However — and this isn’t made clear until after the nail-biting hard-drive-unlocking business is over and done with — Prince really did hide billions in untaxed cryptocurrency on those drives, and really didn’t anticipate that Dave would act swiftly enough to retrieve them before he could have them relocated. So he sits there, watching an I.T. guy reduce all those cold-storage devices to paperweights. The loss staggers him, quite literally — on a security camera after their expensive game of chicken, Dave sees Prince’s knees buckle as he waits to get on the elevator. But $3.5 billion is the cost of taking Chuck off the board permanently, as it seems to have done when Dave orders him arrested (and Karl booted from the building), so be it.
But Prince, Chuck and Kate aren’t the only smooth operators in that room. There’s also Dave, who, it turns out, has her own scheme up and running. Visiting Chuck in jail, she produces a “real” warrant, backdated to before Chuck’s initial seizure of that cold-storage drive, which gives that seizure a legal imprimatur. She wants Prince to believe that Chuck is off the board whereas, in fact, he will be working with Dave “under cover of disgrace” to put Prince out of commission once and for all.
It’s the perfect cover story for Chuck, a man who will stop at nothing to defeat his enemy. Why would Prince worry anymore when his Ahab appears, for all intents and purposes, to be underwater?
Indeed, Prince ends the episode by admitting his enormous financial loss to his people but toasting them in celebration of their battle scars anyway. He does this despite the fact that his sexual relationship with his employee Rian — a continuing thing, as it happens — has been disclosed to the company’s brain trust. Rian refuses the payoff proffered by Scooter and Wags, asserting that she can be trusted to keep schtum.
Prince, for his part, does trust her. He makes this clear during a disturbing speech to her — disturbing to us, not to him — about how “there are people that things happen to and people who make things happen, and you need to land on which one you want to be.” This pep-talks her out of her fear that she’ll become the next Monica Lewinsky or Rielle Hunter.
But the rest of the speech leaves me with a queasy feeling indeed. “When you decide what you want to feel,” he continues, “that is the true source of power. When you get there, people will see what you want them to see on your face. Most people never figure this out. The ones that do? They get to run the world.”
