Billions (TV Program)

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? More

Prince makes Kate an offer she can refuse. It’s just really hard to.Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Burn Rate’Six hundred dollars for coffee with Kate Sacker; $46,863 for Wendy Rhoades’s wardrobe; $162,500 for a night at a Covid-free bordello with Wags; $300 million for Mike Prince’s new yacht, plus an extra $300 million to neutralize its carbon footprint. We’ve said before in this space that the credo of the pro wrestler Ted DiBiase (a.k.a. the Million Dollar Man), “Everybody’s got a price,” holds sway in the world of “Billions.” Never before has the show made it quite this literal.In one of the boldest stylistic choices ever made by the show — you could argue the boldest, and I wouldn’t object — this week’s episode of “Billions” repeatedly freezes the action and superimposes graphics that show you the cost of all the name brands, grand plans and illegal indulgences enjoyed by Michael Prince and his employees. Did you know that a private hog roast with the restaurateur Rodney Scott costs $25,000? That a batch of quaaludes and a courier to deliver them runs you $8,400? That multiple characters’ personal wardrobes and grooming routines on a given day cost more than this country’s yearly per capita income? You sure do now!It doesn’t stop there. By the episode’s end, as Prince gazes at his work force from the balcony, running totals of all the money they’re generating float above their heads, like stats for characters in a video game. Then, in a breach of the fourth wall, all of the main Prince Cap players pause for a group portrait, gazing right into the camera as lists of luxuries and those luxuries’ price tags float behind them. It’s enough to make you want to take up arms with Chuck Rhoades the next time he whips out a bullhorn or a pitchfork.It’s a dazzling device, courtesy of the episode’s director, Chloe Domont, and the writers Lio Sigerson, Brian Koppelman and David Levien. (Koppelman and Levien created the show with the New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.) It makes the show’s subtext literally its text.And given the behavior the show’s protagonists in this episode, it couldn’t be more pointed. Take Chuck Rhoades. He’s still out to scupper Prince’s drive to make New York City the home of the 2028 Olympic Games, by any means necessary. This week, that meant almost immediately abandoning the man-of-the-people schtick he had adopted and warning the city’s big telecommunications companies that Prince plans to provide the city with free Wi-Fi in perpetuity as part of his Olympic bid — wi-fi surreptitiously siphoned from those companies’ unused signals. Big Telecom puts the kibosh on this plan toot sweet.You might think Prince would get his back up about this, but no, not really. Rather than jeopardize his Olympic bid with a big battle, he gets in bed with the telecom firms, settling on two weeks’ worth of free Wi-Fi for the city, during the Games only.This infuriates Taylor Mason, who pushed Prince toward the Wi-Fi plan from the start. In addition, connecting the Big Apple was supposed to be just part one of the plan, which would have also seen the firm set up free wi-fi across sub-Saharan Africa. Taylor compares the meager offering Prince comes up with to a free tote bag; “People love free tote bags!” he replies.But his overall message to Taylor is far more direct. “I’m independently wealthy,” he says. “You’re not; you’re kind of rich. Which is great, but if you want to change the world, nine digits ain’t going to do it.” With that, he sparks a new ambition inside the brain of Mase Carb’s brilliant founder. No longer will Taylor settle for the $100 million fortune once seen as the threshold for effecting positive change in the world. Now, it has to be a billion. (Minimum, we’re guessing. Billions are like Pringles: Once you pop, you can’t stop.)As for Chuck, things go poorly indeed. He is gently rebuffed when he seeks an alliance with New York’s governor, Bob Sweeney (Matt Servitto). “I know I’ve got to take a flume ride with one of you two lunatics on this,” Sweeney says amusingly, but for now he’s simply relishing his newfound power over two of the state’s biggest players.Meanwhile, Prince begins courting Chuck’s right-hand woman, Kate Sacker, asking her to quit her job and become the New York Games’ lead counsel, after which he’ll line up support for her congressional run. When she dutifully informs Chuck of this overture, he tells her to wait before declining and puts his best friend, Ira (Ben Shenkman), into play, asking him to pitch himself to Prince for the position instead.For a minute, it looks as if Prince were considering the idea — who better to neutralize Chuck than his own best friend, right? Wags and Scooter, Prince’s chief minions, are aghast that the bossman is even giving the idea the time of day.But he isn’t. It’s all a ploy to get Chuck to take his eyes off the real target, Kate. Tired of being told to wait for her moment in the sun by her mentor, she decides she is no longer in the father-figure business and joins Prince Cap, not as Prince’s protégé but as his peer, with all the perks that entails. Chuck is bitterly disappointed, but having continuously put Kate’s political aspirations on the back burner in favor of his own, he has no one to blame but himself. (Well, himself and Prince’s bottomless purse.)There’s a tremendous sense of loss as Kate rides away in her expensive chauffeured vehicle. She has always been ambitious, but she also seemed incorruptible, at least insofar as she had a clear picture in her mind of how to achieve her goals, and this picture never involved defecting to the other side. It’s a bummer to see her give in.But it’s also thrilling. What will a steel-trap mind like Kate’s be capable of doing with limitless funds at its disposal? She instantly makes Prince Cap a more formidable force than it already was. So when we see her in that group portrait, her fortune increasing by the second, it’s both sad and exciting to say that she fits right in.Loose changeThe climactic sequence in which we see everyone’s personal price tag is accompanied by a killer needle drop, Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Not only does this describe the voraciousness of everyone involved, it’s also a funny callback to a line from earlier in the episode, when Chuck describes the clang of an intimate part of the governor’s anatomy as being “loud as the cymbal crashes in ‘Hungry Like the Wolf.’” They are indeed pretty loud!In an amusing side plot, Wags and Scooter must work together to woo (read: bribe) the committee responsible for selecting the Olympics’ host city. Unfortunately for Wags, this conflicts with his and his fiancée Chelsea’s attempts to conceive a child. So he preserves his bad-boy reputation by paying a sex worker to loudly fake their encounter, coaching her to give it a big ending as he sneaks out the bordello window.The committee folks are also treated to an intimate club performance by both Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, an attempt by Chuck to mess with Prince’s plans by involving New Jersey in the bid. Neither man makes a cameo, though the University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari pops up early to give Prince Cap a pep talk.It seems worth noting that Rian, Mase Carb’s star employee, is against the free-Wi-Fi plan in both New York and Africa from the jump. She just can’t see how the numbers make sense, and she isn’t convinced by Taylor’s or Prince’s moral reasons for the expenditure.Also worth noting: Once she takes the job with Prince, Kate starts wearing her hair down. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. More

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 ChangeThis 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. More

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. More

The walls close in on Bobby as Chuck sharpens his knives. Then an unlikely ally intervenes.Season 5, Episode 12: ‘No Direction Home’“So this is what it is to lose,” says Bobby Axelrod. “OK.”He’s talking to Mike Prince, the man who helped engineer his downfall — a decisive one this time. How do we know it’s decisive? Because, I think, of that concluding “OK.” (Also, Damian Lewis, who plays Axe, just made public he is leaving the show.) Until this point, Axe has always scratched and clawed like a cornered animal to fight his way out of defeat, whether at the hands of his legal nemesis Chuck Rhoades or his business rivals, like Prince. This time, though? He admits he has been beaten, and makes his peace with it.So why does it feel like a loss for Chuck, too?At a glance, it looks as if Chuck got (almost) everything he wanted. He caught Bobby going into business with a shady cannabis company with an illegal sideline selling the black-market stuff, a deal Axe rushed into without doing his own due diligence. He has ended the era of Axe Cap/Axe Bank for good. He has busted up his mortal enemy’s romance with his ex-wife. He has harpooned his white whale at last.Only the whale gets away.What Chuck didn’t count on, as the jaws of the law began closing on Bobby, was that his own supposed teammate Mike Prince would help Axe escape. It was Prince who alerted Axe Cap to Bobby’s impending arrest, with a single goal in mind: seizing control of Axe’s empire. It was Chuck, he says, who wanted to see Bobby behind bars, a “Cheryl Tiegs fishnet fantasy” that Prince doesn’t share. All he wants is to see Axe gone.Taking advantage of the brief window of time before Bobby or his lawyer, Orrin Bach, are officially notified about his indictment, Prince swoops in with an offer. He buys Bobby’s businesses — Axe Holding, the bank, the asset management arm, Taylor Mason Carbon, the whole enchilada — for the princely sum of $2 billion. It’s exactly the kind of liquid cash Axe will need to live life on the run once the rest of his assets are frozen by the government.So Bobby steps into the helicopter meant to ferry him to the chosen place for his surrender — then simply steps out the other side and slips into a waiting car, which takes him to his escape flight. He winds up in Switzerland, where he is greeted with a new passport and a warm welcome. He accepts both with a smile. And why shouldn’t he? Even in exile, he’ll live a life of luxury unimaginable by any normal standard. “So this is what it is to lose”? I’d be OK with a loss like that, too.Chuck and his allies, meanwhile, are left fuming — but they’re not the only ones. When Prince rolls into the Axe offices to take control, two of Bobby’s underlings, Dollar Bill and Mafee, walk right out. These two former rivals, who once staged a charity boxing match to give their enmity an outlet, agree to an alliance while they’re still in the elevator.Other ex-Axe employees find themselves in a shaky position even when they stay behind. Prince says he needs Wendy and Taylor in order to effectively run the firm, but it’s impossible to imagine the two of them getting along anymore — not when Taylor, a crucial player in the conspiracy to take Axe down, figures out almost immediately that Wendy knew Bobby was planning to flee.Then there’s Rian, the trader Taylor used to help move the anti-Axe plot along. Moved by something like pity for the young woman, Taylor warns her that what’s left of her ethics will be whittled away if she continues to work in the field, going so far as to encourage her to quit. But there’s Rian in the office when the conquering Prince appears; she’ll be a valuable asset to both Prince and Taylor, no doubt, but she is also shaping up to be one of