The show opens with a blaring soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen singing, "Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night..." With that, we get a scene of an overweight guy on a motorized scooter inspecting a vast chicken farm in Arkansas. The guy is responsible for publishing a weekly chicken population report that affects poultry prices. He is supposed to travel around and inspect other facilities.
Well, Dollar Bill learns the guy barely leaves home. This piece of information is derived from a report from the Mobilized Meals gal who tells Bill she delivers a week's supply of meals in one shot. Thus, our hero inspector gets phone reports from outlying facilities, self-reporting, leading to bogus numbers designed to keep the prices high by underreporting the chicken population. Works for them.
It is a perfect piece of information that Axe uses to take a massive long position on poultry, knowing the prices will be artificially inflated because of purposeful undercounting. Whether this is inside information is not known. To me, it is a brilliant strategy making use of a seemingly inconsequential piece of information and turning it into an investment strategy. Guaranteed to win. Just what drives Bobby Axelrod.
Things look good, until they don't. Suddenly, there is no weekly chicken report. It is delayed. No report, no juiced prices. Axe's position looks like it he might soon be holding a bag of, yes, chicken shit. Dollar Bill flies to Arkansas in no time at all to check things out.
Chicken man on the scooter doesn't answer the door of what looks like a bare bones house. Dollar Bill walks all around and peers through a window. Chicken man is dead, laying on the floor with the TV on, likely done in by a heart attack caused by lack of exercise. We don't need the medical examiner's report. The chicken report is cooked.
Dollar Bill hangs around to see who will replace the chicken man, with orders from Axe to get them to report the same way the predecessor has been. Problem. Seven guys in suits get out of two vehicles. If you ever needed to cast a group of auditing pencil pushers, this would be how you would make them look. Straight as arrows from a Big-Four firm.
Dollar Bill figures he can't bribe them all. He's got to do something more radical. He relays his plan to Axe, who correctly assumes Bill is about to do something that might easily land all of them in orange suits with no hope of ever going to any more Super Bowls with VIP seating. Chicken Holocaust.
Dollar Bill walks into what looks like a completely unguarded quarantine facility, where a huge population of chickens who have been exposed to the HBAI H5 virus have been separated from the healthy stock. Bill's plan is simple. Infect all the healthy chickens he can, get them to die, and therefore achieve the same low population count, just by another means. Axe will still win. Axe likes to win, of course.
And to a soundtrack that is as lively as it is a testament to the producers and writers who find these songs to accompany the action, we are treated to country western singer Daniel Romano drawling away the lyrics to 'The Real Story of Chicken Bill.' You can hardly believe it. I have now downloaded the song for my iPod, because frankly, I would have never heard of the song if it weren't for Billions. Come to think of it, perhaps the song drove the creation of the episode, and not the 'Chinatown' quote.
However, Wags and Axe, fearing Federal charges against them because of interfering with the nation's food supply, fly to Arkansas on the private jet and intercept Bill, who is carrying a bowling bag of at least one infected chicken. (How many chickens can you get in a bowling bag is a story for another time,)
Axe, in the spirit of avoiding real trouble, explains that sometimes you just need to take the loss. Dollar Bill is still reluctant with this concept, but backs down as the trio walks away after throwing the infected chicken back (in the bowling bag) into the quarantine facility. Still vastly unguarded.
Bill still wants to go back and toss the bird into the healthy flock. He's restrained by Axe and Wags. Wags, at this point, offers his solace to Dollar Bill: "Forget it Bill. It's Chickentown."
After this, you don't really need the rest of the episode.
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