Tuesday, March 29, 2016

What I’m Watching: Billions


Billions: Season 1, Episode 9 “Where the Fuck is Donnie?” (B+)

There are two big things that happened in this episode that I didn’t expect based on how everything ended in the previous installment. The first is that Axe taking ownership of the trades might have been bold and brave but it didn’t stop any of his scorned enemies from getting vengeance, and the second is that Donnie being a double agent meant good things for Axe. Seeing all the protesters outside Axe Capital was one thing, but far more unsettling was the way that the firemen stormed into Lara’s restaurant and purposely destroyed property and invented problems to shut it down and force customers out at that very moment. Lara is understandably uncomfortable, and I don’t know how much longer that family can go on. Donnie’s disappearance seemed strange at the start of the episode, and it wasn’t clear that he was going off the radar as much for Axe Capital as he was for the unrecused Chuck and a very frustrated Brian. The most important takeaway of Donnie’s religious retreat was that he’s now an unreliable witness, damaging for the government’s case and also worrisome for Axe and Wags who were using him to their own ends. Though their lines of communication have been more open than in the past, Wendy and Chuck are heading down a dark road after Wendy is trying to get through every day at work and then Chuck is shutting her out whenever she gets home because he’s working on a case that he’s not even supposed to have anything to do with.

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