1.8 Boasts And Rails On that front, it’s beyond time to give Billions some credit. In its 8th episode, Billions is what it is: an average to above average pay cable show. It must be acknowledged, however, that it is pursuing at least two plot lines that A. I have never seen before and just as importantly B. Are pretty interesting. The first aspect is something I’ve highlighted several times but escalates into an even better level in Boast And Rails: the relationships among Axe, Chuck and Wendy. Billions is a better show for having Maggie Siff as Wendy on it. Not because Wendy Rhoades is a once-in-a-lifetime character but rather she is the lynchpin of perhaps one of the more interesting troikas on television right now and a unique (to me at least) plot line. Billions’ streak of truly bizarre guest stars remains intact first with “I-Just-Love-The-Music” James Hetfield and now “Let-Me-Tell-You-About-My-IPO” Mark Texieiria His disdain for Wendy and Axe’s relationship goes even further than that, however. Wendy tells Chuck that she loves him and Chuck responds that he loves her more than anything in the world then adds “Lots of people love each other but you and Axe. That’s something else. That’s deep. And I fucking hate it.” It’s in this unexplainable relationship where Billions has found the most dramatically fertile ground. And it’s an even better treat that the show seems to know what to do with it by underplaying it. Wendy doesn’t get explosively angry. No one has to spend the night on the couch. But at the same time, there are no easy answers. How could there be in something so relatively unprecedented? Additionally, the show hasn’t relied on this particular clusterfuck of interconnected relationships and rivalries as a crutch, letting them simmer in the background until conversations need to be had. Unfortunately, that restraint with the Axe-Chuck-Wendy plot, line while creating a truly unique scenario and something that will be in my own personal TV canon brain for a long time, also means there are lots of minutes to fill in the show of other stuff. And it’s that “other stuff” where Billions continues to be punishingly average. The central conflict of Boast And Rails isn’t much of a conflict at all. Chuck, while still officially recused from the Axe Capital case is coaching Bryan Connerty from the sidelines. Bryan has run into an issue because Axe knows he has a mole within Axe Capital and is trying to smoke them out. Chuck instructs Bryan to frame a patsy at Axe Capital for Axe to find to preserve Donnie as the mole. The problems here are two-fold. One is Chuck’s recommendation to Bryan to get his hands dirty has been done to death in storytelling. I don’t doubt that the decision to frame an innocent man is a big one for Bryan, the character, but to us, the audience, it’s just a bore. Especially, since Billionsturns it into a weird, extended “kids these days” metaphor. Chuck can’t relate to the younger people on his staff and the New York Times reporter because they eat healthy Korean food and Vietnamese banh mi instead of pouring whole milk into their coffee *No one should drink milk with their coffee, anyway. Milk is the fucking worst. Maybe I could have settled for a visual metaphor in which the fridge at the Rhoades residence had half and half and heavy cream and Chuck reached for the cream. This insistence on doing things we’ve seen before means for a somewhat boring episode, twist-y ending or no. Still, there is one more, slightly underplayed plot line that feels unique or at least exceedingly rare. We find out what Axe’s big, guilty secret is. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was not in the office of his financial firm for a very specific reason. He was meeting with his lawyers as the firm was preparing to fire him for unethical trading practices. And as if that weren’t enough after Axe saw a plane hit the first tower, he called up the European markets to dump all the aviation and travel stocks he could, making a killing on the backs of his soon-to-be-dead colleagues. That’s… dark. And if I were watching a news story reveal that in real life, I would be disgusted. Here is where the rarity comes in though: Billions convincingly sells this as an amoral act at worst and maybe even a compassionate one at best. Instead of denying it to his P.R. team, Axe admits to it and says the hundreds of millions of dollars he made doing so was in the best interesting of his team-members surviving family. He’s not wrong there. And later on, Wendy meets with Axe and assures him “You were in a tough position so you did what you knew how to do: you traded.” If Wendy says it, it must be true. Read Alec’s review of the previous episode, The Punch, here.
