Billions (TV Program)

Eggs will be broken. The question amid all this conniving, though, is whose?Season 5, Episode 10: ‘Liberty’Chuck Rhoades is cooking eggs.That’s it. That’s the scene.For three uninterrupted minutes — without dialogue, without music, without so much as a single cut — the attorney general for the great state of New York cracks, scrambles, fries, flips and serves an omelet to his daughter, Eva (Alexa Swinton), and their guest, the billionaire Mike Prince. In “Billions” time, those three minutes might as well be an eternity. Suddenly, we’re miles away from the mile-a-minute patter and breakneck plot twists that make “Billions” one of the fastest-moving shows on television. For these three minutes, it is slow cinema, a cousin to the endless floor-sweeping and glacial soup-sipping of its sister Showtime series, “Twin Peaks: The Return.”That this happens in the most momentous episode so far of the season’s long-delayed latter half seems like no coincidence. As the first installment to truly address the Covid-19 pandemic — it appears to be set after the initial quarantine stage, when people started making their way back to workplaces and family gatherings — it is keenly interested in the ways human beings connect. There’s video conferencing and FaceTiming, as well as spirited dinner conversations, an in-office date and an intimate phone call. Viewed in this context, the omelet scene is an attempt to slow things down and capture the vibe of what it’s like to pull an all-nighter with a colleague, share a joint and then fix an early breakfast for your daughter.But before we run the risk of slowing down too much ourselves, let’s jump right into the momentousness. For starters, the pandemic happened — is happening — and the show addresses it head-on; in the opening scene, half of Axe Cap’s staff members delivers their dialogue through masks.But they aren’t Axe Cap’s staff for long. Zooming into the office from his home, where he has been quarantined because of an infected private jet pilot, Axe announces that Axe Cap is no more. Everyone has been let go … and some, but not all, of them will be rehired by night’s end for his new venture, Axe Bank. In the case of Lauren, Mase Carbon’s investor relations guru, she’ll have to choose between joining the bank or staying put. (When she tries to do both, Taylor fires Lauren, and Lauren dumps Taylor.)Chuck has a big night on the docket, too. With the help of video conferencing technology and some in-person guests, he is staging a Jeffersonian Dinner, a highly structured exchange of conversation and ideas. The assembled worthies include Prince; Chuck’s friend and lawyer Ira Schirmer; the Manhattan district attorney, Mary Ann Gramm (Roma Maffia); Governor Bob Sweeney of New York (Matt Servitto); Senator Marcia Vandeveer (Polly Draper); Chucks’ right-hand woman; Kate Sacker; U.S. Solicitor General, Adam DeGiulio (Rob Morrow); and, unexpectedly, his father, Charles Sr., with his sleazy medical adviser, Dr. Swerdlow (Rick Hoffman).Why does Charles Sr. show up? It’s complicated. Essentially, Chuck gives his estranged wife, Wendy, a choice: Cough up a lump-sum divorce settlement, or allow him to snoop around Mase Carb/Axe Cap’s books. When he ignores her FaceTime call, she contacts Ira instead. Ira gives her a view of the room and affords her a few snippets of the conversation everyone is having about bank regulation and liberty or something. She tips off Axe that his enemies have gathered. He sends his newly loyal ally, Charles Sr., and his mole, Swerdlow, to crash the party.Now here’s where it gets extra tricky. The conversation eventually turns to the legalization of cannabis. Prince is all for it; Chuck is against it, but eventually bows before superior arguments in its favor; DeGiulio thinks the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue but likely rule in its favor. And when people like this talk, people like Axe listen.Axe figures that the fight between Prince and Chuck was a ruse, that cannabis is soon to get the federal green light, and that the time has come to corner the market before Prince can do so himself. What he doesn’t know (I think?) is that Taylor, who had earlier told him there was a yellow light for the weed biz, is part of Chuck and Prince’s conspiracy.According to Taylor’s employee Rian, the light, in fact, is bright red. So has Axe fallen for a ruse, one he was meant to be ensnared by from the moment Chuck set his bait for Wendy’s call? Or has he seen through it? On this show, how can you even tell until the ax (no pun intended) inevitably falls on whoever screwed up?Even as all these schemes fly around, there’s room for romance in