Billions: Short Squeeze

"I don’t hold on to a loser."

Billions gives us our first knockdown, drag out brawl between the opposing forces.

Was this chess? Tennis? Muay Thai?

Honestly, the thing that this felt most like? Pinball.

We have three distinct episodes going on here, so why don't we deal with them one at a time. As I already brought up pinball, let's start with that one.

If we imagine Chuck, Charles Sr. and Axe as flippers in a pinball machine, then we can comfortably label the ball as 'consequences.' And the three of them spend the entirety of the episode ricocheting consequences back and forth at one another. The most stripped-down recounting of how the ball bounced runs more or less as follows:

— Axe makes his move to short the stock on a trucking company.

While the episode itself makes a very thoughtful attempt to give us a layman's explanation of what shorting a stock is, it's not really very important to understand the details. I know that I don't. All we really need to understand is – Axe makes money if stock price goes down. Any understanding that you might have beyond that is gravy. I, personally, don't have even a layman's understanding of what shorting a stock means, and I once had Margot Robbie explain it to me while she was naked in a bubble bath. (The Big Short really was a great movie.)

This, incidentally, adds another layer of understanding to what Axe was up to with the Yumtime board. He wanted to make sure the contract with their trucking affiliate was cancelled, because that would tank the trucking company's stock, and that leads to making money through whatever the hell shorting the stock is. And that's fine. The important thing is that it's illegal for him to be seen to be causing it to happen, which he's made sure that he can't be, since he made one of his traders run the short and started it before he joined the Yumtime board. So far, so good. And, honestly, it feels like this sort of thing is just a Tuesday for Axe. But...

— The British bank representative that's responsible for some of the logistics of the short has told a friend of Charles Rhoades, Sr. about the situation. So out of almost entirely spite, old Chuck Sr. plants a fake news story to say that far from losing a valuable contract, the trucking company in question in going to be acquired shortly which makes the stock increase in value instead of decrease. Planting the story is also, of course, illegal. And will make Charles Sr. a shit-ton of money as he just bought a lot of stock in what is undeniably insider trading based on his own 'fluffing' of the stock. This term, if you follow both the inner workings of finance and pornography, is terribly, terribly funny. I mean, I hear. But...

— Axe finds out about the fluffing through what is admittedly a pretty thin reference to a golf course that he once saw Charles Sr. at, and immediately calls Hall, his wetworks guy, to do whatever has to be done to fix the situation. Which leads to...

— Hall makes an anonymous tip to Ari Spyros, making him aware of both Charles Sr.'s stock fluffing and insider trading, which leads Spyros to...

— Blackmail Chuck into making Spyros the most important person in the Axelrod investigation if he doesn't want his father to go to prison. Which allows time for...

— Chuck to call Charles and force him to abandon his plans. Charles' fake story has time to fade, the short has time to proceed like Axe wanted, Axe makes lots of money, Charles loses lots of money, no one goes to jail. The end.

That's a lot of interrelated plot developments for the viewer to follow. But if you do, you risk missing the two other important things happening here.

The first of which is the very clever way that the episode uses the proffer of Pete Decker as a framing device to track all of these developments. The way that they cut directly from Decker saying that there's always someone coming to kill the King to Charles Sr. forming his plans on the golf course is particularly well handled. But to discount it as merely a framing device is to do it a disservice, because the entire thing is also being used as a colossal misdirect. We're being told all along that the Decker trail leads directly to Axe, and in the final moments are told that it doesn't. At all. At best it might... might... lead to 'Dollar' Bill, and Chuck is more or less back at square one.

And that's all well and good as an interesting story, but that's not what this is really about either.

What this is really about is whatever is happening to Axe.

Both Elise and Metallica essentially give Axe the same advice. Go where you want to go. You don't have to stay anywhere forever. I mean, Elise says it with more poetry, but does she have a Grammy? No, she does not. Freddie's betrayal of Axe, trying to jump onto the coattails of Axe's short and thus risking him more exposure, just reinforces the point. The point being...

Yeah. That's the thing. We don't know yet. When Constantine calls Axe at the beginning of the episode, we're tricked into thinking that he's just calling to let him know that Metallica is playing a concert in Canada and that he should go. But near the end of the episode Constantine tells him, 'I don't know what you want to do with this information...' and it's perfectly clear that the call was about more than just a concert. And then we get the final bookend scene in which Axe looking at his traders is explicitly associated with Danzig machine gunning the deer on his lawn, right down to the exact same music cue and the image of Danzig eating to reference his complaint of the deer eating everything he'd planted.

