Official Billions Thread: Season 7 (Final Season), Episode 9 (10/6/23) - Game Theory Optimal

[Arthur Shelby]

Chuck Sr is awesome i might have to vote him MVP of season 3 outstanding

 

[Master Zik]

Taylor is heading for a hard L.

I'm watching just wondering how and if this goes bad for Chuck.

 

[Arthur Shelby]

Jock Jeffcoat

 

[Meangene45]

 

[Master Zik]

On wow. Okay.

So they really flipping the dynamic of the show now to have Chuck and Axe work together That's gonna suck for their opponents.

Connerty cold blooded. Let Jock slide just to get Chuck fired Petty.

With Axe though, it just ended. Wasn't gonna kill her so he got wait for the full revenge.

Wendy, Chuck, and Axe are a fearsome team.

 

[Kimchi Papi]

I knew the moment Chuck started hatching his plan that he was going to get played. Jock is too much a rattle snake for anyone to try & get the upper hand on. It was the southern district’s red wedding.

If I were Ax, I would’ve told Taylor that Andolov offered to off her & now she’s stuck with him... Taylor’s problem is that numbers & algortithims can only take you so far. You also need to combine it with soul or a human touch. Instinct & such. Taylor doesn’t have that.not sure she can succeed without the sage counsel Wendy provided.

I can’t wait to see how Chuck & Ax extract their revenge. I hope it’s merciless especially on Ax’s end...

 

[a-friend]

Axe is going to Bankrupt Jock.
Taylor is going to be shedding real tears before S4 ep1 reaches it end.
Wendy's team and whoever is on it, will get the W.(funny how I look at her now compared to how I looked at her after seeing her as Mrs. Teller for all those episodes)
Kate Sacker is a Savage.
Conner throwing Chuck out was not Epic, shame on him.
Mafee will kill himself if Dollar Bill doesn't do it first.
Bobby is going to have Grigor cut into pieces, and Hall will gladly do it to get even for that backhand to the Face.
Taylor's crush(only guys name I don't know) brought her down to size and will be her Kryptonite in some way.

Show cooked so hard this Season.

 

[Cashflow]

Billions hit me with the double face turn at the end. Eventually they have to break up but for now but for now it's reminding me of...

 

[hand2handking]

glad axe didnt have taylor killed

so many dualities in wendys convo with taylor

wendy put the battery in chucks back to go after jock and it backfired harking back to taylor saying how she let things get out of control

of course taylors words of buying loyalty and then losing the guy (but getting his money)

i hope dale comes back next season

i also think axe will help handle joc while chuck will help strategize for taylor

not sure ben kim isnt a double agent too

did kate get any quid pro quo for her role in chucks demise? i think shes gonna get get some comeuppance too

i almost thought andolov was gonna have taylor killed anyway just so it would look like axe ordered it and leverage him anyway

great finale cant wait for next season

 

[Kimchi Papi]

Wish I had posted it before, but I felt like Chuck was always meant to fall. He was selling out everyone including his father & best friend in order to accomplish his goals.

As soon as he & Axe starting to conspire to make the his case go away, I felt like they would end up working together at some point especially since Wendy has such vested interest in both.

They way they conspired to set up that poor Dr with the medical slide... I can't imagine the hell they'll unleash on Jock, taylor, andolov, & the others...

Wendy... She reminds me a lot of Anna Paquin...

BTW, here's a podcast about the Billions finale recap...
https://www.theringer.com/2018/6/10/17446552/billions-season-3-elmsley-count-finale-recap

 

[SoleByThePound]

What a great season; I actually like Chuck & Axe getting along.

 

[stuntman mike]

interesting turn of events at the end. great season!

 

[651akathepaul]

When is the next season?

 

[Master Zik]

When is the next season?

Probably next year same time.

 

[rico x hood]

Mother****in called the Axe x Rhodes team up!

Axe and Rhodes are going to team up to take down the General and the Russian later on. Calling it now. They're both in bed with people more powerful than themselves.

 

[|A-Man|]

I'm just waiting for the scene where Grigor basically tells Taylor you can't lose my money or I will kill you.

That's when she gonna really be shook. I can see her running back to Axe crying for help before probably going to the feds and ending up dead.

 

[a-friend]

I'm just waiting for the scene where Grigor basically tells Taylor you can't lose money or I will kill you.

That's when she gonna really be shook. I can see her running back to Ace crying for help before probably going to the feds and ending up dead.

Taylor is definitely dying

 

[Kimchi Papi]

This was amusing...

 

[Arthur Shelby]

Season 3 the best Billions season so far

 

[hand2handking]

How Showtime’s Billions Went From Dull to Dazzling
Improbably, a series seemingly about rich white guys measuring their dicks is an essential show of our era. (Okay, maybe not that improbably.)

