'Billions' Stock Watch: 'A Generation Too Late'

The Billions Stock Watch is a weekly accounting of the action on the Showtime drama. Decisions will be made based on speculation and occasional misinformation and mysterious whims that are never fully explained to the general public. Kind of like the real stock market.

STOCK UP – Rogue operations

Ahh, the flip side of the Chuck coin. After spending most of last week proving once again that he’s an awful power-crazed monster who will steamroll anyone in his way, he, uh, did basically the same thing this week, but for more honorable reasons. His attempts to wiggle out of prosecuting the abused and tormented prisoner for killing a guard all added up to squat, though. The only thing that came from it was the warden getting fired after he strong-armed her into leaking to the press. Tough night for that lady.

Actually, that’s not true. Two other things came from it. One, we got a great phone call between Chuck and the Attorney General, which featured the AG cleaning his gun in his office and making analogies about beating dogs that bark. I hate that guy and everything he stands for but I do kind of love that he is so much of what he is. Just the most, every second he’s on screen. I half-expect the next episode to open with him casually lassoing a steer while telling Chuck to challenge an assault rifle regulation.

The other thing that came from it is Chuck officially getting fed up — in episode three of the season! — and putting Sacker in charge of a rogue operation to continue working on the cases the AG told them to drop. This is at least the third separate rogue operation going on right now. We also have:

Axe’s chicanery with the orphan $2 billion and cryptocurrency
Brian putting Chuck up on his personal Ice Juice conspiracy wall after Ira tried to spill the beans and Dake shut him down

This last thing brings us to…

STOCK UP – Conspiracy walls

God, I love a good conspiracy wall. And let’s be clear here: This is very much a conspiracy wall. Oh, I know it looks like your standard organized crime criminal chart, with the boss up top and the underlings spread out below. The kind you’d see up in a law enforcement building on any kind of mob show. But the thing is, this one’s not in a law enforcement building. This is on the wall of Brian’s apartment. The apartment he’s coming home drunk to after punching suspects. Brian is going off the rails a bit here. That makes it a conspiracy wall.

Also, please do picture a scenario where you go to go visit a friend — you’re in the neighborhood, just dropping by — and discover they have a full-on conspiracy wall going. I’d be half worried about them and half extremely excited. I really like conspiracy walls.

STOCK DOWN – Talking to the Axelrods

Man, last week Lara just shredded that poor lady at the baseball game and this week Axe made that investor guy’s $40 million sound like nothing. I thought the guy was about to leap off that balcony. Never talk to the Axelrods when you’re having personal problems. They are not helpful.

STOCK DOWN – Billy Beane

Taylor was going hard with the sports metaphors this week during the whole quant interviewing thing. That was strange. And poor Billy Beane. What did that guy ever do to anyone? Imagine if he watches Billions as his weekly diversion or something. All episode long, “Billy Beane never won the World Series.”

I have this image in my head of him getting angrier and angrier as the episode plays out before finally exploding and shouting “I’M DOING THE BEST I CAN” at his television.

STOCK DOWN – Truffles

Shaving 20 grams of truffles onto your pasta at $14/gram works out to $280, plus whatever the cost of the pasta dish is. That is too much money for pasta. I don’t care how much money you have. You should never pay $300 for pasta.

Are truffles even good? Be honest. I’ve never had them and I probably never will because I have the type of respect for money and unrefined palate that tips the cost-benefit analysis toward “nah” but I can’t imagine they honestly taste anywhere near good enough to justify that price. They look gross. I do not want gross things shaved onto my pasta at any price.

STOCK UP – Cheeseburgers

Says a lot about me that I saw the borderline obscene truffle scene and was like “pass” but then I saw Wags jam a huge messy cheeseburger into his face and became so hungry I could have eaten my entire fist.

STOCK UP – Wags

I love that Wags set up his big “why I’m loyal to Axe” story like the payoff was going to be “Axe gave me a kidney” and then it turned out Axe just told him to bail out of Lehman Brothers before the housing bubble burst. Tells you almost everything you need to know about both of them.

Please stop here to imagine Wags at a Killer Mike release party.

STOCK DOWN – $300 million

Conversation of the night goes to Bobby and Lara Axelrod panicking over having just $300 million left if he loses his case. What number were you expecting him to say there, when he was giving her the “the government might take everything” speech? I thought he meant everything everything at first. I was gonna go as high as the value of their house. Then he said “$300 mil, maybe $320” and I damn near did a full-on 1990s sitcom spit-take. And then Lara’s face! She looked like he said the government was gonna take the kids. I went back and watched the scene three times. It was fascinating to me. Sometimes I watch Billions and study the rich people on the show the way a scientist studies wild animals. This was one of those moments. I still can’t believe he said $300 million.

What an incredible moment of television.

STOCK UP – Having a killer kiss off

Billions is great at kiss-offs, those last words in a conversation that end it completely and give the person saying them the upper hand. There were two really great ones this week: