Billions: YumTime

"We are not uncertain."

So, here's the real question - How much of this is actually about the Scrumpets?

This week, all of our major players are running their own side quests; albeit side quests that are ultimately interconnected in ways that won't come to fruition for a while yet. Which means that even though Axe and Chuck are still the declared enemies, they're currently more focused on organizing their own particular proxy players.

It'll probably more productive to take a look at what our big four (plus Wags) are each focusing on this week in order of relevance to the bigger picture.

— Wendy's ethical dilemma – well, her current ethical dilemma – involves conflicting instances of doctor/patient confidentiality. Specifically, Wags tells her, in session, that he plans to cause considerable harm to the career of Maria Saldano, the portfolio manager that Wendy coached to great success in the previous episode. It appears that Maria used that coaching to successfully negotiate herself a better deal with Axe Cap, and Wags takes the way she did it as a betrayal. So, being Wags, his plan is to pretend to give her everything she's asking for, lock her into the company, and then slowly crush her into poverty for daring to negotiate for what she's worth.

Wendy is quite right to point out the inherent sexism in Wags' response. Even Wags isn't entirely what we might call 'full throated' in his denial of it. But both Wags and Maria are Wendy's patients, and so she's powerless to warn Maria about the plan. This kind of moral quagmire is shown to us now, early in the show's run, to underscore how Wendy exists on a very thin line of ethical conduct.

Wendy's solution to the problem is elegant, if also ethically questionable. She uses her understanding of Maria to manipulate her into accepting the outside job that she'd only been using as leverage to get a pay increase at Axe Cap. This is obviously morally questionable at best, but she found a way to save Maria without technically committing misconduct. It's a clear example of Wendy's preference for – and skill in finding – the least gray path out of a dilemma. Wendy wins.

— Lara, meanwhile, has the good fortune to stumble into the information that June (she who Lara shot down so brutally in the pilot) is having a memoir about 9-11 published. Well, good fortune for Lara. Not so much for June, who's already gone to the effort of not only writing the book but also having sex with the incredibly sleazy old publisher in order to get it into print.

What follows is an impressively brutal series of object lessons as to why you don't piss off Lara, as June gets to endure an escalating series of object lessons as to exactly what Lara can do to destroy your life.

Honestly, it's kind of difficult to not root for Lara here. Normally, as a viewer, you'd expect to feel badly for June, but the show takes a couple of very clever steps to make you feel all right about enjoying her suffering. First, and a lot of the credit for this has to go to Melissa Errico who plays June, the episode does an excellent job of making June just enough of a bitch that it's hard to sympathize with her. And second, the 'rain of fire' that Lara brings down onto June are all such '1% problems' that you're more likely to have open contempt for her than to feel any pity. Oh, I'm sorry, your yoga class and tee-time got cancelled? That must be so hard. You're no longer able to buy your idiot son an admission to Stanford? I'll run right out and light a candle for you.

But the real point of the Lara and June plotline – and it's very cleverly seeded just low enough in the mix to not ring too many alarm bells yet – is that there's a chapter in June's book that details... something... about 9-11 that Lara very much does not want printed. Something about Axe, if we infer properly from a number of context clues. And whatever it is, Lara successfully beats June down until she agrees to remove it entirely from the book and sign an NDA on the subject. We're meant to be enjoying that Lara won, but the real point of it is the open question of what that chapter revealed. More on that later. Lara wins.

— While all this is going on, Chuck is still getting his ducks in a row for the moment that he can get one to flip on Axe and bust his insider trading case wide open. There's just one problem. Ari Spyros, frustrated at Chuck's belittling of him in the Pilot episode, has handed off one of the more important ducks to a different district, which means they're positioned to go after Axe and not Chuck.

Of all the side quests, Chuck's is the most straightforward. He has to do a little horse trading with the East District in order for them to give him the aforementioned duck, who we will hereafter refer to as Peter Decker. In order to get this done he has to screw over one of his attorneys and give away the case that poor Lonnie had been working on for years, which is a fairly shitty thing to do to Lonnie, but the way Lonnie reacts definitely implies that this isn't the first time such a thing has happened.