Somehow, none of these characters has the last name Billions.
Showtime

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/6/12/17451298/billions-season-3-finale-recap-showtime-explained

If you’ve been following the world of TV Twitter this spring, you probably know that a certain subset of this nation’s great, professionally paid TV viewers has gone a little goofy for Showtime’s Billions. Observe!







I could go on. But my larger point is this: Billions is a show that a lot of critics wrote off somewhere in early season one, and while it got the typical, “Hey, this show has gotten a lot better” write-ups late in that first season and (especially) in season two, the recently concluded third season seems to have crossed some sort of threshold in terms of its popularity and the willingness of its fans to bug you about it nonstop on various social media platforms.

Billions has managed this rise in its fortunes despite being a show about white-guy antiheroes — a type of series many critics have cut less slack in recent years — and despite being about the mega-rich and the lawyers who fail to prosecute them at a time when nobody’s particularly enthused about either of those things.

It’s managed this rise in its fortunes despite the fact that its entire premise, involving one of said lawyers deciding to make an example of one of those billionaires, was basically torpedoed by reality, where the Trump administration has been, let’s say, much friendlier to the mega-rich.

And it’s managed this rise in its fortunes despite the fact that its storytelling is frequently completely ridiculous, often predicated on its characters hiding incredibly elaborate strategic gambits from each other, to the degree that it’s hard to imagine how they kept something so skillfully from seemingly everybody they knew.

That makes it a fun show to goof on, only helped by just how funny the show has become, thanks to its deep bench of actors who are incredibly agile with a one-liner. From jokes about the show’s potential for a crossover with The Americans to “**** ‘EM UP, BILLIONS!”this is a series that can handle a solid bit of snark — a must for social media takeoff.

But Billions is really good and sometimes great TV (in its third season, especially). It’s one of the rare shows that has genuinely been bolstered by the times: In an era of very dour shows about the dark times we live in, sometimes great (The Handmaid’s Tale) and sometimes mixed (Westworld), Billions is pure pulp thriller, but in a way that never loses sight of how poisonous all the vipers within it are. Here are three ways Billions overcame its early shakiness to become its best self.

1) It completely overhauled its premise, but in ways that aren’t particularly noticeable

Chuck and Bobby try to find common ground.
Showtime

The original premise of Billions was probably unsustainable. It centered on Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), a US attorney for the Southern District of New York, who grew tired of prosecuting small-time crimes and decided to take down Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), a titan of finance he knew was crooked. Chuck’s wife, Wendy (Maggie Siff), worked for Bobby and thus became an unlikely figure in both men’s games.

In the early going, it wasn’t always clear what the show was, beyond an excuse to watch its two big-name stars snarl at each other. My review of the first half-season liked some aspects of the show (particularly the acting) but found its attempts to dig into the world of high finance too surface-level and obvious. It was clear the show was interested in income inequality and the corruption of US systems that led to the wealthy abusing them endlessly, but it also flirted frequently with lapsing into straight-up lifestyle porn about how cool it was to be rich.

Slowly but surely, the series corrected some of these flaws in season one, but then the question became what the show would even be once Chuck put Bobby behind bars, or Bobby somehow triumphed over Chuck. On a network that had already had a show that centered on an investigation of Damian Lewis that lasted at least one season past its welcome, Billionsfelt caught in a trap.

And then somewhere in early season two, Billions started overhauling itself for the long haul. You wouldn’t know it to look at the surface of the series, where Chuck and Bobby were still launching long-range attacks at each other (remarkably, it took until mid-season three for the two to share significant screen time). But underneath that surface, the show’s writers, led byBrian Koppelman and David Levien, were focusing more on other cases that fell under Chuck’s jurisdiction, as well as stories about how the corruption of the mega-rich had so infected the entire system that to try to defeat that corruption meant becoming corrupt yourself.

The second season concluded with a series of revelations that showed just how long of a game the series could play and substantially muddied its ethical waters. The question wasn’t whether to root for Chuck or Bobby; instead, the question was figuring out a way to tear down the entire system they existed within. The show still had the gleam associated with wealth and power, but it was interested in questions beyond its central battle. When it finally moved past it in the middle of season three, there was a wealth of other stories waiting to be told, including...

2) Taylor Mason gave the show an instant jolt of something new and different

Asia Kate Dillon plays Taylor Mason.
Showtime

Much has been made of how Asia Kate Dillon’s Taylor Mason, a promising new employee of Bobby Axelrod’s company, Axelrod Capital, is almost certainly the first nonbinary regular character on a major American TV show. (Both Taylor and Dillon use they/them pronouns.)

Dillon is one of TV’s most electric performers, and they’ve made Taylor into a force within the show, to the degree that almost all of the third-season finale revolves around major decisions they make. The show even subtly codes which characters are not to be trusted based on whether they use Taylor’s preferred pronouns — and the fact that Bobby and his various cohorts take no time in adjusting to using “they” and “them,” despite being scoundrels in countless other ways, is meant to convey the immense respect they have for Taylor, even when they’re incredibly mad at them.