the air. Some of it even comes from Wags, who has been searching all season for a way to rectify his failure as a father by fathering a whole new child and starting from scratch. He seems to find his woman in Chelsea (Caroline Day), who eats a dinner prepared for them by the celebrity chef Tom Colicchio all by herself while Wags puts out various fires. To Wags’s surprise, she invites herself back to his place because his tyrannical antics turn her on.The biggest bombshell of all comes in the episode’s final scene. Speaking by phone around the same time that (a slightly stoned) Chuck cooks breakfast, Bobby Axelrod (who, by the way, buys Wendy’s share of Mase Carb to give her liquid assets enough to placate Chuck) confesses that he sabotaged Wendy Rhoades’s relationship with the artist Nico Tanner because he has feelings for her himself. They’re feelings she reciprocates.And that’s it. No passionate clinch, no consummation — just two people who know each other inside and out, smiling on opposite ends of a phone call. If Axe weren’t so detestable, it would be a beautiful moment. Maybe even one worth spending three uninterrupted minutes on.Loose change:Back in the fold this episode: Orrin Bach (Glenn Fleshler) Axe’s much-missed lawyer, and Bob Beaufort, a.k.a. Hard Bob (Chelcie Ross), the government official turned compliance officer for Axe Bank. Still missing from the ranks of regularly scheduled guests: Sarah Stiles as Bonnie, the tough-talking trader who has an illicit relationship with her colleague Dollar Bill, and Terry Kinney as Hall, Bobby’s black-ops specialist. Fingers crossed!Wags has mostly stuck to the sidelines so far this half-season, but what a pleasure to watch the actor David Costabile tear the head off an underling, or react with disbelief when his disastrous dinner date turns out to have been a success after all.With Lauren now out of the picture, I wonder if the professional and personal tension between Taylor and Rian — who once again nearly bounces from Mase Carb when she realizes that Taylor is misleading Bobby — will begin to blossom into something more.During an argument over the phone, Wendy roasts Chuck: “I care not a whit, as you might say.” Direct hit, she sank his battleship, et cetera. More

Axe continues to let his emotions lead his decisions. And now the consequences are teaming up to take him down.Season 5, Episode 9: ‘Implosion’“He’s not dead till I say he’s dead,” says Bobby Axelrod of his decabillionaire rival, Mike Prince.“Bobby Axelrod has to be wiped from the face of the earth,” says Mike Prince of his decabillionaire rival, Bobby Axelrod.Heck yeah, says I.“Billions” is never better than when its combatants (often a more apt word than “characters”) have well and truly joined the battle against one another, concocting complex schemes and building toward dramatic denouements for their rivalries. As this week’s episode drew to a close, not one but three worthy adversaries — Mike Prince; Chuck Rhoades; and, in something of a surprise, Taylor Mason — had all joined forces to take Bobby Axelrod down.Will it stick? Probably no more or less than all their past attempts, including those that took place in this very episode. Will it be fun to watch? I would bet a decabillionaire’s daily ill-gotten gains on it.This latest round of hostilities began in last week’s episode when Bobby reached out to the still-grieving mother of Prince’s former partner, whom he convinced to blast Prince on national television. It was one of the most effective reputation destroying maneuvers in recent “Billions” memory, and in addition to scrapping his ambassadorship to Denmark, it drove many of Prince’s clients, business partners and charity partners heading for the hills.Sure, he can talk a few of them into staying with an intimidating, Van Halen-quoting monologue or two. But the writing is on the wall, in letters so large even Princecan read them.So, after a meeting with his ex-partner’s mother, he does what he considers to be the right thing. Rather than let his plummeting reputation sink the impact-investment sector, he divests all of his do-good holdings so they’re not tainted with his sociopathic stink.Naturally, this is seen as good news within the halls of Axe Cap, specifically the Taylor Mason Carbon wing of the office. Taylor realizes they can buy up Prince’s former holdings on the cheap, shoring up both the sector and their own control of it.Axe’s response? He wants to offload everything Axe Cap owns in the sector, turning Prince’s good deed into the first domino that will sink the entire decarbonization market. Why? Just to make Prince look even worse than he already does.Taylor, of course, is