The Good Life falls short in this regard but still amounts to a perfectly fine, above average episode.
I was impressed with the interplay between the two previous episodes: YumTime and Short Squeeze.
In YumTime, Axe muscled his way onto YumTimes board to influence decision-making.
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In The Good Life, Axe does almost the exact same thing.
*Im sure that felt as weird to read as it did to jot down.
Billionsinstincts are in the right place.
It wants the audience to experience what its like to watch Axe work from the outside looking in.
Hes a master chess player, ten moves ahead of everyone else.
Axe is doing some stuff?
Wake me up when we find out what he was really up to.
Still, when that revelation eventually does come, it cant be denied that its at least interesting.
After the telecom news breaks, he unretires and resumes trading in all the other industries.
As is the insistence on not knowing the real Bobby Axelrod.
Was it all just a ploy or was it really a mid-life crisis?Billionswill never tell!
That kind of indistinct character motivations is a solid plan but its just too much five episodes in.
TV is serialized for a reason.
Give us more time to actually get a baseline understanding of a character before making his motivations needlessly murky.
Meanwhile, Chuck is pretty much an open book.
His investigation has received what it needs from Pete Decker and now its moving on to Dollar Bill Stern.
*
*Bill Stern is played by Kelly AuCoin, a.k.a Pastor Tim onThe Americans.
Bill Stern is another Axe Capital trader mixed up with some shady trading.
In this case its a bribe for an executive at Pepsum Pharmaceuticals.
Grunwald met with Stern and told him information about Pepsum before it was public.
Still, theres something about Giamattis and Maggie Siffs performances that makes it work.
After screwing over Grunwald, Chuck hops on Kinkplayfinder.com and heads to a kink club in Iowa.
Wendy is really the linchpin for this whole thing.
Its the looser, more improvisational Wendy thats holding this all together.
Albeit by a string but thats good enough for an decent enough episode of TV.
Rating:
3 out of 5
