Another week, another dive into Black Monday. In this week's episode, â295,â Mo tries to salvage his plan to get the Georgina companyâs shares after Blair and Tiffany Georginaâs surprise breakup in the previous episode threw a wrench in that plan. By the end of this weekâs episode, Mo gets what he wants but it doesnât go as planned. Don Cheadle told VIBE that Black Monday was âinsane...in a good way,â and this episode shows just that, starting with Moâs God complex.
Stop Trying To Be God
You need a certain cocktail of self-aggrandization and delusions of grandeur to walk around with a God complex. Mo has that cocktail coursing through his veins. The entire episode revolves around Moâs attempt to control the actions of humans by placing them in certain situations he is sure will yield his desired results. Only someone blinded by their obsession with being right wouldnât see having to fix a âfoolproofâ plan makes him a fool.
The writing expertly showed that when you play God your creation is your reflection, especially in the tense scene at Moâs dining room table with Blair and Dawn. He turned Blair into a cocaine-addicted party animal to show him how empty life is without having someone you love. Then, in one scene, Dawn exposed how all Mo did was build Blair in his image without realizing that part of his plan was to inadvertently show Blair just how miserable Mo really lives.
Even ostensibly innocuous details carry a huge emotional weight thanks to Black Mondayâs writing and Cheadleâs consistently engaging performance. The writers literally had Mo on the outside looking in at forces out of his control at the end of the episode when heâs looking into the bar. Itâs at this climactic moment of the show that Mo realizes his own mortality by getting what he wants but missing out on what he knows he needs.
Itâs also at this moment that the showâs most boring lead character grew into someone worth watching.
Blair Is Here
For the first three episodes, Blair was as interesting as paint on the wall; always in front of your face but in the back of your mind. Before a single character utters a word in this episode, Blair is chain-smoking cigarettes, snorting coke and dressed like a Saturday Night Fever extra. He died âfor a song and a halfâ and was electroshocked back to life, all in the first minute of the new episode. Blair has finally joined the Black Monday party and the show is better for it.
Mo molding Blair into his image allowed Blair to tap into a new level of confidence. Â Blairâs exchange with Dawn about the implicit racism and sexism in 1980s films like Teen Wolf was rewind-worthy hilarious and ends with Blair remarking, âMy favorite line from the movie is, âIâm not a f*g, Iâm a werewolf. Oh, Michael J,â easily one of the funniest 1980s critiques on a show full of them.
The episode also entangled Blair in the showâs first love triangle, ensuring that Blairâs character growth is probably not done. With Blair now being compelling, following Dawn and Keithâs character-defining performances in the previous episode, Black Monday has set up its four most accomplished actors to be able to carry entire story arcs without relying on each other. But, the Black Monday world got bigger than those four in this weekâs episode.
The Wall Street Mythology
Thereâs not enough time in a 30-minute episode to flesh out every characterâs backstory and fully formed personality. The most surprisingly funny part of episode â295â was the story arc of Jammer Group traders Keith and Yassir (Yassir Lester) trying to stop Wayne (Horatio Sanz) from completing a âThe LaGuardia Spreadâ. The arc showed that Black Monday has an ingenious way of speeding up character development: mythologize Wall Street.
On Black Monday, âThe LaGuardia Spreadâ is when a trader takes a huge position on a stock, goes to LaGuardia Airport and waits to see if they made a huge profit or debilitating loss. If you guess right, you come home. If you guess wrong, âyou donât come home ever. You get on a plane and you f**king disappear,â according to a frantic Keith. Wayne was nothing more than a bumbling joke punchline of a trader before this episode. In only a few minutes of screentime we find out Wayne slept with his wifeâs sister, has some weird dislike for The Howard Stern Showâs weekly guest Jackie Martling, and is so money hungry that heâd be giddy at the news of a mad cows disease epidemic and itâs positive effect on his âLaGuardia Spreadâ trade.
A similar result happened before on Black Monday. In the series premiere, the Lehman twins (Ken Marino) laid out the Georgina Play, the foundation of Moâs plans to get all the shares from the Georgina company from Blair after he marries Tiffany. That Wall Street myth led to their grandfather setting himself on fire. That myth also showed that at any moment any person you see on screen become valuable because of what they about know how this fictionalized world works. As long as Black Monday continues to use the inherent absurdity of Wall Street as a machine for character development, this show could begin entering the conversation for one of the best ensemble casts on television.