What did Constantine tell him? Why is Axe now selling off literally everything he has? Where is this going? We'll see next episode.

Bits and Pieces:

— The opening act – Elise – sings for her warmup a very lovely acoustic cover of the Ratt song 'Round and Round.' My music training isn't good enough to swear to it, but it seems to have been transposed to a minor key? Anyone with more musical training, please let me know in the comments. The actress playing Elise is named Kerry Bishe. It pleases me to mention that my older sister's name is also Kerry, spelled the proper way. She was the one that convinced me to try watching Billions, and it pains me to admit is much smarter and more reliable than I am. Still though, if you need Doctor Who trivia I'm going to win that one hands down, every time.

— All of the members of Metallica are credited in IMDb as 'Individual name: Metallica.' As if they don't have individual identities in the Billions universe.

— One wonders what Axe told the rest of his crew regarding why Freddie wasn't on the airplane home.

— We find out in this one that Charles Sr. wanted to go into politics, but early on in his attempts a building he owned burned down (we assume killing a number of people) and all the papers in NYC dubbed him a slum lord. This is why he's trying so hard to live those dreams through his son. Honestly, the dialogue about this was extraordinarily clunky and well below the standard for exposition on this show.

— Kate Sacker continues to go from strength to strength, easily busting Tara Nohr in the ladies' room leaking information. I'm so glad that they didn't stretch that plotline out, and also that Chuck, while not entirely letting her off the hook, was reasonably merciful to her.

— There wasn't a lot of either Wendy or Lara this week, as the episode was mostly focused on non-stop dick measuring amongst the fellas. That said, Wendy did have a wonderful moment with Chuck in which she again proved that she's both a supportive wife and also no pushover. The way she simultaneously acknowledged that Chuck hadn't really done anything seriously wrong in trying to obfuscate the presence of Pete Decker, given the circumstances, while still calling him out for not taking one of the many, many more straightforward and honest responses to the situation was a lovely moment between them.

— Lara, meanwhile, just got to look amazing in her nightgown and enjoy a little romantic Facetime with Axe before bed. But, in her defense, Axe hadn't done even the slightest thing for her to be upset with him about, so there was no need for anything else.

— Huge shout out to the show for how nicely they handled both Axe's commitment to fidelity and Elise's respect for it. Absolutely no one had done anything wrong in that situation. There was a slight misunderstanding, what with Elise thinking that they were flirting and Axe just being in it for a nice conversation with only a hint of harmless flirting, but they both handled it like mature adults once they realized that they weren't on the same page. I'll never complain about a TV show showing adults behaving like adults.

Wags, on leaked information:

Honestly, Wags' only really notable quote this week was so gratuitously sexist and gross that I'd just as soon not repeat it. Let's just acknowledge that he had a lot to deal with, what with Axe leaving him in charge and move on for this week.

Quotes:

Axe: "What drives you doesn’t understand enough."

Axe: "It’s like your wife says. Hold the fucking position until I tell you that I’m done."

Charles: "Of course I’m watching it. I’m bathing in it."

Axe: "Well, you can’t beat a classic. Friends. Cars. Music."
Elise: "New things can be fun too."

Chuck: "Dad. I know. Do not make another phone call tonight. Do not go on the internet. Do not call your broker, or make a trade, or do one fucking thing until I see you. First thing in the morning. And the only words I want to hear you say are ‘OK son.’ And then the phone going dead."
Charles: "OK son."

Banker Guy: "This isn’t coming from me, Axe." (Silence) "Axe?"
Wags: (to Axe) "I hung up on the little tool."

Axe: "You want to stay, stay. You want to pull, then tell me in the morning. But either way, get off my dick."

Elise: "Don’t go all Charles Foster Kane on me."
Axe: "You know, I’ve never seen it?"

Wendy: "There were a hundred legitimate things that you could have said. Including, ‘I can’t talk about it.’"

So, who won today?

As much as I hate to admit it, the honest answer is Spyros, who got to out-maneuver Chuck into giving him all the credit and press time for any future Axelrod convictions. But if we think about it, he was handed that on a platter by Hall as part of the general back and forth of this week's struggle, so I'm going to give the win to Hall.

Which means that I'd rather give the win to a straight up sociopath than a preening, self-satisfied dipshit. And I'm comfortable knowing that about myself.

9 out of 10 worn out Metallica CDs.

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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