Taylor’s biggest regrets.And what about Axe’s right-hand man, his “Tom Hagen”? The last we see of Wags in this episode, he is dueling with Scooter, Prince’s Wags equivalent, to pull out an office chair on Prince’s behalf. Once a henchman, always a henchman, I guess. It’s true that Wags’s legal jeopardy over the banking deal disappeared once he revealed that he had never officially signed on as chief executive — at least not on any documents Chuck and company can find. But still, a second banana needs a top guy. Any port in a storm, you know?If I have one complaint about Axe’s departure from what Dollar Bill refers to as “the field of battle,” it’s that the character’s long-delayed romance with Wendy never really materialized. No steamy assignations in exotic locales, no drama from growing pains as their relationship matures, no examination of how Wendy and Chuck navigate the new normal — hell, not even so much as a kiss goodbye!“If we can’t finish it,” Bobby says as he and Wendy bid adieu, “we can’t start it.” Too bad for them, and too bad for us.But this, of course, is subsumed by a greater loss: that of the steely presence of Damian Lewis. It is frankly amazing how well he and Paul Giamatti served as opposite poles on the show. Giamatti’s Rhoades is verbose and blustery, displaying a lawyer’s way with words and a to-the-manor-born respect for the rules, even when he himself breaks them. Lewis’s Axelrod, by contrast, had a clipped, clenched-jaw cadence in his speech; the precision of his voice, the sharklike cool and speed of his body language, every bit of it was in service to creating a character for whom “move fast and break things” was the byword.Corey Stoll’s comparatively laid-back Mike Prince will be a major departure as Chuck’s next antagonist; it’s impossible to imagine Axe standing still for three minutes while Chuck cooks him an omelet. That’s a testament to Lewis’s work. The real cliffhanger for Season 6 is simply how “Billions” will fill its Axe-shaped void.Loose change:I don’t know about you, but when those workers chiseled the words “Axe Cap” from the office walls — a change not even the firm’s switch-over into Axe Bank occasioned — it really did feel like the changing of the guard.In addition to all the storytelling and acting ramifications described above, am I the only one who thinks Bobby’s flight from the law speaks poorly to his parenting? Obviously his kids still have their mother, Lara, to look after them. (The actress Malin Akerman departed the show long ago, but her character is still out there.) But I find myself thinking of the sequence earlier this season when he bullied his son Gordie’s headmaster into calling off the kid’s expulsion, then delivered a fiery “greed is good” speech to the assembled student body. What kind of message does this send, I wonder?One unexpected note of grace from Bobby’s departing deal with Prince: Axe pushed, albeit unsuccessfully, for Taylor Mason Carbon to be set free. Clearly he still has some respect for the protégé who almost eclipsed him.On a happier note, this finale saw the return of Sarah Stiles as Bonnie, one of the Axe gang’s funniest members. Here’s hoping she is back in the fold full-time for Season 6, which its co-creator Brian Koppelman has said will debut in early 2022.Rather cynically, Prince refers to Axe as “the new poster boy for inequality” … as he makes his play to seize control of Bobby’s empire. What does that make Prince? Until this point in the season, I think “Billions” used Prince to toy with the idea of what an ethical billionaire might look like: one who attempts to make amends with his former partner’s mother, who joins with Chuck and Taylor after Bobby destroys the renewable energy sector. Even the sight of Prince smoking a joint and eating eggs with Chuck and his daughter was humanizing. Do ethical billionaires exist? This episode may have given us the show’s answer. More