Prince makes Kate an offer she can refuse. It’s just really hard to.
Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Burn Rate’
Six hundred dollars for coffee with Kate Sacker; $46,863 for Wendy Rhoades’s wardrobe; $162,500 for a night at a Covid-free bordello with Wags; $300 million for Mike Prince’s new yacht, plus an extra $300 million to neutralize its carbon footprint. We’ve said before in this space that the credo of the pro wrestler Ted DiBiase (a.k.a. the Million Dollar Man), “Everybody’s got a price,” holds sway in the world of “Billions.” Never before has the show made it quite this literal.
In one of the boldest stylistic choices ever made by the show — you could argue the boldest, and I wouldn’t object — this week’s episode of “Billions” repeatedly freezes the action and superimposes graphics that show you the cost of all the name brands, grand plans and illegal indulgences enjoyed by Michael Prince and his employees. Did you know that a private hog roast with the restaurateur Rodney Scott costs $25,000? That a batch of quaaludes and a courier to deliver them runs you $8,400? That multiple characters’ personal wardrobes and grooming routines on a given day cost more than this country’s yearly per capita income? You sure do now!
It doesn’t stop there. By the episode’s end, as Prince gazes at his work force from the balcony, running totals of all the money they’re generating float above their heads, like stats for characters in a video game. Then, in a breach of the fourth wall, all of the main Prince Cap players pause for a group portrait, gazing right into the camera as lists of luxuries and those luxuries’ price tags float behind them. It’s enough to make you want to take up arms with Chuck Rhoades the next time he whips out a bullhorn or a pitchfork.
It’s a dazzling device, courtesy of the episode’s director, Chloe Domont, and the writers Lio Sigerson, Brian Koppelman and David Levien. (Koppelman and Levien created the show with the New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin.) It makes the show’s subtext literally its text.
And given the behavior the show’s protagonists in this episode, it couldn’t be more pointed. Take Chuck Rhoades. He’s still out to scupper Prince’s drive to make New York City the home of the 2028 Olympic Games, by any means necessary. This week, that meant almost immediately abandoning the man-of-the-people schtick he had adopted and warning the city’s big telecommunications companies that Prince plans to provide the city with free Wi-Fi in perpetuity as part of his Olympic bid — wi-fi surreptitiously siphoned from those companies’ unused signals. Big Telecom puts the kibosh on this plan toot sweet.
You might think Prince would get his back up about this, but no, not really. Rather than jeopardize his Olympic bid with a big battle, he gets in bed with the telecom firms, settling on two weeks’ worth of free Wi-Fi for the city, during the Games only.
This infuriates Taylor Mason, who pushed Prince toward the Wi-Fi plan from the start. In addition, connecting the Big Apple was supposed to be just part one of the plan, which would have also seen the firm set up free wi-fi across sub-Saharan Africa. Taylor compares the meager offering Prince comes up with to a free tote bag; “People love free tote bags!” he replies.
But his overall message to Taylor is far more direct. “I’m independently wealthy,” he says. “You’re not; you’re kind of rich. Which is great, but if you want to change the world, nine digits ain’t going to do it.” With that, he sparks a new ambition inside the brain of Mase Carb’s brilliant founder. No longer will Taylor settle for the $100 million fortune once seen as the threshold for effecting positive change in the world. Now, it has to be a billion. (Minimum, we’re guessing. Billions are like Pringles: Once you pop, you can’t stop.)
As for Chuck, things go poorly indeed. He is gently rebuffed when he seeks an alliance with New York’s governor, Bob Sweeney (Matt Servitto). “I know I’ve got to take a flume ride with one of you two lunatics on this,” Sweeney says amusingly, but for now he’s simply relishing his newfound power over two of the state’s biggest players.
Meanwhile, Prince begins courting Chuck’s right-hand woman, Kate Sacker, asking her to quit her job and become the New York Games’ lead counsel, after which he’ll line up support for her congressional run. When she dutifully informs Chuck of this overture, he tells her to wait before declining and puts his best friend, Ira (Ben Shenkman), into play, asking him to pitch himself to Prince for the position instead.
For a minute, it looks as if Prince were considering the idea — who better to neutralize Chuck than his own best friend, right? Wags and Scooter, Prince’s chief minions, are aghast that the bossman is even giving the idea the time of day.
But he isn’t. It’s all a ploy to get Chuck to take his eyes off the real target, Kate. Tired of being told to wait for her moment in the sun by her mentor, she decides she is no longer in the father-figure business and joins Prince Cap, not as Prince’s protégé but as his peer, with all the perks that entails. Chuck is bitterly disappointed, but having continuously put Kate’s political aspirations on the back burner in favor of his own, he has no one to blame but himself. (Well, himself and Prince’s bottomless purse.)
There’s a tremendous sense of loss as Kate rides away in her expensive chauffeured vehicle. She has always been ambitious, but she also seemed incorruptible, at least insofar as she had a clear picture in her mind of how to achieve her goals, and this picture never involved defecting to the other side. It’s a bummer to see her give in.
But it’s also thrilling. What will a steel-trap mind like Kate’s be capable of doing with limitless funds at its disposal? She instantly makes Prince Cap a more formidable force than it already was. So when we see her in that group portrait, her fortune increasing by the second, it’s both sad and exciting to say that she fits right in.
Loose change
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The climactic sequence in which we see everyone’s personal price tag is accompanied by a killer needle drop, Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Not only does this describe the voraciousness of everyone involved, it’s also a funny callback to a line from earlier in the episode, when Chuck describes the clang of an intimate part of the governor’s anatomy as being “loud as the cymbal crashes in ‘Hungry Like the Wolf.’” They are indeed pretty loud!
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In an amusing side plot, Wags and Scooter must work together to woo (read: bribe) the committee responsible for selecting the Olympics’ host city. Unfortunately for Wags, this conflicts with his and his fiancée Chelsea’s attempts to conceive a child. So he preserves his bad-boy reputation by paying a sex worker to loudly fake their encounter, coaching her to give it a big ending as he sneaks out the bordello window.
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The committee folks are also treated to an intimate club performance by both Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, an attempt by Chuck to mess with Prince’s plans by involving New Jersey in the bid. Neither man makes a cameo, though the University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari pops up early to give Prince Cap a pep talk.
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It seems worth noting that Rian, Mase Carb’s star employee, is against the free-Wi-Fi plan in both New York and Africa from the jump. She just can’t see how the numbers make sense, and she isn’t convinced by Taylor’s or Prince’s moral reasons for the expenditure.
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Also worth noting: Once she takes the job with Prince, Kate starts wearing her hair down. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
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‘Billions’ Season 6, Episode 4 Recap: Hungry Like the Wolf - The New York Times
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