This week, the ties that bind are feeling extra tight for Chuck, Prince and Scooter.
Season 6, Episode 5: ‘Rock of Eye’
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that “Billions,” the most “Godfather”-quoting show on television — this episode alone included references to the “Part II” antagonist Don Fanucci and Vito Corleone’s regret that his son Michael would never become governor or senator — put family at the heart of its story lines. This week, family was the story line for three of the show’s most important characters. And surprisingly, no one involved got shot to death in a rowboat, metaphorically speaking.
The first family struggle involves Mike Prince’s second-in-command, Scooter, and his nephew, Philip (Toney Goins). Prince woos the wunderkind away from his job teaching at a charter school to join Prince Cap, where his instantaneous success rubs many of his colleagues the wrong way. Scooter is aghast at Prince’s play; he wanted his nephew to pursue dreams that aren’t strictly financial in nature. (Scooter himself says he could have been an orchestra conductor before the promised wealth of a partnership with Prince came calling.)
In the end, they patch things up, though Philip causes problems for the firm in other ways. He arrives just days before Prince declares that he will reallocate capital among the traders, and the old guard worries he will take a piece of the pie. Philip, however, declines Prince’s offer to double his book; he prefers to have it cut in half so he can grow it on his own and take a larger slice of the profits. That said, Philip is given the job of directly supervising the timid trader Tuk, who has his capital zeroed out.
(The biggest fireworks from the reallocation come from a completely different quarter. Victor, the firm’s alpha male now that Dollar Bill is gone, has his book doubled, while Bonnie, who was aggressively trading against Victor’s positions in a sort of grudge match, gets hers cut in half and put under the supervision of Wags. She angrily quits in protest; might she join Mafee and her former lover Dollar Bill at their breakaway firm?)
Chuck’s family problems hit him right where he lives, literally: His father, Charles, moves into Chuck’s house after getting thrown out by his wife over some illicit texts exchanged with a woman on whom he has had romantic designs for years. (Charles announces his intent to stay at Chuck’s place in semi-permanent fashion by humming the theme song from “The Odd Couple.”) To everyone’s surprise, Charles’s not the least, he doesn’t pursue the potential affair, letting both it and his existing marriage exist in limbo.
That limbo lingers until Wendy, his former daughter-in-law steps in. She convinces him with brute-force reverse psychology to give up the emotional affair and move back home: She tells him to leave his wife, knowing he’ll do the exact opposite. It’s a solid make-good to her ex-husband, Chuck, for her role in poaching Kate Sacker from the attorney general’s office. But it’s also a very transactional move, which causes her to put the kibosh on her nascent interest in practicing Buddhism. (Her instructor had asked her to start by seeing if she could go just four days, or even four hours, without any quid pro quos.) Oh well!
Prince’s family woes, by contrast, directly effect the grandest of his plans: his play to bring the 2028 Olympic Games to New York. News breaks — with a little help from Chuck’s well-connected minion Karl Allard, who alerts Page Six — that Prince’s daughter Gail (Gracie Lawrence) has insulted Gov. Bob Sweeney to his face, leaving egg all over it. After some tense negotiations during an emergency family dinner, Gail agrees to apologize at her father’s insistence, but Prince winds up reversing course and tells her she shouldn’t have to eat crow for speaking her mind.
Instead, he seizes on a throwaway comment from Gail, who wonders aloud how a man as vain as Sweeney could ever make it to the governor’s chair, and runs with it. He decides to appeal to the governor’s vanity directly by naming his theoretical Manhattan stadium after him; the plan, which involves a huge glowing mock-up of Sweeney’s name over the stadium entrance, works like a charm, much to Chuck’s and Karl’s chagrin.
One of the episode’s most intriguing developments involves Taylor Mason’s play for a vegan-food outfit called Terravore as part of an attempt to drive up those end-of-quarter numbers. Taylor orders Rian and Winston to stake out a position on the company so huge that the firm’s legal minds, including Sacker and the compliance officer Ari Spyros, worry it will raise red flags with the S.E.C. unless Taylor can provide documentation as to why the purchase was so big. When it becomes clear that Mase Carb’s play is to wait until the company makes it onto the S&P index, at which point they’ll sell and turn a huge profit, the concern only grows.
Sure enough, the plan works, though it requires help from an unexpected quarter. Taylor’s old colleagues Mafee and Dollar Bill help out by convincing a loudmouthed YouTube day trading guru, Darren Russakoff (J-L Cauvin), to urge his legion of “stonks” bros to buy in. Kate, of all people, helps Taylor by claiming the Mase Carb founder’s six and a half years of veganism count as due diligence and by backfilling a paper trail to that effect. Everyone at the firm, including Prince and Wendy, know that something sketchy has gone down, but unless Taylor comes out and admits it, it’s nothing anyone can prove. (Rian, it should be noted, seems particularly uncomfortable with the scheme from the get-go.)
But at least one of the nominal good guys gets a W, even if it comes after a major L. To burnish his reputation as a tribune of the people, Chuck steps back into the courtroom to prosecute a case against a seafood company that fraudulently labeled poor-quality fish as the good stuff. To use a situationally appropriate metaphor, he is eaten alive by a shark: the corporate defense lawyer Daevisha Mahar, also known as Dave (Sakina Jaffrey), who dupes him into using an expert witness she knows is crooked, and whom she exposes as such.
Chuck regrets the error — it’s very much like how he was fooled by Prince into taking his eye off Kate Sacker last week — but he is impressed by Dave’s acumen. More than that, he is convinced that between her past as a public defender and her current fondness for diner food, she is less than comfortable with working at a white-shoe law firm, defending law breaking corporations.
So Chuck invites her to take over Sacker’s old position as his right hand, and Dave accepts. This could create a very interesting dynamic in the attorney general’s office, as Chuck has never before had a lieutenant who was more a peer than a protégé. Will his eagerness to enlist Dave lead to a clash with his considerable ego? Tune in next week, same Chuck time, same Chuck channel!
Loose change:
This series’s love of basketball is second only to its fondness for the works of Francis Ford Coppola; this week, Prince, himself a former player, uses Coach John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success as a guide for his employees — who take to it with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success — and rewards them all with brand-new Jordans when the reallocation is complete.
I enjoyed the insight into Karl Allard’s personal legal style granted by this episode: He admits courtroom work isn’t his strong suit, his office is one giant pile of folders and boxes, and he says he hasn’t a clue where anything is amid the mess … but he does have the gossip sheets on speed dial.
Dave and Chuck both fire direct shots at the reputation of a certain former New York prosecutor by the name of Rudy Giuliani. Now that it’s no longer making a pastiche of Trumpworld with the likes of Jock Jeffcoat and Todd Krakow, “Billions” seems more comfortable in making its distaste for the former administration and its hangers-on more explicit.
At one point, after revealing in-depth knowledge of the nature of the spat between Victor and Bonnie, Prince says, “I’m the Eye of Sauron — I see all.” Does that sound like an ethical billionaire to you?
A key quote from Chuck that I think we’ll be coming back to as long as Prince sits in the big chair: When Wendy tells him the firm under Prince “isn’t Axe Cap,” Chuck says, “No, it’s worse because it pretends to be better.” That’s the crux of the season, isn’t it?
Source: Television - nytimes.com
