Neither Chuck nor Prince has really moved on, even if everyone around them seems ready to.
Season 6, Episode 10: ‘Johnny Favorite’
There’s a valedictory note in the air. It starts in the office of the New York state attorney general, where Chuck’s newly minted replacement, Dave Mahar, leads a send-off toast to her ex-boss. It is echoed in an all-hands meeting called by Mike Prince, held at his own home — a meeting that turns into a booze and molly-fueled dance party D.J.ed by Questlove.
Even Chuck relents eventually to letting his father; his best friend, Ira; and his buddy Judge DeGiulio (Rob Morrow) drag him to a fancy Lake George retreat, where the hope is that he can forget his troubles for a weekend and be steered toward his next station in life: chief counsel for a defense contractor, perhaps? Nothing a few drinks, some bison rib-eyes and some short-term female companionship — with a little boost from Dr. Swerdlow (Rick Hoffman) — can’t sort out.
But neither of our two central antagonists has really moved on, even if everyone around them seems ready to. Prince’s shindig is largely an attempt to change the narrative, and Chuck’s only personal breakthrough after obsessing over Prince all weekend is in having determined his next move against him. Guys like them don’t take losing lightly, and in the span of two episodes, Chuck has destroyed Prince’s Olympic dreams, and Prince has destroyed Chuck’s political fortunes. For both men, the fight is far from over.
From the start, Chuck is openly wary of the excursion his father and friends have put together for him. He refuses to relinquish his phone, preferring to remain tapped into the grid in order to establish his next route to power. When it comes to clay pigeons, he easily outshoots the rest of his party, metaphorically displaying his still extant killer instinct. (Chuck with a gun: Now there’s an image.) His turn in a sensory immersion chamber becomes a battle with a rich loudmouth named Ronald Chestnut (Matthew Lillard), a fight that continues when Chestnut attempts to pick up the group of women attached to Chuck’s gang at the retreat’s bar.
Chuck dispatches this goon with his usual verbal dexterity, earning a round of applause from the whole establishment. But even as Swerdlow and his father retire to their rooms with their conquests of the evening, Chuck is planning his next line of attack. You simply cannot take the fighter out of him.
As for Prince, he recognizes that his team is still smarting from the Olympic loss and needs to share in the spoils of his victory, however pyrrhic, over Chuck. He triggers the fight-or-flight instincts of all his employees — with one important exception — by giving them a day off and calling for an all-hands meeting at his home that evening. His plan is relatively simple: To use his favored analogy, he has slain his dragon; now all that remains is for the army that backed him to share in the devouring of the dragon’s heart, in the form of a celebratory rager.
And it is indeed a wild night, from the perspective of a “Billions” fan at least. Making good on weeks of tension, Taylor Mason makes a pass at the witty and glamorous Rian; Rian rebuffs Taylor, saying she could never risk falling in love with a co-worker — only to wind up spending the night with Prince. In this relatively sexless season of the show, this is wild stuff.
But there is one Prince Cap employee not in attendance: Wendy Rhoades. It’s not that she objects to Prince’s defenestration of her ex-husband; on the contrary, she seems to understand and accept this as something Prince needed to do. It’s the why of it, not the what of it, that concerns her as the company’s performance coach. What is it that Prince seeks, she wonders. Fear? Respect? Love?
Over the course of a lengthy colloquy, Prince admits to requiring all three. By leaving the staff in suspense as to the nature of the all-hands meeting, he taught them to fear him. By centering the meeting on Chuck’s ouster, he earned their respect. And by turning it into a bacchanal, he won their love. It’s a psychological-manipulation hat trick!
If you get the sense from all this that Prince thinks very highly of himself, compared with even his own most valued employees, you’re correct. Punishing Chuck isn’t enough to make up for having lost the Olympics. He tells Wendy that his end goal is to become that once-in-a-millennium figure who uses his talent, power, and fortune to leave the world a better place than it was when he found it, rather than, in Wendy’s profane parlance, “[expletive] the world up.” (How this squares with sleeping with one of his employees is anyone’s guess; it certainly casts doubt on his repeated promise to his semi-estranged wife, Andy, to prioritize their relationship.)
And oh, did you know that Wendy is writing a book, and has in fact finished it by the time this episode ends? It sure was news to me!
When you put all the pieces together, you’re left with one of the strangest and most unsettling, and unsettled, episodes of “Billions” in quite some time. Chuck, Prince, Taylor, Wendy — they all seem to be “at the precipice of a crossroads,” as “The Sopranos” would put it. For all its complexity, this episode is essentially a holding pattern, a brief reprieve before the masters of the universe at its heart select their next lines of attack.
Here’s hoping they let the power go to their heads. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have much of a show, would we?
Loose Change:
In a side plot, Kate Sacker is steered by Wags to a working relationship with Bobby Axelrod’s black ops guy, Hall (Terry Kinney). It’s Hall’s job to dig up the kind of dirt on Kate that no one else can find — precisely the sort of dirt that could be dredged up and used against her by a determined congressional opponent. In fact, Hall uncovers dirt even Kate didn’t know existed: Turns out, her father (Harry Lennix) paid off her prep school’s headmaster in order to prevent serious consequences for Kate’s vandalism of an administration building during a protest. When she angrily confronts her old man about this, he frames it as a matter of safeguarding the progress of Black people generally. It’s enough to put Kate’s dreams of high office on standby.
In another relatively minor story line, Taylor meets with Mafee and is aghast to learn he hasn’t done anything to grow the small fortune in cryptocurrency gifted to him by Bobby Axelrod. Mafee insists that had he tried to parlay the gift into something bigger, the money would have owned him rather than the other way around. I’m not quite sure how this plays into Taylor’s later decision to make a pass at Rian, but it does seem connected in some ineffable way.
“You see a bully, you have to step in”: This is Ira’s assessment of Chuck’s fundamental character. It ties in with Chuck’s fixation on the fact that Prince attended the hearing that led to Chuck’s ouster instead of letting it play out from a distance. Prince is a person who has to see his victories happen firsthand, which makes him vulnerable.
It’s worth noting that Chuck very clearly chafes at Dave’s takeover of his office. He hired her to work for him, not to replace him. I wonder if he’ll ever get over it.
Chuck compares the immersion chamber to the film “Altered States,” written — and subsequently disavowed — by Paddy Chayefsky. In fact, he’s surprised that this is the first Chayefsky reference the employees have heard. Is he talking about the staff at the retreat, or the writers of “Billions”?
The episode takes its title, “Johnny Favorite,” from the name of a character in the director Alan Parker’s supernatural noir film “Angel Heart,” starring Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro and Lisa Bonet. It’s a movie Rian and her co-worker Winston have become obsessed with, growing less sure of their interpretations of the story with each new viewing. You’ve gotta love a movie that makes you more confused over time rather than less.
Speaking of movies, Chuck and his crew go through a lengthy recreation of the U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue from “Jaws,” only in this case it’s Charles Sr. ruing the deaths of dozens of people burned to death in a nightclub he owned during his stint as — let’s be blunt — a slumlord. It’s hard to tell which he regrets more, the deaths or his implication in them. Yikes.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
