delegate-whipping and backroom dealing is a good opportunity for Veep to work in some final shots from its arsenal of insults, and give the usual foul-mouthed political roundelay one last airing. But beyond the satire of Jonah’s “terrorist math” prediction coming true, the episode doesn’t really kick into gear until Selina goes over to the darkest of the dark side once and for all.

The references to real life politics here are about as subtle as Jonah himself.

But what does it get her? Well, the presidency, for one thing. (And hey, that’s not nothing!) But when we see Selina sitting in the Oval Office (once again buttressed by Sue!), she may get to be the President who won’t let the Veep’s staff into the room this time around, but she doesn’t seem very content. She’s still reflexively asking for Gary. Her staff is now made up of strangers. And in the end, she’s utterly alone, something that — as conveyed through Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s outstanding performance here — seems to be getting to her.

All of this striving and backstabbing and cutthroat Washington D.C. politicking still doesn’t seem to have made Selina Meyer happy. It still hasn’t fulfilled that ache within her in the way it was supposed to. The premiere of Veep’s final season asked repeatedly why Selina wanted to be President, and the closest she could come to an answer was “because this country owes it to me.” When that’s the only reason you want something — because you like the idea of having it, not the thing itself — then attaining it will, as the finale suggests, only leave you alone and empty.

It’s a surprisingly powerful statement from a show that had once seemed to adopt a Seinfeld-esque, “no hugging, no learning” policy. The true boldness comes in the show’s epilogue, which jumps twenty-four years in the future. It lets the audience see that these years and years of naked political ambition have left Selina’s hangers-on with few achievements or accomplishments to cling to either.

Ben is dead. Kent’s become a shaggy-looking, rough-hewn rancher. Amy married Bill Erickson and decided never to have kids (an interesting echo of where things started for her this season). Dan never grew up, remains out of politics, and is now selling real estate. Jonah was impeached, but remains married to his half-sister. And poor Gary is still devoted to the object of his courtly affection, despite all she’s done to him, laying the special lipstick on her coffin in a moment that has more emotional resonance than any comedy this foul should be able to muster.

Tony Hale is absolutely tremendous in this scene.

Meanwhile, Richard, the only person in Selina’s coterie with any ethics or morals to speak of, is the President, having been recently reelected in a landslide. All of the shameless political backstabbers ended up discarded, depressed, or somewhere far short of their goals. And the only one among them who was too decent for this world, who shared none of their ambition, is the one who ended up in a better place than any of the rest. In some ways, Veep’s finale is a fairytale. In others, it’s the final chapter of a tragedy.

(The one exception to all of this is Mike who, in a hilarious running gag that reaches its zenith here, manages to consistently fail upward in the media world. His boneheaded shtick is seen as endearing and a part of his charm. There’s a lesson, and an implicit critique, in that too.)

So what did all of that selling out and betrayal and darkening of the soul net Selina? A one-term presidency that seems to have left her overshadowed by her successors, discarded by history, and bumped from the evening news by the death of Tom Hanks. Selina thought that all of this scratching and clawing would not only bring her happiness and fulfilment, but also earn her a legacy. Veep declares, in her yonic Presidential Library full of disdainful rivals and allies and shoddy stumbles, that even after all she did in search of these things, she ended up with none of the above.

Veep is a deeply cynical show — about government, about politicians, and about people. And yet, in the end, it delivered one of the most remarkably optimistic, and even moralistic messages imaginable: that the calculating climbers lose, even when they win, and that the good will ultimately prevail. The series was always one part caricature beyond the real world and one part hitting too close to home, even before the current political moment. But in its final hour, Veep buries its protagonist, and with her earthly remains, buries everything she aspired to and represented in the process.