aghast at the idea, which is both immoral and — this should be the more important consideration for Axe — a money loser. So Bobby goes around his semiautonomous lieutenant and orders Taylor’s underling Mafee (Dan Soder) to make the trades. There goes the sector, and there goes all of Prince’s attempts to rehab his reputation along with them.For Bobby, this is just more tit-for-tat, a follow-up to Prince’s attempt to get at Axe by stranding at sea the first shipment of his frozen-pizza pet project. On the advice of his star pizza chef’s cousin, Paul Manzarello (Domenick Lombardozzi), Bobby buys up a bunch of Italian-made pizza ovens and recreates the entire shipment domestically, allowing his right-hand man, Wags, to show up Scooter, his counterpart at Prince’s firm, at a supermarket. For Prince, it’s the last straw: Axelrod delenda est.Chuck, meanwhile, continues his machinations against his old rival — while he’s not busy helping his dying father pick out coffins. Recognizing that his maneuverings unwittingly handed Axe the bank charter he had been seeking, Chuck reaches out to Drew Moody (an impressively sinister Michael Cerveris), attorney general for the tax-haven state of Delaware, in an attempt to nip the problem in the bud.Moody blows him off. “I don’t believe corporations are people,” he purrs. “They’re better than people, because they don’t [expletive] up when they get so obsessed with one thing they can’t see reality.” I’m not sure this tracks given Axe Cap’s behavior, but OK, sure.Chuck devises a novel workaround for this particular stone wall, though. He has his father, Charles Sr., appointed as special trustee to Axe’s new bank, ready to ride herd and make life for the fledgling operation a living hell, so long as he is still alive to do so.And that’s precisely the vulnerability upon which Axelrod seizes. Utilizing the secret employee files compiled by Wendy Rhoades before her big ethics investigation a while back, Axe discovers that his minion Danny Margolis (Daniel Cosgrove) is a donor match for the kidney transplant Charles needs to stay alive; by the time Chuck gets wind of it, the operation is all but underway. Now Bobby can say he has done the one thing Charles’s own son couldn’t: He saved the old man’s life.So much for that punitive trusteeship!But Prince is surprisingly optimistic. Recognizing an excess of emotion in Axe’s decision to cut his pizza partners in on atypically favorable terms, Prince sees the new bank as a blessing in disguise. With no one in place to stop him, Prince says, Axe will get reckless and make mistakes — “fatal ones.” All they have to do is let him run with it, continuing to cut corners and wage war against Prince until he makes a blunder from which he can’t recover.So when Taylor rolls into Chuck and Prince’s conversation and asks, point blank, “How are we taking down Bobby Axelrod?,” the last piece of the puzzle snaps into place. If these three together can’t do it, no one can.But what if that’s just it — what if no one can? Consider the fate of Nico Tanner, Axe Cap’s artist in residence. His relationship with Bobby has effectively ruined his artistic drive; he is now both overly attached to making money and bitterly resentful of his patron’s control over him. So he slashes the canvas of the final painting to which he was contracted with Bobby and winds up destroying his relationship with Wendy in the process. Raking in the big bucks only made him painfully aware of his need for the big bucks, and the result is an omnidirectional disaster.But not for Bobby. Sifting through the detritus of Tanner’s trashed studio, he snaps up the sketch of Wendy that Tanner penciled after a night together, then decides to hang a painting that Nico appears to have defaced with an entire can of black paint. That ruined painting isn’t ruined at all, as Bobby sees it — it has the power and emotion he was looking for all along.And why would he see it any different? Profiting from disaster is the Bobby Axelrod way. Or as Chuck puts it elsewhere in the episode, “Every time I move, I make his life better and mine worse.” Is Chuck’s alliance with Prince and Mason a way out of this dynamic, or will it simply dig the hole deeper?Loose change:Fans of Bobby DeNiro take note: This episode referenced both “The Irishman” (with Charles Sr. hilariously arguing that his life is now too short to watch a four-hour movie) and “Cop Land.”Prince refers to himself as “the Atomic Punk” to a recalcitrant investor, thus harnessing the power of Van Halen (it’s a reference to a song on their first album). Chuck paraphrased the Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth in last week’s episode. Here’s