Prince and Chuck make the world a better place, each in his own underhanded way.
Season 6, Episode 2: ‘Lyin’ Eyes’
If you’re looking for the future of “Billions,” two quotes from this week’s episode point the way forward, I think. The first comes from Wendy Rhoades, describing to Taylor Mason her fear that their boss, Mike Prince, might suffer from narcissistic personality disorder: “He thinks he’s better than everyone else, and he won’t stop till he gets what he wants.”
The second comes from Chuck Rhoades, describing the method to his newfound rabble-rousing madness: “No one is safe.”
We’ll tackle Chuck’s half of the episode first. Inspired by the bravado of Gene Hackman’s thief character in the David Mamet crime film “Heist,” which he watches in the comfort of his upstate farm, Chuck returns to New York City with the intention of raising some hell. He finds what he’s looking for in the plight of the city’s doormen, who have worked long and hard on behalf of mega-rich tenants who fled the city when Covid-19 struck, leaving their servants on the front lines of the pandemic.
The problem is that despite responding favorably to Chuck’s fiery rhetoric, the doormen’s union is perfectly happy with the 2 percent raise the tenants and property management board are prepared to offer them. So Chuck unilaterally turns up the temperature, first by blowing up the negotiations with a 5 percent ask, then by threatening to sick the tax authorities on the union if they don’t go on strike at his behest.
Having successfully cowed the union into doing his bidding, he turns his attention to his prime targets: the billionaires, whom he refers to as “the criminal class,” represented by the rude and ruddy-faced Bud Lazarra (Wayne Duvall). The defiant Lazzara thumbs his nose at Chuck’s threats and convinces the union to call off the strike and take the original deal — but only through bribery, an act caught on camera by Chuck’s lieutenant Karl Allard, who wanders by in full Vincent (The Chin) Gigante bathrobe attire to record the incriminating footage.
When Chuck confronts Lazzara with his intel, the bigwig bends … but Chuck betrays him to the press anyway. The message is clear: His war against the billionaires is in full no-prisoners mode.
Considering the idiosyncratic behavior of Mike Prince elsewhere in the episode, this may well be the right approach. Oh, things start off well enough, with Prince announcing his intention to tank the stock of an athletic apparel company called Rask because of its use of forced labor in China’s Uyghur mass internment camps.
The move makes heads spin all across Michael Prince Capital. Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), the firm’s resident hard case, warns that the company is all but unsinkable. No matter, says Taylor Mason, anticipating the boss’s next move: They’ll use athletes and influencers to ruin the brand’s reputation while they’re busy shorting its stock.
Rian (Eva Victor), the rising star of Taylor Mason Carbon, sees an opportunity: There are other players in the sector with even filthier human-rights records, and Mase Carb could easily gobble up the whole sector. When Taylor tells her not to make the play, she does it anyway, leading Taylor to confer with Wendy Rhoades as to whether firing Rian is the right move. They decide it’s too Axe-like by half, and a chastened Rian is spared the ax, no pun intended.
Finally there’s Wags, who has the most comical reaction of the whole crew: He is worried on behalf of Rask’s chief executive, with whom he formed an Eagles cover band at a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp. His surreptitious tip-off almost enables the company to salvage itself with a buyout until Prince and his right-hand man, Scooter Dunbar, force Wags to kill the deal by dishing even more dirt: Rask has been in bed with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un for years. The maneuver kills the company for good, though it also leads to Wags’s expulsion from the band. You win some, you lose some!
At this point you may be wondering, where would a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder for Prince come into play here? After all, he did exactly what he said he would do: take down a crooked company.
But as Taylor puts it, he is playing on a much bigger chessboard than just the markets. Prince’s real plan was to scupper the Rask-sponsored Olympic hosting duties of Los Angeles, in hopes of relocating the 2028 games to the Big Apple — which would bring his estranged wife, Andy (Piper Perabo), an Olympic-level rock climbing coach, back into his orbit. Indeed, she’s so impressed with his scheme that she takes him up on his offer of dinner, an overture she previously rejected.
So maybe it all was a grand romantic gesture, as Wendy and Taylor contemplate — or maybe it was the move of a self-appointed master of the universe, bending world events to his will. But when you have the kind of money and power that Mike Prince has, is there any distinction between personal desires and sociopolitical manipulation? I know the answer Chuck Rhoades would give.
Loose Change
This week’s appearing-as-themselves guest stars: the rock climber Alex Honnold, the golf expert Michael Breed, and the journalist Olivia Nuzzi. Honnold and Nuzzi were even factored prominently into the show’s story lines, with Honnold leading the charge of online influencers against Rask and Nuzzi outing Lazzara’s bribery scheme.
Since I’ve heard directly from several readers who upbraid me when I lose track of this, I’ll state for the record that I spotted two “Godfather” references: Chuck’s reference to Lazzara as the shot-calling Don Barzini of New York’s landed gentry, and Wags’s name-drop of Frankie Pentangeli from “Part 2” when it came time to make a killing on the market. (Rian bucks the trend by quoting a different Francis Ford Coppola film, “Apocalypse Now.”)
Though it does depict mask use at large gatherings, such as the meeting of the doormen’s union, the episode occasionally refers to the pandemic in the past tense, as if the worst were behind us when it was filmed. Ah, were we ever so young?
One subtle but impressive bit of acting by Corey Stoll as Prince: silently chuckling as he learns that Rask is declaring bankruptcy, its chief executive is being dragged before congress, and the Olympics have withdrawn from Los Angeles. Typically, laughing at the success of your master plan is the stuff of supervillains; Prince has the perspicacity to do it quietly, at least.
As an avowed Wags fan, it pains me to learn he’s an Eagles fan; my position on the band is best expressed by the Dude in “The Big Lebowski.” (But speaking as someone who was a teenager in 1992, I was a big fan of opening the episode with “Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots.)
“I’m definitely against concentration camps, but ——” Let me stop you right there, Ben Kim!
Scooter Dunbar working connections in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office to further the anti-Rask ploy. Chuck Rhoades reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capitalism and Ideology.” The times, they are a-changin’.
Seeing the Olympics committee dump a host city for human-rights violations is the kind of thing that reminds you what you’re watching is fiction.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
