A whole Billions season without Axel, yes that just happened! I’d say it fared better than it did for worse.
Sure, some bits were slow but in retrospect, it seemed clear that Season 6 was never about a high-risk, fast-paced plot. Rather, what it did was lay the groundwork for Mike and Chuck’s antagonism that will ride a rollercoaster in Season 7.
The season ended with a Mike-Chuck showdown with exactly the result you’d expect: no winners.
In the Billions S6 finale, Chuck tries to get Mike arrested for tax evasion for hiding $3.5 million worth of cryptocurrency.
But Mike manages to walk scot-free and instead, Chuck lands in jail due to his illegal warrants. He is later legally absolved by Dave, who recruits him to take down Mike in S7.
Here’s how it all went down:
Mike and Chuck’s showdown
Chuck sees red when he realizes that Mike is aspiring to run for the US presidency. Ironically, he uses illegal means to get a warrant for one of Mike’s companies, which has encrypted an data drive.
He presents this now-decoded drive with $150 million in cryptocurrency to Dave, proving to her that Mike is up to no good.
Dave finds 11 more drives across Mike’s companies and calls them both in to inform them about the consequences: If the data analyst is able to crack open Mike’s drives and it is found that it has more cryptocurrency, he goes to jail for tax fraud.
If they can’t be opened, Chuck will be arrested for illegal seizure of property.
The catch is that you only get ten tries to open all these drives.
In the end, the analyst is unable to open the drives in the given amount of tries and ends up locking them forever. Chuck is arrested, and this should be Mike’s cue to celebrate…
Except that those drives did actually contain cryptocurrency worth $3.5 billion which he just lost forever. (I’m beginning to think that even Mike wouldn’t make it on the Prince List.)
He consoles himself thinking that this is the cost of taking Chuck out of the DA forever.
But he’s wrong once again—the real winner of this episode (or should I say season?) is Dave, who fishes Chuck out of jail by legally sanctioning his shady warrant.
She will now make him pretend he has no power as he secretly takes down Mike in S7 and as such, she will boss over both these megalomaniacs.
So, not only did Mike lose $3.5 billion, but he also failed to dispose of the one enemy that cost him billions.
How’s it going at Prince Capital?
Back at the office, Taylor and Philip are named co-successors to Mike at Prince Capital.
I don’t personally see this faring well: Taylor has expressed that this is just an in-between job they’re doing till they get a foot into something better, while Philip has lost the support of his uncle Scooter.
Elsewhere, the company realizes that Mike running for president means that his personal life is now his business life, too. This means that sleeping around with Rian is going to get him and Prince Capital into big trouble.
So while the likes of Scooter and Wags try to decide how to deal with the situation, Mike offers Rian a payout in exchange for her silence.
Nobly, she refuses and makes it known that she has no intentions of blackmailing him. But the emotional burden he’s left her with weighs even on me.
(You’d think this would salvage her relationship with Taylor, but no.)
Mike Prince’s Dark Side
What makes Mike Prince such a good successor to Axel is his delusion of how much better he is than everyone else. What once came across as morals, ethics, and virtue, now just comes across as plain narcissism.
His bid to become president with no actual welfare in mind, standing on buried drives filled with illegal cryptocurrencies, is just one of the many proofs.
Interestingly, the people around him are also beginning to see this bit of his personality and might agree that Chuck’s vendetta isn’t wrong.
As Wendy said, at least with Axel it felt like “honest cheating.” Mike, on the other hand, is a whole new side of Billions we’ve not explored before.
About Billions
Billions is an American drama created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. The series is set in financial centres based in America.
The series follows hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), as he accumulates wealth and power in the world of high finance. The series premiered on Showtime on January 17, 2016.
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