Billions Has a Blank Slate for Season 4

Billions concluded its third season on Sunday, and it ended on a note with something that would’ve been unthinkable at the start of the season: Axe, Chuck, and Wendy sitting around at a table as Axe and Chuck plotting with each other about how to crush their new enemies.

This season was clunky at times as they recalibrated it from Axe vs. Chuck into Axe vs. Taylor and Chuck vs. Jock Jeffcoat, but they’ve landed in a place that is genuinely intriguing for whenever in 2019 Season 4 is coming out.

Taylor Mason starting their own hedge fund shop was something we knew was happening at the end of the penultimate episode. We learned before Axe, and got to see him react to getting immaculately set up for them to get a head start on their own capital raise, at the direct expense of Axe.

Meanwhile, it also wasn’t the biggest shocker in the world that Jock Jeffcoat has the upper hand over Chuck for the time being. He was way too evil for Chuck to just defeat him in the course of one season — especially after he was entangled with Axe for two-plus seasons and didn’t even wind up snaring him in the end.

The most surprising part of the episode, to me, was that Kate Sacker turned against Chuck at the end, siding with Dake, Connerty, and Jock Jeffcoat. I guess it makes some sense given how dismayed she was when he went over her head to get her father to divulge bread crumbs into Jock Jeffcoat’s ill-gotten fortune, but I figured she would call in the chit Chuck owed her over something surely dire to happen down the road. “You recognized I was a political animal,” she told him. “You fed it. Nurtured it. And I warned you it might bite you. That’s where we are.”

So yeah, Chuck has a lot of enemies now. He wasn’t even mad. He lost a battle, sure, but I wouldn’t bet against him in the next round.

Meanwhile, Axe also has a derivative enemy in Grigor Andolov, the Russian plutocrat/mobster played by John Malkovich. Andolov’s taking his money to Taylor and so now everything that Axe does to them has to be clandestine so as to not incur fatal retaliation. Axe having extra security detail put on Lara and their kids feels like an ominous foreshadowing.

Andolov, by the way, doesn’t operate with a whole lot of logic. One minute he’s down to have Taylor murdered, the next he’s putting a fortune with them. That just makes him scarier I guess?

Anyways, as always, Billions is a game of 43-dimensional chess and I don’t even feel like we’re at a point in the newly developing plot where I could even make predictions at what will happen next. Let’s just hope we’re all happy and healthy by the time it gets here.