Chuck’s gotta pay an incarcerated Bryan a visit. It doesn’t take much to get Jackie on board, considering Chuck offers him a pretty sweet deal: Bryan will be transferred to a closer, cushier prison, and Jackie won’t be arrested for grand theft auto (security cameras caught him casing a Bugatti showroom).īefore fulfilling his end of the bargain, though, Jackie has one reasonable request for the New York Attorney General. All Chuck needs to do is coax Bryan Connerty’s safecracker brother, Jackie (Michael Raymond-James), to get the ring out of the ex-fiancée’s apartment, and Bobby Axelrod will never own a bank in the state of New York. But while that explains much of Axe’s heartless actions through the years, does it excuse it? A similar question goes for Senior: Will Jeffrey DeMunn’s sublime hospital-bed acting be enough to win both Chuck and the audience over after Senior’s lifetime of abhorrent behavior? (I gotta say, those adorable pre-collapse scenes of DeMunn with baby Willow sure help - damn you, Billions!)īefore Senior is rushed to the hospital with renal failure in the episode’s final act, Chuck spends most of “Contract” preventing Axe from obtaining his bank charter, which he does in the most Billions way possible: The woman who stands between Axe and his bank is one Leah Calder (Wendie Malick!), who wants her son’s ex-fiancée to return the diamond ring that Leah’s father smuggled out of Hitler’s Germany. The long-term damage that Axe’s unnamed father caused is indisputable - we need no further proof than Damian Lewis’s voice cracking on a single line of dialogue when confronting his mother, Laurel (Patti D’Arbanville), over Papa Axelrod’s Yonkers reappearance.
As for Charles Senior, his brush with mortality - and the news that his wealth and status can’t override age and decades of hard drinking - has transformed him into a “scared shitless” child, begging his son to help him get a kidney transplant. Billions revisits the watershed moment that set Axe on his path to wealth and power: His father’s abuse and subsequent abandonment when Axe was 12. In both cases, the audience is asked to once again look at the humanity beneath the monster, and search for empathy. The “ fathers and sons” theme is strong in this season of Billions, with “Contract” getting to the heart of why Axe bailed on dinner at his Yonkers childhood home last week - and Chuck being tasked with saving his father’s life.
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