7 Predictions for Billions Season 3

The second season of Billions came to a close on Sunday night. By now, you’ve presumably read recaps of everything that went down in the finale, so I’m just gonna take some wild guesses at a few things that will happen when the show comes back in (hopefully) early 2018. Obviously, there are Season 2 spoilers below:

1. Taylor will be indicted for insider trading, and end up with jail time.

Taylor signed off on two of Axe’s big trades: Claxon (a European auto manufacturer) and Ice Juice. Claxon could have been justified through various things like credit risk, but from all accounts Ice Juice was a robust IPO that only fell through because Axe sabotaged it by delegating a series of poisonings.

Bryan Connerty made a couple runs at Taylor, trying to get them to flip against Axe. Dissatisfied with the efforts, Connerty moved them up to the list on the bulletin board, to the top line of targets.

2. Wendy Rhoades will also be caught up in the insider trading investigation.

In the penultimate episode, when Wendy learned of Axe’s short play on Ice Juice and saw her separated husband’s stubbornness to pull out of his long position — now, we obviously know he knew what he was doing — she phoned in a large short position. This obviously will not escape Oliver Dake and Bryan Connerty’s investigation.

3. Wendy and Axe are gonna do it.

The program has been teasing an underlying attraction between Wendy Rhoades and Bobby Axelrod since essentially the beginning. Axe and his wife Lara are unwinding; after she said she wouldn’t run away with him, she asked his lawyer about whether she could preserve assets via divorce. Then Axe used her as a decoy before going to jail without saying good-bye to her in person first.

Wendy made a pact to Axe that she would help him rebound from his impending legal troubles. Chuck, who had just seen photos of Wendy and her young booty call, looked on jealously. Though Chuck and Wendy held hands at the end of the episode, I’d surmise that their marriage will remain on the rocks. At some point, Wendy HAS to choose between Chuck and Axe. My bet’s on Axe.

4. Chuck’s consolation prize will be George Minchak, the woman with the southern drawl who New York influencer Blackjack Foley hired to minimize the damage of Chuck’s skeletons.

They also seem to have a thing going on.

5. Lonnie is gonna join Axe’s defense team.

Lonnie was the odd man out in the office. Connerty will be prosecuting Axe. Sacker is chief of crim. Lonnie, who snitched on Rhoades to Dake when Rhoades was under fire in the attorney general’s investigation, was packing up boxes in the finale montage.

He is going to be dangerous on Axe’s behalf. For example, he knows that Rhoades held back on Axe for bribing local cops to hold off on charging his associate for indiscriminately firing a machine gun. There are probably other ways he’ll prove to be an asset as well.

6. Axe will get off easier than it looks right now.

Axe will probably get some jail time, but he’s not going away for long enough that it will last even the arc of one full season of the show. This will come from some combination of Lonnie’s resourcefulness, maybe using Taylor as a fall person, and spite from Ira, Chuck’s best friend who he screwed over in the Ice Juice shenanigans.

The show, if there is a fourth season, needs Axe wheeling and dealing, and a long stint in prison is greatly limiting for that.

7. Axe will cost Rhoades the governorship.

There’s no way Rhoades escapes the BDSM stigma forever. Maybe Axe exposes that — with the help of Wendy?, or maybe he screws her over too because he found her web history when he was suspicious she leaked their session to her husband, and might not have actually deleted it? — and the electorate can’t handle it. Who knows. But the pendulum has to swing back somehow.

What do you think will happen? Chime in in the comment section.

[Display image via Showtime]