It’s tough to say. On this show it often pays to be paranoid. The question is, paranoid about what? Is it worse to overstep like Connerty, or to underestimate like many others?

Wags, for example, is usually among the most cynical and suspicious characters of the bunch. But he is so blinded by his desire to look legit in the eyes of the city’s richest and most respectable financiers that he walks right into a gathering of their prestigious fraternity, in the full drag required of novices, without realizing his invitation was a setup by an old enemy. His promise of revenge is too profane for this publication even to paraphrase, but I’m quite sure it’s as sincere as it is hilarious.

Wags’s boss, Bobby, also learns the hard way that he should have been more cautious. Turns out that during his brief hiatus from running his company, Taylor adjusted his contract with one of his proxy traders, Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), to make their allegedly untraceable relationship a whole lot more traceable. Now Victor is in hot water for shady conduct with a research firm, and Axe could wind up boiling along with him. It’s “a Trojan Horse time bomb,” as Wags puts it.

Bobby’s first attempt to defuse that time bomb is to ask Chuck to take over the case against Mateo and make it go away. But Rhoades realizes that all the heat on him from Connerty and Jeffcoat would only draw more attention to the matter, and begs off. So Axe is left with only one other option: buy the research firm to silence its chief executive, shut down Mateo’s firm to end its threat, and force Victor into what’s essentially indentured servitude, back with the grunts at Axe Cap.

Axe has yet to make a meal of his top target, Taylor Mason, but not for lack of trying. At one point early in the episode, he and his black-ops guru, Hall, actually skulk around a rooftop across from one of Mason’s facilities, dressed in black and casing the joint like heroes in a Marvel-Netflix series. Taylor, of course, is aware of Axe’s vindictiveness; Doug Mason, the brainiac hedge-funder’s aerospace engineer father, has been made aware as well, and their joint business venture is closed up tight.

Not tight enough, though. Under the guise of friendship, Wendy has resumed contact with Taylor — and begun combing through old therapy files, looking for a weakness to exploit. She finds one in Doug, whose failure has haunted his child for years. A not-so-chance meeting with Taylor’s right-hand man Mafee, whom Wendy is an old hand at manipulating, gives her enough info to determine which company the Masons are partnering with to make Doug’s dream a reality.