Relationship Spotlight: Maurice Monroe & Blair Pfaff (Black Monday)

*Some Blair-Mo-related spoilers.*

In our Book of Rannells chronology, I’ve skipped a couple previously-reviewed projects because I didn’t have much more to say, so we’ve made it back to season 3 of Black Monday. The cast chemistry is one of the show’s best qualities, and that’s especially true among the three main characters. Mo, Dawn, and Blair are excellent to watch as a trio as well as any duo that can be made between the three. Today, we’re looking at Blair with Mo.

Just within the pilot, our understanding of Mo and Blair’s dynamic changes more than once. Mo is the fast-talking Wall St. hotshot, a still-little fish who’s more than ready to take over the whole big pond. He has confidence to burn and next to no shame, and even when he’s lying transparently, he does it with gusto. By contrast, Blair is a fresh-out-of-business school hayseed, browbeaten by his high-maintenance fiancée and severely lacking in the swagger department. He has plenty of book smarts, having designed a whiz-bang trading algorithm, but he’s never set foot on the trading floor before. By all accounts, he’s either someone Mo wouldn’t even notice or someone Mo would eat for breakfast.

Mo takes the latter approach, blowing up Blair’s fledgling career over an accidental slight and making his name toxic on Wall St. But punching-bag Blair, pushover Blair, shows a bit of a spine when he comes to the Jammer Group to confront Mo about it. Mo challenges him to prove that his algorithm really works, and when Blair loses the bet, Mo takes his car but offers him a job. This adds another wrinkle, with Mo still belittling Blair and pushing him around but also showing just a hint of “this kid’s got potential.”

But the first episode isn’t even over yet. In the last scene, we discover the real reason Mo wants Blair around: he’s engaged to a member of the Georgina family, and the enormous, game-changing plan Mo wants to execute depends on getting his hands on her shares. He masterminded their whole encounter on the trading floor to ensure that Blair would get blacklisted with every other firm and have no choice but to turn to the Jammer Group. Mo then sets the next phase of his plan in motion, taking Blair under his wing (in a quintessentially-Mo way) to butter him up and secure his trust/his fiancée shares. The slick Wall St. veteran showing the naïve kid the ropes, and all the while Mo’s playing him for an angle.

Things take another flip when it’s revealed that, after Blair gets wise to Mo’s plan midway through the season, he decides to double-cross Mo, running the Georgina play himself. It’s a little bit “the student becomes the master” and a big helping of “the mark gets the upper hand.” The hard-knocks Wall St. lessons Mo taught Blair sank in a bit too well. It’s a cold, triumphant Blair who calmly explains how he swiped Mo’s plan, and his firm, out from under him.

This positions Blair in a more antagonistic role relative to Mo, even though, of course, Mo had tried to play him first. It means fewer chances for Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannells’s excellent foil-chemistry with each other, but whenever they are in each other’s orbit, they really get to let loose. Blair rubs Mo’s failings in his face while Mo is abundantly clear about his hatred for Blair. When they haphazardly find themselves working together again, it’s a cycle of seeing who will go farther, who’ll double-cross who first, and who can get in the best zingers.

And yet, there’s this small part of them that never really stops being in sync. As much as they’re frequently at each other’s throats, they weirdly kind of work well together, and that pops up in unexpected moments where I think they both surprise each other with their somehow-still-enduring bond. One of my favorite moments in season 2 is when Blair comes to the Jammer Group late at night, at his lowest point, and Mo runs into him. Both keep each other way at arm’s length, but there are just these little moments of truth that get through between them, and by the end of that encounter, Mo is ready to include Blair in his plan to get them all out of some majorly hot water.

Blair spends a lot of season 3 apart from Mo, which is a shame. I said in my episode reviews that, while he’s hugely entertaining in his early plots with Tiff, the season really starts to sing once he gets back in Mo (and Dawn’s) orbit. There’s an amoral chaos there, and it’s great to see the way they continually bullshit one another while somehow getting real at the same time. If we don’t get a season 4, I’m okay with where these two end up, but of course I’d love to see more of what they get up to together.