Everyone Vapes In ‘Billions,’ No Matter What Side Of The Law They’re On

There’s very little subtlety in Billions. Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti’s performances as Bobby “Axe” Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades, two men who have ruined countless people’s lives because they hate each for no real reason, are both archly masculine and masculinely arch. There’s Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon), the non-binary trading powerhouse whose most recent romantic relationship started over a game of Netrunner—less emotive, but still capable of silencing a room with numbers and icy competence. And, of course, there are the show’s twisty heists, trading maneuvers and legal strategies, plots that wrap all the way back around from insane to brilliant and back again. But there’s one activity that Billions treats with the utmost sense of delicacy: vaping.

Take the second episode of the series, when Axe and his wife Lara (Malin Akerman), preparing to go to a charity function, take a few hits off a PAX 2 weed vaporizer to take the edge off. When Lara quickly, quietly hides the vaporizer, she laughs it off: “Just like smoking in the girl’s bathroom at St. Mary’s, you had to be quick or you’d be over a nun’s knee.” Before heading into the gala, the Axe hands the vape to his Chief Operating Officer and lieutenant Wags (David Costabile) for disposal. Wags, a middle-aged 12-year-old, giddily takes a big pull. This is the most explicit treatment vaping gets on the show.

For the most part, vapes are just omnipresent accessories: Pretty much everyone on Billions vapes, whether they’re on the side of the law, the side of the hedge fund managers, or somewhere in between. Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) solemnly pulls cotton while typing in bed, as all good therapists do. (Axe literally vapes during one of their sessions.) Mafee (Dan Sofer), one of the traders at Axe Capital, gets caught vaping in the bathroom when he’s too anxious to tell his boss about an idea to make some money. And when Axe asks Taylor to represent the firm in a poker tournament, he tells them he knew they used to play poker because they weren’t one of the popular kids with social lives “hanging out under the bridge vaping.” But now, Taylor and Axe are those kids, and they don’t have to hang out under the bridge.

Part of the appeal of vaping is that it’s silent, or at least that it can be. (It’s a lot harder to smoke a blunt in public, that’s for sure.) But it’s the loudest type of surreptitious gesture, taking an activity that only needs to be a rolled bit of paper and turning it into a literal lights-and-colors spectacle—which is to say, it fits perfectly into the lifestyles of everyone else on Billions. No one ever calls attention to the fact that they’re smoking weed, or that they’re stoned. Why would they? The activities they tend to call attention to, the ones that scream excitement, are more bizarre—like eating illegal birds. Beyond being the most minor and silly of status symbols, vaping just isn’t that big a deal for them. At least, not until Axe Cap starts making plays in the legal weed industry.

Eric Thurm’s writing also appears in GQ, Esquire, Real Life, and eventually in a book about board games he is writing for the NYU Press and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the founder, producer, and host of Drunk Education, a comedic-academic event series that has absolutely nothing to do with TED.

Where to stream Billions