Once Chuck gets that done, it's just a matter of finding the right pressure point to get Decker to flip on Axe. In this case, one is supplied to him through Kate Sacker turning out to be really good at her job and discovering that Mr. Decker had been hiding money by funneling it through his almost comically innocent and wholesome parents, leaving them liable for prosecution on the same insider trading charge that Decker has been dodging. It has to be said, approaching Decker at his kid's softball game while the innocent parents happily watch and threatening to have them taken to jail for the weekend is next level cold of him. But it does get the job done. Chuck wins.

Which leaves Axe, and the question that we opened with. How much of this is actually about the Scrumpets?

For about the first half of this episode I kept coming back repeatedly to the same question. Why, for the love of sweet glittery Jesus, does Axe care about this? Any of this?

From the first time we see him this week, Axe appears to have become obsessed with the company YumTime, which is certainly not a thinly veiled caricature of Hostess, no sir. He's buying truckloads of them while at the same time complaining that they don't taste as good as when he was a kid. Ben Kim backs him up on this assessment, so we'll take it as true. So why do we repeatedly hear that Axe is buying up a larger stake in YumTime? Why is he so literally invested in this?

And I think they want us to be bewildered by that question, because it makes the ultimate explanation such a delightful blindside. Axe is setting up the pieces to take down the CEO, third generation ruler of the YumTime empire, Hutch Bailey III. And he wants to do that so that he can kick a specific woman off the board once he's in a position to do so. Specifically, Charles Rhoades Sr.'s mistress. This was all an incredibly overelaborate way to send a signal to Chuck, via Charles Sr., via his mistress, via a fictional snack cake company, that Chuck shouldn't underestimate how far Axe's reach is, or how far he's willing to go. It's a warning shot, banked off a lot of other surfaces.

Except that it's clearly not just that, and is so often the case, Axe betrays himself to the audience. Hutch III changed the recipe so that they'd be cheaper to make. So that he could pay himself more and have a private jet. So that the board could make more money. And they justify it all with a simple 'well, they don't taste that much worse.'  And that offends Axe to the core. And here's how we know that –

At this point, it's important to understand something about scenes that are set in Bruno's pizza place. Without getting too deep in the mud regarding semiotics and the language of television, we've been trained to understand that when we see Axe in the pizza place, we're being told 'Axe is being emotionally honest right now.' That's the location's function throughout the entire series. And he brings Purk – the lynchpin vote in ousting Hutch III from the company – to the pizza place. And has Bruno give him a short talk about the importance of using the good ingredients, even if they're more expensive. Otherwise, 'It just don't taste right.'

If that same talk had happened in any other location, it would have been Axe making a play. But Axe does not make plays in the pizza place.

It was always as much about the Scrumpets as anything else.  Axe wins.

Bits and Pieces:

-- This is the episode where Kate Sacker really comes into her own, both as a character on the show and as a player in the show's machinations. She knows at a casual glance who Bryan is sleeping with and is the only one to think to check Pete Decker's parents' finances. Which is of course the winning move in getting Decker to flip on Axe. She appears to even be happy to let Chuck take the credit for flipping him. From here on out, Kate is in the game.

-- Wags' insistance on being as graphic as possible in his 'ass to mouth' discussion with Wendy, coupled with her equal level of commitment to not being remotely shocked by anything he says is a very fun dynamic to watch. I bet the notes from Wags' coaching sessions are the stuff of legends.

-- It would be interesting to know where exactly Wendy falls on the 'Doctor' versus 'HR coach' spectrum, for legal purposes. She referred to her notes as 'patient files' to the fake FBI last episode, but she refers to the meetings themselves as 'coaching sessions,' not 'therapy,' which defintely feels more corporate recordkeeping and less HIPAA compliance. It would be fascinating to have someone who understands the relevant laws explain exactly how all of that games out, legally, in the real world. Because it feels a little like the show is having its cake and eating it on this particular issue.

-- The way the show at this stage regularly keeps Ben Kim in close proximity with Axe makes it seem like he was originally intended to be more of a protege, set up for a much larger role in seasons to come. I have a suspicion as to why that doesn't really end up happening, but we won't get there for a few episodes yet. Regardless, Ben Kim is a delightful character and we currently know about a million times more about him than we do about anybody else at Axe Cap.

-- It is, in fact, true that if you get arrested on a Saturday you just get left in jail over the weekend until a judge comes back in on Monday. More often not until Tuesday. I mean... I hear.

-- YumTime did get a 'blink and you'll miss it' reference in the previous episode, when Axe asked one of his traders to look into them. I forget now which one and it's not important enough to go back and check. Not Ben, I remember that much.

-- It's kind of delightfully evil that Hutch III apparently makes all his employees listen to the YumTime jingle over and over again all day long. I'm surprised that there hasn't been workplace violence.

-- All the other YumTime product names are equally delightful. It's well worth going back and finding them in the background.

-- The exchange between Chuck and the dogwalker who doesn't pick up his dog's poop is amazing, but felt way too long to include in the quotes. I'll tag it at the end for bonus material.

-- Respectable power move on Lara's part already having the NDA prepared and on hand for when June came crawling to her door.

Your moment of Wags:

Wags, on self-awareness:

"But… I’ve learned this. And it’s one of the positives of getting older.
It’s better to accept who I am than fight it."

Quotes:

Axe: "Here’s something they didn’t teach you at Stanford. Whenever you can, put a company in your mouth."

Lonnie: "So, what. I’m just supposed to bend over and take it?"
Chuck: "I’ll send over a vat of ass lube."
Lonnie: "Chuck, what’s the difference between ass lube and regular lube?"
Chuck: "Viscosity."

Axe: "Do you want to try him?"
Wags: "I can’t do that. He’s folksy."
Axe: "So?"
Wags: "I’ve tried with folksy people. They find me to be a rapacious scumbag."
Axe: "I’m sorry to break it to you, but I don’t think it’s just the folksy people."
Wags: "How about you?"
Axe: "You’re my rapacious scumbag."
Wags: "This is what love is."

Spyros: "That’s what I like to call the Prisoner’s Dilemma."
Chuck: "No, you don’t like to call it that, that’s what it’s called."

Hutch III: "My father is turning in his grave, I assure you."
Purk: "Your father thought you were a lunkhead."

Axe: "Read a couple chapters. We’re at a good part."
Lara: "Fun."
Axe: "That Delores Umbridge sure is a bitch."

Chuck: "Right and wrong. That’s a funny line, isn’t it?"

So, who won today?

Actually, kind of everybody. It helps that they weren't in direct opposition to one another this time around. A small exception for Wags, who did not get to go full ATM on Maria Saldana, but even he seemed a little sad to see her go, and not in a 'dang, I don't get to destroy her life now' way. Maybe he'd already decided to lay off of her. I'd like to think so.

8.5 out of ten snack cakes that just aren't as good as they used to be.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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Bonus Material:

Chuck: "Let it slide. That sounds simple. Easy. Sure, let it slide. That’s just some dog shit. But those are three devious little words. You know, if… if I let your dog shit slide, then I have to be OK with this whole plaza filling up with it, which it would. Before we know it. Oh, and then it would be on our pant legs and our shoes, and we would track it into our homes. And then our homes would smell like shit, too. It’d be easy to let it slide. You know, why don’t we, uh, why don’t we let petty larceny slide too? Some kid steals five bucks from a newsstand? Who cares? Well, maybe next time he decides to steal your TV. Or break into your brownstone and steal your fucking wife. But what difference does it make? Because by then we’re all living in shit anyway."

Dog Walker: "Come on man. I don’t have a bag."
Chuck: "You have hands."

People who don't pick up their dog's poop absolutely deserve this, for the record.