'Black Monday' Season 2 Episode 6 sees Dawn torn over taking African American Scholarship Fund money
The last few minutes of the fifth episode of the second season of Showtime’s Wall Street dark comedy ‘Black Monday’ really took the show’s plot to a whole new level. Up until then, we had assumed Mo (Don Cheadle) had exacted his revenge upon Dawn (Regina Hall) and Blair (Andrew Rannells) by tarnishing the name of their company Amerisavings Bank. But things were much deeper than anyone could have guessed.
One of the survivors of the massacre at Amerisavings in Miami turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, who was there only to get closer to Mo. They wanted to catch the people responsible for the historic 1987 Wall Street crash known as Black Monday, and the officer behind the operation was an old acquaintance of Mo -- the same woman who had backstabbed him years ago, Connie (Xosha Roquemore). Connie convinced, nay, forced Mo to go back to the company so that the FBI could build its case better with Mo as a snitch working from within.
And Mo introduced Connie to the group as a wealthy Nigerian heiress with $25 million to invest (that would solve all of Dawn and Blair’s problems). Spine-chilling stuff.
So, what’s next for the rag-tag group of Wall Street brokers? Episode 6 is titled ‘Who Are You Supposed To Be?’ and that may as well be a question for everyone in the show, considering they all lead a kind of double life. Per the official synopsis of the episode, “A new client presents a moral quandary for Dawn. Mo, Blair, and Keith (Paul Scheer) chase down leads while Tiff has an identity crisis.”
The promo for the episode sees Blair wonder why Congressman Roger Harris (Tuc Watkins), his secret lover, was not responding to his calls. In episode 5, we saw things suddenly sour up in a meeting between Dawn, Blair and Pastor Newell (Michael Hitchcock), the notoriously-homophobic Christian televangelist and the father-in-law of Harris, after he found out that Blair and the Congressman were close friends. While Blair’s wife Till (Casey Wilson) tries to reassure him, his anxiety doesn’t seem to lessen.
And it’s an understandable one. The powerful pastor, should he suspect that his son-in-law was secretly gay, could destroy both of them, or worse, make sure they would never meet again. And while he was busy moping about his personal life, Dawn was busy worrying about the company. “Have you got your next big idea? Cause we are broke, Blair,” Dawn tells the supposed wizard of Wall Street. And broke they were.
Even with the money offered to them by Connie, they could only pay off the Lehman Brothers. They did not have enough to run the company. The aforementioned moral quandary comes in the form of Dulé Hill, who plays Mark, the head of the African American Scholarship Fund, who wants Dawn to invest his $30 million. While Dawn gravely needs the money, depriving and defrauding fellow African-Americans would go against what she stands for. But she does desperately need the money.
The promo lays to rest some of Blair’s worries because we see him and the Congressman meet and the latter asks him, “You wanna finance my campaign?” How Blair will find the money to finance the campaign is a separate conundrum altogether. At the same time, we see Mo telling Connie that Blair was using insider information. The promo ends with several shots of Dawn, for the lack of a better word, losing it, and a shot of her and Mark celebrating, perhaps implying that she did end up taking the money from him -- to “invest”, of course.
‘Black Monday’ airs Sundays on Showtime at 10 pm ET.