Chuck goes to war with a billionaire, but probably not the one audiences expected. Prince tries his best to be different from his predecessor.
The Season 6 premiere of “Billions” was given a surprise early release on Friday morning, available free across multiple streaming platforms, including Showtime.com and YouTube. Future recaps will publish after episodes air on Sunday nights.
Season 6, Episode 1: ‘Cannonade’
A new season of “Billions” is upon us, and with it comes a new billionaire on Chuck Rhoades’s to-do list. It just isn’t the man you think it is — at least, not yet.
Oh, sure, Mike Prince has conquered the business empire of his and Chuck’s one-time rival Bobby Axelrod, who has fled the country one step ahead of the law. (Damian Lewis, who played Axe, left the show at the end of Season 5, with the actor Corey Stoll taking over as Paul Giamatti’s co-protagonist.)
But Prince and Chuck are currently in a sort of détente phase at the moment. Chuck has temporarily stepped away from his duties as New York Attorney General, vowing to return only if and when he can line up a big victory to offset his failure to collar Axelrod; by the end of this week’s episode, it’s not clear if he’ll return to the job at all. Prince, meanwhile, literally offers to become Chuck’s ally; the offer is rebuffed, but the fact that it was made says something about the man’s temperament.
No, the filthy rich creep currently in Chuck’s cross hairs is Melville Revere, a descendant of a Revolutionary War hero played with magnificent snootiness by Michael McKean. (Anyone who witnessed McKean’s turn as Chuck McGill on “Better Call Saul” knows nobody in the biz does self-righteousness better.) Revere’s ancestral property — brought back into the family by the money Melville made as a security contractor, selling pepper spray and rubber bullets — is adjacent to the upstate farm to which Chuck has semiretired.
The two blue-bloods might have gotten along just fine if it weren’t for the twice daily fusillade from Revere’s collection of antique cannons every morning and evening, disturbing Chuck’s peace. Unfortunately for Chuck, who has handed the reins of the attorney general’s office to his protégé Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad), he has nothing to do but perseverate on the irritating explosions, day in and day out.
Chuck tries a variety of methods to shut the cannons down. Direct diplomacy with Revere fails, as does Chuck’s initial attempt to rally the townspeople to his side; many of them are just as irritated by the noise as he is, but they feel helpless because Revere’s largess has benefited everyone from the fire department to the local Boy Scout troop. So he gets creative and opens up a sluice on the creek that runs through both of their properties, flooding out Revere’s supply of gunpowder.
In a fortuitous coincidence (or a storytelling sleight-of-hand, take your pick), Revere is an investor in the firm formerly known as Axe Cap, now Michael Prince Capital. Knowing that Chuck’s ex-wife, Wendy, is a macher in the company, he reaches out to see if she can somehow call off the dogs. This sets Mike Prince’s mind to work about what it means to keep his investors happy, though a sit-down with Chuck over glasses of Glenlivet — set to “Jurassic Park” — style shaking by the cannonade — fails to yield the alliance Prince was hoping for.
In the end, Chuck’s path to victory is an easy one. After learning from an environmentalist that the creek into which Revere’s cannonballs land is an ideal habitat for endangered bog turtles, though none actually live there, he orchestrates the transfer of several of the reptiles to the site. This provides him with the legal basis he needs to shut down the cannons, though he makes a grand show of the thing by enlisting a mob of townspeople literally armed with pitchforks and torches. (Well, lanterns, anyway.)
It’s then that Chuck makes a statement that could have huge ramifications for the future of his character, and the show. Speechifying to the assembled crowd and members of the press, he effectively writes off the law as toothless when it comes to reining in the lawless excess of the billionaire class. Does this mean he’ll relinquish his attorney generalship permanently, in favor of a more grass-roots approach to taking down Revere, Prince and their ilk? Stay tuned!
And what of Prince? His name is now on the wall of what used to be Axe Cap’s hallowed halls, but his comparatively mellow, even vaguely do-gooding approach is a hard sell to Axelrod’s hard-charging staff. True, he saves the life of Axe’s former right-hand-man, Mike Wagner (David Costabile), by calling 911 when Wags’s high-tech heart-monitoring ring reveals that Wags is having a heart attack while using his Peloton.
Wags is grateful for the save; “I’m not going out like Mr. Big,” he declares, in reference to another major TV character’s heart attack on a Peloton last month — and in what appears to be a brilliant bit of last-minute sound editing. But Wags is understandably resentful that he was being spied on through the ring, a gift from Prince to everyone in Axe Cap and Mase Cap. The incident only worsens relations between Prince and his new employees.
Prince’s dilemma is twofold. Not only must he either win over the existing employees or fire them en masse and start anew, he also has to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission that he, unlike his predecessor, is on the up-and-up. He contemplates firing Wags until the fiendishly clever reveals his indispensable in-depth knowledge of the firm’s traders. He turns to the unctuous compliance officer Ari Spyros (Stephen Kunken) for guidance in identifying borderline-illegal maneuvers from the company’s past that he can give up to the S.E.C. to prove his good faith. Spyros points to a wall of file boxes: Turns out the vast majority of Axe Cap’s wheelings and dealings fall under this umbrella.
So, acting partially on the advice of Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), he does what would have been unthinkable to Bobby Axelrod. He gathers all his employees and investors, including Revere and Charles Rhoades Sr. (Jeffrey DeMunn), and announces that he’s firing … the investors! From now on, he says, investors will have to prove themselves to the firm, not the other way around. Only the most pristine clients need apply to what he calls “The Prince List.” This is obviously a financial and reputational bloodletting in the short term, but Prince expects it to pay dividends in the end, both with the investor class and with his most recalcitrant, and most talented, employee, Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon).
Which brings us to the big question asked by the episode, and perhaps by the entire show: Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire? “Billionaires break the laws of decency, even while obeying the letter,” says Chuck. “By definition, having that much is criminal.” Prince disagrees; he’s a billionaire himself, so what did you expect?
But as a character, he represents a unique challenge to Chuck Rhoades’s entire raison d’être: He believes that, even as a billionaire, he can effectively police himself and his peers on the Prince List in the bargain. Somehow I doubt that the newly minted torches-and-pitchforks Chuck will agree.
Loose change:
The episode starts with Buffalo Springfield’s epochal protest anthem “For What It’s Worth” and ends with Public Enemy’s late-90s interpolation of that song, “He Got Game,” from the Spike Lee film of the same name. “Billions” never shies from big needle drops; this is a clever way of incorporating one of the most recognizable classic rock songs in the catalog.
Also on the music tip: One of the episode’s funniest moments comes during a scene in which Wags and Prince haggle over what it will cost for Wags to quit the firm. Instead of making a deal, Wags simply says “Nope!,” and at that moment the composer Brendan Angelides’s score cuts out entirely. All it’s missing is a needle-scratch sound effect.
It felt great to see the usual Axe Cap suspects throughout the show, but much missed were Kelly AuCoin as Dollar Bill and Dan Soder as Mafee. Will they resurface to make trouble for Prince?
As interesting as Prince’s decision to sack his investors was, it’s hard to believe that all of them — except Melville Revere, who gets in high dudgeon about it — would simply take it on the chin and leave the office without saying anything in protest. For that matter, it’s hard to believe that all of them would come when summoned.
The episode ends with Chuck firing one of Revere’s cannons himself as a sort of kiss-off. To me, this says a lot about Chuck: The rules are meant to be followed, unless it makes him feel good to break one.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
