Chuck visits an old friend. Wags tries to cover his boss’s tracks as the decision about New York’s Olympics bid nears.
Season 6, Episode 7: ‘Napoleon’s Hat’
You know, it’s funny: Before I watched this episode of “Billions,” I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s been too long since Chuck Rhoades went to a dungeon.”
Seriously! The series launched with an image of Chuck in flagrante, and his so-called “arousal template” played a major role in the show on and off for quite some time. A calculated admission of his predilections helped him win the attorney general’s office. And a failure to service his kink spelled the end of his relationship with last season’s romantic interest, played by Julianna Margulies.
In this very episode, in fact, Rhoades says regarding sex workers, “I’m out of that game.” An almost entirely sexless sixth season, at least as far as Chuck is concerned, just didn’t sit right.
So it was with some pleasure that I greeted Chuck’s descent into his old dungeon, on a quest to uncover the current location of the high-end brothel where Wags illegally entertained the bigwigs who select the host city of the 2028 Olympics. It was great to see Clara Wong as Troy, Chuck’s one-time dominatrix, and even better to see Paul Giamatti squirm as Troy painfully tweaked Chuck’s ear.
It even meshed well with the subplot in which Chuck and his ex-wife-slash-amateur domme, Wendy, briefly rekindled their old friendship, only to bail when professional concerns got in the way. At their son’s high school carnival, Chuck had won a private dinner for two with the Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud, to which he invited Wendy for old time’s sake. But poor Boulud, playing himself, wound up serving the multicourse meal to their nanny and himself instead. C’est la vie!
In the end, however, Chuck’s reunion with Troy bore no fruit, legally speaking. Wags was one step ahead of him, tipping off the elite brothel that the cops were on the way; the pros in question converted the place into the world’s least-geriatric bridge club, stymying Chuck’s attempt to tie Prince to illegal activities and thus scupper his Olympic bid.
Even Chuck’s Plan B winds up D.O.A. With the help of his lieutenants, Dave and Karl (who’s been increasingly entertaining), Rhoades pinpoints the Olympic “fixer” Colin Drache as the recipient of a $5 million bribe, presumably from Prince. (Even Wags, of all people, is aghast at the brazen nature of the graft, at least as it pertains to a self-conceptualized straight arrow like Prince.) But just when he’s ready to make an arrest amid New York City’s celebration for securing the games, Drache simply vanishes, like Keyser Soze.
In a way, watching this season of “Billions” is like watching some kind of ethical disease spread. Taylor Mason, head of the Prince Capital subsidiary Mase Carb, could well be patient zero. The one-time wunderkind spends this episode setting up a crowdsourced algorithm for investment ratings, then lording it over an established ratings agency in order to force them to downgrade the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The idea is to allow Prince to weasel his way back into the system after his previous $2 billion donation to the authority backfired, abrogating the city’s need for his big ideas to improve the subway.
It’s such an effective play that the governor, the mayor and the head of the M.T.A. can basically only nod and go along with it. Prince is upset that Taylor and his own right-hand man, Scooter, went behind his back with the plan, but he knows how to take a W. Still, he insists he’s not like some drunk dad from whom the booze needs to be hidden at Christmas; he wants to be included in future maneuvers of this sort.
Meanwhile, Rian, who has been spending the season as a sort of Jiminy Cricket-style externalization of Taylor’s conscience, rues handing over the spiffy new ratings algorithm to the corrupt old guard just to have it squashed. The Rian-Taylor dynamic is one of the show’s most intriguing at this point; I have no idea where the endgame is with these two.
But the most compelling duo in this episode is Chuck and Dave, thanks to their verbal sparring over the nature of extreme wealth. Chuck has the zeal of the convert when it comes to the rich: He calls billionaires a threat to democracy itself and says that the lower classes have been sold a myth because they hope against hope to be rich themselves one day. Dave argues that “only those with wealth have the privilege of resenting it, but for the rest of us, it’s that dream that makes us go.”
Honestly? For as shrewd a legal operator as Dave is made out to be, her position sounds hopelessly jejune. I mean, Horatio Alger? In this economy? Please. By contrast, Chuck’s rage against the billionaire class reads like a logical and narratively fruitful outgrowth of his old enmity for one specific billionaire, Bobby Axelrod, and his current grudge against Axe’s successor, Mike Prince. Chuck has met the enemy, and he is cash.
Loose change:
No “Godfather” allusions that I caught this week, but there was a shout out to another gangster movie, “A Bronx Tale.” For my money, though, the best pop-culture reference of the episode was a subtle but unmistakable quote from “The Big Lebowski” when Chuck talks about the scholarship students sponsored by Prince: “Proud we are of all of them,” he says, quoting Julianne Moore’s Maude Lebowski on the “Little Lebowski Urban Achievers.”
As a charter member of the Karl Allard fan club, I was delighted to no end by this episode as it revealed the wild side of the old legal hand. Dave recoils in borderline disgust as Karl recalls nights in an Okinawa sex club with viper-seasoned sake; Chuck gazes at him incredulously as he describes his prowess as a “spirit guide” in the psychedelic era. (“Loose, breathable clothing is key.”)
Still no clues as to whatever Mike’s secret agenda may be, beyond his vaguely proclaiming, “I plan on having a lifetime of grand projects.”
Crucial to all of Mike Prince’s plans is the approval of his semi-estranged wife Andy, an Olympic-level rock-climbing coach. She ends the episode with an anecdote about racing up a summer-camp rock wall to kiss pinups of era-appropriate heartthrobs at age 8 and by extracting a promise from Prince to fly back and forth to Denver. Can he really be trusted to put his marriage ahead of his city?
“The year Sperrys or a Vineyard Vines blazer shows up on Kevin’s Christmas list is the year we’re transferring him to public school”: Wendy is decidedly sour on her son’s private-school upbringing after she and Chuck are confronted by an obnoxious parent at the carnival, who calls Chuck a communist and Wendy a Karen. As an aside, the way they ferociously stick up for each other makes me think there’s still dramatic juice to be squeezed from their relationship.
For all of Chuck’s self-conception as a man of the people, he still reacts like a scalded dog at the prospect of his son going to — gasp — Cornell instead of Yale.
“That guy … a Cypress Hill song comes to mind,” says Prince of Chuck. Which one, I wonder? “Insane in the Brain”? “How I Could Just Kill a Man”? Uh, “Hits from the Bong”?
Chuck on that fancy brothel: “These places shuffle locations like handsy priests change dioceses.” As a veteran of a Catholic upbringing, this one hit home hard.
“Next time I pay every employee their full night’s wages,” Wags says to one of the brothel’s workers, “something unspeakable is going to transpire, and I will be right in the middle of it.” Now that’s our Wags!
Source: Television - nytimes.com
