As usual, the word "fuck" is bandied about from all mouths. If that word had been under copyright by the early Anglo-Saxons, the producers of Billions would go broke paying royalty fees.
Episode 2 really lets the women shine. It shows Wendy and the duo at Mase Cap, Sarah and Lauren, show they can run the place while Axe is off upstate at a billionaires conference at the Mohonk House.
When an Asian ball-busting woman representing a major pension fund stakeholder comes to Axe Capital to kick the tires while the alpha males are upstate, Wendy gets Lauren, the PR princess of Mase Cap to handle the investor relations end of the business with aplomb. Lauren has tabloid gossip journalism credits—Page Six— and knows how to spin things so effectively that you don't even notice they are being spun.
She and Wendy are a great psyche team that can get anyone to do anything they want them to do while the subject thinks they're making the choice. If this show was in Washington, Lauren would be the president of a K Street lobbying firm.
Sarah, the buttoned-up other major domo female on the Mase Cap team is a retired Naval officer who reminds anyone who will listen of her Naval Academy background.
Episode 2 mostly centers on Bobby and the new nemesis Mike Prince, jousting for pissing rights in front of the assembled at the conference. Axe is allowed to be seen leaving the evening's meal with a stunning eye-candy beauty and a bottle of extremely old scotch, no doubt to go over her portfolio in a room upstairs. The eye-candy beauty actually gets to say a few words before she and Axe make their obvious exit. A speaking part pays more than a simple walk-on. A star is born.
Axe and Mike Prince are using the conference to try and corner the market on an emerging psychotropic drug Ayahuasca, which Axe and Wags used on themselves in an Alaskan wigwam with the lead shaman. Why the FDA would seemingly license a drug that seems to resemble LSD is beyond me, but there you have it.
The simple Google definition tells us it "is a brew with powerful hallucinogenic properties claimed to open your mind and heal past traumas." It doesn't say if it introduces new traumas. Will President Trump endorse it and take it himself? It sounds like dangerous stuff, and is so far illegal in the U.S. It is derived from plants.
Axe and Wags are lobbying the soon-to-be named head of the FDA for the right to buy his stock portfolio just before he is confirmed. It seems anyone who comes up for a job in Washington has to first shed the pesky conflicts of interest there would be unless they divested.
And how prescient can the screenwriters be? The NYT reports today that industry ties pose a possible conflict of interest for the scientist leading the coronavirus vaccine team. According to the Times, Moncef Slaoui has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests.
Chuck and Kate are called to governor's office, complete with a huge portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on a wall behind the governor, and taken to the woodshed over Chuck's lowering the charges against the upstate techies who caused a massive power outage trying to create a massive Bitcoin mining operation.
Since Bobby Axe was connected to the scheme, and Chuck and Bobby are supposed to be buddies, Chuck lowers the level of the charges from criminal to civil. After all, Bobby has returned the Churchill books.
The sit down with the governor occurs in New York City, naturally, since Albany will never be recreated by the producers. The governor wheels in the Manhattan DA, a seasoned looking woman who is dressed quite professionally, who also tells Chuck she doesn't give a "fuck" about the responsibility Chuck feels in lowering the level of the case.
The governor is cutting off Chuck's pursuit of these type of cases, and now has to work with the Manhattan DA's office. It is a blow.
As a further blow to Chuck's autonomy, the settlements collected from the civil law suits he pursues are under the control of the governor's oversight. He gets to apply them to whatever lines in the budget he likes.
But, Kate Sacker, being the legal genius that she is, reads that it is possible for Chuck's power over the settlement money to kick in if it goes to something philanthropic. Yale Law, your ship has docked.
So, all that dough that Eliot Spitzer collected when he was Attorney General probably never made it in the form of restitution for the general taxpayer. No taxes were lowered; no rebates wee made. I would have recognized the government giving me some money.
Chuck is correct in assuming that Bobby Axelrod has gotten to the Manhattan DA and ratted on Chuck's lowering the charges. That meeting is in a prior scene and amazes anyone who really thinks about it that a man with Axe's reputation for financial shenanigans can get a meeting with the sitting Manhattan DA. But hey, this is showbiz.
Episode 3 is titled "Beg, Bribe, Bully." It could also be called Billions, Family Style. The theme is set with Cat Stevens's 'Father and Son,' a beautiful song that is still one of my favorites, being played at the episode's opening. The theme is the friction between fathers and sons, and when the song came out in Cat Stevens's 'Tea for the Tillerman album, a friend of fine told me he could only think of myself and my father, since our relationship was contentious at best.
Quite a few years ago in Flushing, my neighbor told us his brother Joseph had passed away. Showing respect for our neighbor, we went to the wake one evening. There at the wake were Joseph's family, three adult sons if I remember correctly.
Apparently Joe was quite a son-of-a-bitch to his sons and they grew up with a good deal of resentment toward the father. We were at the wake on the last evening and I was surprised that their resentment lead them to bring a cassette player, hit he play button, and have the Cat Stevens song 'Father and Son' play.
Wakes of course these days are video affairs, with lots of still photos. There was none of that then, just an audio remembrance of the contentiousness the sons had with the father. Wow.
Axe's son Gordie goes to a very exclusive prep school, likely in one of those still quaint New England towns in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. Wherever it is, it far enough away from New York that Axe takes the private jet to smooth over the trouble his son Gordie has gotten himself into when he rigged enough cable to start a Bitcoin data mine, only to create a blackout like the upstate techies did in Episode 1.
Gordie is obviously highly adventurous, a clone of his dad, but in deep, deep do-do from the headmaster who is expelling him the for misuse of resources.
Of course Axe is proud and mad at his son at the same time. Gordie is chastised for not seeing the possibility of failure and its consequences. Gordie and a nerdy girl who wears those glasses that automatically stereotype her as a nerd, were millionaires for a brief moment, but then they blew the little village's power out. I still don't understand why Bitcoin's value only exists if the power is on, but that's for another discussion.
Anyway, the headmaster will not succumb to Axe's offers of generosity in the form of a bribe disguised as a hefty donation. Moolah, and plenty of it. The headmaster wears a bow tie and looks like he should be judging dog shows. He is of such high moral rectitude that when Axe and Wags start to see where his Achilles heel lies they get nowhere.
That is of course until they get lucky and get PI photos of the Syrian refugees that the headmaster is sponsoring with diverted donated money to the sports program. The diversion is not in itself enough to ding the headmaster, since it is a noble cause, but making the Syrians do yard work around his house, uncompensated, is what brings him down. Or at least makes him vulnerable to Axe's demands.
Again, the screenwriters are ahead of the curve. Did thy anticipate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's brouhaha with directing staff for errands? Did they remember that the long-time head of the New York Racing Association,(NYRA) Christopher Kay who was bounced for having stable help rake the leaves at his Saratoga property uncompensated? Come on. Grab a rake and do it yourself. It's good exercise.
Didn't this headmaster live through all the nominees at the start of Clinton's first term that took a nosedive when it was discovered that hired help was not on the payroll for Social Security deductions? Nannygate sunk several nominees.
Before the headmaster take-down, Axe engages in conversation with Wendy as what to do. Wendy responds with some typical fence riding psycho babble about letting the chips play out and have young Gordie suffer expulsion and going to a less prestigious school, thereby softening his chances of Harvard, and leading him to drink at 28, or, do what Axe usually does, and buy his way to a solution.
Either way, whatever Axe does, it seems young Gordie is headed for AA at 28 is he's lucky. Sometimes you just can;t win.
Armed with the photos, Axe has the headmaster by the cojones and ladles on the requirement that he get to address the student body. A chastened headmaster can only agree.
Axe therefore gets to address the school, wearing his trademark zip flannel jacket and jeans, use the word "fuck" here and there, and tell the assembled how wonderful the real world of capitalism is. It's Gordon Gecko's "greed is good" speech from the movie "Wall Street", and meets with thunderous applause.
The headmaster looks like he's going to puke. Axe delivers the financial facts of life, similar to Sonny telling C in "A Bronx Tale" that Mickey Mantle doesn't give a fuck about you. Jesus, what an eye-opener.
Gordie of course gets to stay in the august confines of Skinner Preparatory Academy, and Wags, so touched by the father and son bonding over a crisis sets out to get in touch with his far-flung offspring.
For Wags, this doesn't mean just giving them a call, since they don't live with him, it means finding them. Talk about estranged. Wags employs the Axe Capital gumshoe, Hall, to track down the products of his loins.
Only one of them seems accommodating enough to meet Wags, a young adult male Jesus freak wearing a wooden cross prominently around his neck. If this character stays in the script, it's a cinch Wags is not going to be able to take him to the gentleman's club for a session of father and son bonding over pole and lap dancing with $10 tips stuffed in G-strings.
Axe also gets an emerging abstract artist to cave in on his artistic independent principles and over Bruno's famous slices of pizza, convinces the artist to be sponsored by Axe, like Michelangelo has the Medici's at his back. Money may not completely corrupt, but it does buy some nice things.
Meanwhile, Chuck, ever eager to become a different person, shows up at his law school Alma Mater—Yale, of course—and offers to teach a course for a semester. The black, female dean of the law school is gushy over having a sitting attorney general giving lectures. To a point.
Academia, no matter how well endowed with riches, is always after more riches. The dean reminds Chuck that Chuck Sr. has never made good on his pledge of $100,000 annually. Seems pops went there as well. No surprise there.
"Well, how many years has old dad missed?"
"All of them."
"I'll see what I can do."
This sets in motion the chain reaction of quid pro quo that Chuck is used to. Dad won't budge on making good his pledge—and therefore throwing a wrench into Chucks professorial dreams—until Chuck Jr's family accepts dad's new Native American bride and their papoose. Chuck Sr. is following Roxanne's orders that the Rhoades family needs to become one family.
Chuck needs Wendy to get on board with this. Chuck become the old Chuck by telling Wendy he'll lift the financial restraining order if Wendy will agree to a family get together, with the kids and her, to meet the latest members of the Rhoades family.
Wendy of course knows Chuck wants something as soon as he enters her office, but is willing to agree to the get together, not for any wellspring of family emotion, but I'm sure for the ability to get the next to-die-for apartment with no monetary worries.
And not to be left out of the script is the Taylor Mason sub-plot that shows off a software program that supposedly can reveal the hidden meaning beneath someone's words. Thus, when a university president says he will not divest the fossil fuel companies in the school's portfolio as demanded by the green-leaning student body, he is actually looking for a way to do so without losing face.
The pitch to divest meets with acceptance by the president after some baloney double talk with Taylor, but meets with a solid wall of resistance from the president of the trustees, a retired four-star admiral who is a James Earl Jones lookalike and soundalike.
The Naval Academy Sarah enters to sweet talk the admiral, or what really happens, drink with the admiral toe-to-toe and get him to lower his resistance. It seems buying the divested shares can make Mase Cap some money if they can run the transaction through the main house, Axe Capital.
When Taylor balks at using Axe Cap, Sarah quits in frustration. Best I can tell from the actress Samantha Mathis's IMDb, Sarah's gone after this episode. Anchors away my boys.
What are left with? Another object lesson in what money and power can achieve. Chuck is not anywhere near the man he tells the shrink he'd like to be, and Axe, well, he wants to be a bank. That's right. He's a wannabe Sandy Weill.
Axe always aims high.
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