But Taylor’s nonbinary identity and Dillon’s performance don’t explain, in and of themselves, why the show seemed to take off almost immediately after it introduced Taylor in its season two premiere. Instead, I would argue, the presence of Taylor has immediately pried apart some of the show’s most rigid elements, in a way that has benefited both it and almost every character within its world.

Somewhere near its core, Billions is an exploration of toxic masculinity, of the ways that codes of behavior between men can sometimes curdle and go wrong, most obviously affecting the women around those men but also hurting the men themselves. Billions’ most obvious example of this is in the relationship between Chuck and his father, Charles (Jeffrey DeMunn), a ruthless legal shark who abhorred any signs of weakness in his son and seems most at ease when the two are trying to kill each other.

But it’s also present in the constant ****-measuring at Axe Cap, or the scenes where Chuck and Wendy’s love of BDSM threatens his burgeoning political career. Nothing is more important in the world of Billions than the appearance of raw, masculine strength, but that raw, masculine strength is strangling everybody near it.

In the first season, this resulted in a lot of scenes of guys competing to see who could be the most macho, while Wendy and the handful of other women on the show tried to find places to fit amid the swagger. Simply by their mere existence, Taylor stands out as a rejection of this fruitless binary — a one-character expression of the idea that some of the systems we’ve come to rely upon were rotten to begin with.

If the larger idea of Billions is that a failure to seriously question the status quo will destroy the world, Taylor immediately makes viewers question many things the other characters accept as simply the way their lives are. And that extends to other aspects of the series, where Taylor (who is, after all, really, really good at playing the markets to make lots of money and, thus, part of the same corrupt economic system as everybody else) might not have as much immediate bearing.

3) By embracing pulp, the series has been better able to tell stories about the destructiveness of unchecked capitalism

I didn’t get a chance to talk about my beautiful boy Wags (David Costabile, left) in this article, so I’ll at least put him in a photo.
Showtime

If toxic masculinity is near the center of Billions, then the show’s absolute core is the idea that while unchecked capitalism might be fun to watch a TV show about, it’s destroying the world all the same. The more the characters maneuver to hang on to their power, the more entrenched the horrible systems that need to change become.

Chuck goes from trying to bring down Bobby to more or less propping up the whole system Bobby used and abused to become as rich as he is, and in the third season, the government (a not-that-fictional spin on the Trump administration full of fire-breathing evangelicals and grifters in greasy suits) is only too happy to let him do the propping. In the process, innocent lives are destroyed, a woman who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is deported to Guatemala, and the titans at the top of the credits don’t even blink.

Billions was still interested in these ideas back in its first season, but it kept shifting awkwardly between the modes of “Chuck and Bobby snarl and hurl invective at each other” and “Unchecked capitalism is destroying everything.” One of the show’s co-creators is journalistAndrew Ross Sorkin, and in season one, certain storylines in the series felt more reported than they did written, like the show was trying to get across a point but hadn’t quite settled on what that point was or the best way to sell it.

In season two, however, the series simply shifted all of its eggs into the “pulpy business thriller” basket, and trusted that audiences would notice all the horrible venality that happened in proximity to the long war between Chuck and Bobby. When watching people do very bad things is as fun as it can be on Billions, it makes viewers feel all the more complicit in those bad things — and helps increase the sense that we’re just as complicit in the bad things happening in our own reality.

By wedding its larger concerns to the sheer, propulsive fun of the business thriller, Billionsfound a way to serve the audience its cake, then keep serving them so much cake they wondered where all the cake came from and desperately wanted to stop eating it. That makesBillions, at times, a show where it’s hard to find someone to “root” for, but the series is canny enough to know that’s the whole point.

We’re not damned; we’re already in hell, and we need to find a way to pull it down around our ears to make something better. But good ****ing luck with that.

All three seasons of Billions are available on Showtime’s streaming apps. Season four will arrive in 2019.

 

[aepps20]

Really impressed with Sacker. Her ability to stay in the good Grace's of the power players is impressive.

 

[Master Zik]

Eh, she's not making any waves, remains friends or at least allies with whoever was willing to make a risk to make a power play, and probably is viewed as a follower of whoever is in charge given the situation.

Its impressive in the sense that when Chuck makes his move and possibly gets back in power or even more power (governor somehow) he's not going to hold much against her, may pity her for w/end he had to do afterward, and at worst mat simply not trust her much and tell her shell have to earn that back.

Connerty though. Son put his neck out there. He's done for when Chuck gets the upper hand. And I can see him being so low to get revenge that he finally does try to take Axe up on his offer and that screws him even more cuz Chuck and Axe are working together.

 

[Kinfolk]

Season 4 is about to be Connerty FLAME BROILING CHUCK Baby Nuts Rhodes.

I'm so ready for it.

Wish this series was released in a Netflix consume all at once format though.

 

[slighted]

 

[Platinum State]

Anyone else feel Damian Lewis isnt a good actor?
I felt that way since season 1. Should've cast a stronger actor