hoping Axe does karaoke to “Hot for Teacher” or something next week.Speaking of that old-time rock ‘n’ roll, it was nice to hear Bruce Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain” on the soundtrack.Something to note: Rian, one of Mase Carb’s rising stars, nearly quits the firm over the sell-off debacle before being talked out of it by Taylor. I still feel like there’s a connection developing here that will go deeper than boss and employee.Don’t think for a second that Chuck’s alliance with Prince makes them friends. “Because I’m so rich, I’m inherently guilty?” Prince says during one of their first meetings. “It’s what I built a good chunk of my career on,” Chuck replies. Prince counters by saying the mega-rich can’t be policed by outsiders; the only way they can really do good in the world is “to demand it of ourselves.” Given his track record, I’m not filled with confidence. More

Chuck returns minus a beard and a lover. Axe returns minus the good sense to leave well enough alone.Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Copenhagen’Chuck Rhodes has shaved off his beard. But he wants to be clear: It’s not that big a deal.“You look ready to toss your cap in the air at West Point!” exclaims his underling Karl Allard (Allan Havey).Rhodes’s weary reply? “Don’t make a whole thing of it.”My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that this new clean-shaven Chuck Rhodes has more to do with the vagaries of scheduling talent for the back half of this Covid-scrambled season than a decision made in the writers’ room. If your show stars Paul Giamatti, and if he has gone beardless sometime during the many months since you were last able to film, then by God, your main character will go beardless as well.But “Don’t make a whole thing of it” doubles as a mantra for the entire … what should we call it? A half-season premiere? Season Five version 2.0? However you slice it, the writers have taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to the show’s return. No hard reset, no launching point for a slew of brand-new story lines — this is a standard “Billions” episode, which is to say it simply advances its pre-existing plotlines in dense and dizzying style, through crackling dialogue and confident performances.For Chuck, this means losing more than just his beard. His relationship with the Yale sex researcher Catherine Brant, played by Julianna Margulies, appears to have been another casualty of the forced break in production. The show writes her off with Chuck’s revelation that his threesome with her and a sex worker, hired by Cat for the occasion, proved disastrous when its lack of sadomasochism, the thing that really gets Rhodes’s engine revving, exposed fissures in their romantic connection.Chuck’s relationship with his alma mater produces more trouble than a regrettable sexual liaison, however. One of his former students, Merle Howard (Noah Robbins), led a revolt against Chuck’s assignment to take down the secretary of the Treasury, Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), during the season’s opening half. With the help of some photographic evidence provided by the Axe Cap sleazeball Bill Stearn, a.k.a., Dollar Bill (Kelly AuCoin), he has now resorted to blackmail, ordering Chuck to resign his post as the Attorney General of New York lest his long-ago role in rigging a Yale student election be exposed.Chuck has a moral leg to stand on here: His opponent in the election in question opposed divestment from apartheid South Africa, and the young Chuck joined friends in burning ballots in a bathtub to prevent this ultraconservative candidate from achieving power. Unfortunately for Chuck, that candidate grew up to be the university’s beloved chaplain, and a head-to-head morality-based showdown in the present day would not necessarily deliver Chuck a slam-dunk victory — not when election-rigging has been such a going concern in America in general, and on “Billions” in particular.“It was a student election — persuading Oingo Boingo to play Spring Fling, and not Sun City,” Chuck protests to Merle. “It’s not Il Duce in ’34!”“One leads to the other,” Merle responds without missing a beat.Chuck’s lawyer and best friend, Ira (Ben Shenkman), digs up an unseen file of dirt on Chuck’s old election opponent, over Chuck’s protestations. If Merle had a pistol,” Ira asks, “would you let him shoot you? No: You’d defend yourself and then go about making amends once you knew you were still breathing.”In the end, Merle blinks, withdrawing his threat and reporting himself to the university’s dean (Tawny Cypress). When she confronts Chuck about his youthful indiscretion, however, Chuck refrains from using Ira’s file, tendering his resignation from Yale’s faculty instead. Sic semper tyrannis, I guess.On the opposite side of the great “Billions” divide, Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) takes on an altogether more dangerous adversary than a law student: his fellow billionaire Mike Prince (Corey Stoll). When Bobby learns from his thoroughly hung-over right-hand man Wags (David Costabile) that Prince is on deck for an ambassadorship to Denmark, the two men dig for whatever dirt can cancel the appointment and ruin Prince’s reputation.They settle on Scooter Dunbar (Daniel Breaker), Prince’s equivalent to Wags. Using a small army of runners to cover up his own involvement, Scooter appears to have developed a serious sports-betting habit, precisely the kind of security vulnerability that gets people axed from government positions. (Or at least used to.)But Wags’s attempt to bigfoot Scooter on the issue backfires when Prince shows up to Axe Cap headquarters, revealing that the bets were his own. The reason he placed the bets through Scooter and the runners wasn’t to hide a dangerous vice, he says. It’s because, given his well-earned reputation as a power player, his position could tilt the betting odds were it widely known.Not that this stops Axe’s attack. Keying in on a stray mention by Prince of his past, Axe tasks his lieutenants to dig deeper. Once again, it’s Dollar Bill who gets the goods: According to the mother (Becky Ann Baker) of Prince’s late partner, Prince swindled his former partner and best friend out of a billion-dollar deal — contributing, she believes, to his death in a drunk-driving accident. The ensuing TV news exposé lets Prince know he has a real fight on his hands.Indeed, if there’s a through line for this episode, it’s about characters trying, and often failing, to stay true to the people and things that mean the most to them. The artist Nico Tanner (Frank Grillo), the current love interest of Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), recoils from the culture of limitless cash and entitlement embraced by the Axe Cap/Taylor Mason Carbon power structure — although that doesn’t stop him from fleecing one of them for thousands of dollars for a mere scribble. (His vigorous, shirtless creation of a new painting before an enraptured Wendy, to the tune of the Velvet Underground’s euphoric song “Rock and Roll,” is the episode’s valedictory moment.)As for Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon), the wunderkind trader is aghast to discover that the Mase Carb up-and-comer Rian (Eva Victor) still works as a cater waiter in her off hours. The side gig is an attempt to keep alive her relationships to her old friends, she insists. But if other major investors see her at work, Taylor argues, they will question how Taylor runs the shop. At Taylor’s behest, Rian quits her side hustle and settles in for a cozy night in front of the telly with her boss. Is it just me, or is there reason to worry that Taylor’s right-hand woman, Lauren (Jade Eshete), won’t be the only woman in the young genius’s life before too long?And while Chuck scrambles to find a kidney donor for his father (Jeffrey DeMunn) — a course of action that leads to Chuck’s humiliation by Dr. Gilbert (Seth Barrish), whom he put away for ethical violations — his ex-wife, Wendy, is tapped by Charles Sr. to be his health care proxy.“I need you to be cleareyed and punch my ticket” should the need arise, Charles tells her.In the end, the episode’s most potentially momentous moment almost feels like an afterthought. Acting on a tip by his sinister go-to guy Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), Axe buys up an obviously crooked payday lender that Chuck and his own lieutenant, Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad), have been looking into. Why? Because said lender has a bank charter, the golden goose for which Axe Cap has been searching all season.Game on, folks!Loose change:As, quite potentially, the most Tom Petty-friendly show on TV, “Billions” here deploys “It’s Good to Be King.” Ironically, of course.This week’s major cameos come in the form of The Bail Project’s governing board chair, Michael E. Novogratz, and the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whose obvious integrity challenges Tanner to stand by his own artistic instincts.I appreciated Chuck and Ira’s shout out to Mamoun’s, the New York/New Haven falafel mainstay. Boy, I could tell you some stories.This week in “concepts I didn’t know about until ‘Billions’ told me about them,” it’s hygge, the Danish ideal of being warm and contented. Has anyone on this show truly felt hygge at any time? More