Lucy Dacus – "Troublemaker Doppelgänger" (2016)

I wanna live in a world 

Where I can keep my doors wide open

But who knows what’d get in

And what’d get out

The Showtime series Billions has all the eye candy you could ask for.

We’re talking beaucoup Maseratis, private jets, drop-dead-gorgeous Manhattan penthouse apartments, and drop-dead-gorgeous people.

The cast is strong – Damian Lewis (as a self-made Wall Street billionaire) and Giamatti  (as an ambitious U.S. Attorney who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth) are the big names, but the delightfully devilish David Costabile and the totally toothsome Maggie Siff steal most of the scenes they appear in.

And the writing is very smart.  (There are some well-educated writers working on Billions.)

*     *     *     *     *

Billions is as entertaining as all get out.  But if you’re looking for realism, you’re watching the wrong show.  

Billions is about as plausible as a Dickens novel – by which I mean it’s totally implausible.  

The plot of a typical Dickens novel is chock full of outrageously contrived twists and turns, and the same is true of Billions.  Another Dickens-like thing about Billions is that it is populated with plenty of distinctive and colorful characters, most of whom have only a very faint resemblance to real people.

*     *     *     *     *

Unlike a Dickens novel, Billions has no ill-fated young heroes or heroines whose struggles tug at your heartstrings – no one like David Copperfield, or Oliver Twist, or Pip (Great Expectations) or the Jarndyce wards (Bleak House).

Billions star Maggie Siff

With few exceptions, the characters in Billions are assh*les.  They mostly fall into one of two groups – hedge-fund types who would do anything for a quick buck, and government types who would do anything to achieve higher political office.

Considerations of morality or ethics never enter their minds.  If you asked them if the ends justify the means, they wouldn’t even have to think before answering “HELL YES!”  

*     *     *     *     *

I always watch Billions with my smartphone close at hand so I can Google the references in the script that go over my head.  (I also use my phone’s Soundhound app to identify the obscure but interesting musical cues used in Billions – that’s how I figured out the identity of today’s featured song.)

For example, I watched the first episode of season three recently.  The script quoted Greed and Top Gun, alluded to some New York Islanders and professional wrestlers from the 1970s and 1980s, and dropped in some obscure Basque and Arabic honorifics.

Perhaps most impressively, it not only contained a reference to the “Ship of Theseus” (a metaphysical paradox that has been argued over by philosophers since Plato’s time) but also used that term perfectly aptly.

*     *     *     *     *

As you no doubt know, Theseus was a mythical king of Athens.  The ship he sailed back to Athens in after killing the Minotaur – only one of his many heroic feats – was kept in the Athens harbor for several centuries as a memorial to him.

Ship of Theseus

Eventually, of course, the wooden planks used to construct the ship began to rot.  As each plank decayed, it was replaced with a new one.

Eventually, every piece of wood on the Ship of Theseus was replaced.  This question then arose: was the ship still the Ship of Theseus? 

*     *     *     *     *

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?  

What if the Greeks had saved all the old rotting planks and some genius scientist figured out a way to reverse the rot and make the planks as good as new.  If you reassembled those planks into a ship, that ship would clearly be the Ship of Theseus – right?

The other ship – the one that consisted entirely of replacement parts – couldn’t be the Ship of Theseus, because then you would have two Ships of Theseus when everyone knows Theseus only sailed on one ship.

Believe it or not, some philosophers have argued that the original ship and the replica ship are both the Ship of Theseus because they have the same form and function, and existed at different times.  This seems to be what Aristotle believed.

Aristotle: not as bright as
you’ve been led to believe

I’ve been brainwashed since high school into thinking Aristotle was a major brainiac, but it turns out he’s not.  The solution to the Ship of Theseus paradox is as plain as the nose on your face, yet Aristotle got it wrong.

*     *     *     *     *

Heraclitus, another fancy-pants Greek philosopher, approached the Ship of Theseus paradox by asking whether someone who walks into a river on Monday and then again on Tuesday has really walked into the same river.  After all, the water that he waded into on Monday wasn’t the same water that he waded into on Tuesday.

According to Heraclitus, “It is impossible to go into the same river twice” because the water in that river is constantly changing.  

Heraclitus is just as big a dummy as Aristotle.  We’re not talking whether the water is the same on Monday as it is on Tuesday – we’re talking about whether it’s the same river.  OF COURSE IT IS!

Let’s be practical, boys and girls.  If the Mississippi River was a different river on Tuesday than it was on Monday, it only stands to reason that you’d have to give it a different name – not only on Tuesday, but also on Wednesday, and Thursday, and so on.  

And we’re not just talking about the Mississippi River needing a new name every day – we’re talking about every other river, too.  It would be more than a little bit confusing if every damn river in the whole damn world had a different damn name every damn day!

*     *     *     *     *

“Troublemaker Doppelgänger” was released in 2016 on Lucy Dacus’s debut album, No Burden:

Dacus – who’s a native of Richmond, Virginia – was 20 when she recorded that album.  How many of you released an album consisting entirely of original songs before you turned 21?

Click here to listen to a live performance of “Troublemaker Doppelgänger.” 

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: