‘Ballers’ season 2, episode 5 review: Spencer hits a few walls

On Sunday night’s new episode of “Ballers,” we saw Spencer Strasmore start to unravel in a way that we haven’t quite seen so far. While he’s sort-of keeping it together on the surface, we’re getting more and more of an indication that this is not going to last too much longer.

The first bit of evidence of this came fairly early on during the episode, where we saw that Dwayne Johnson’s character was so desperate to get what he wanted that he went to an alternate doctor under an obvious fake name for some medication. It was a total ruse that shows that he really doesn’t care where his medicine comes from or what it does to his health, provided of course that he gets what he wants.

From there, the second major revelation was that his history with Andre Allen is far more important to the story than we realized. While we knew that they had to have made some mistakes together, we didn’t quite realize that it was an enormous real-estate disaster back in 2008. (Also, nice Rick Hoffman appearance in here!) Johnson had a great performance in here, showing off a wide range of emotions from frustration to happiness upon learning that a friend had landed a job within the Players’ Association.

Elsewhere in the episode, we saw Ricky receive a little bit of advice when it comes to his future destination, and this is a reasonably interesting story. We just wish that the writers would stop acting like most of the viewers don’t know very much when it comes to the NFL. The Charles story finally got interesting this week as we saw him receive an offer to work in the Dolphins front office. This is a great gig for him, at least until he probably has to tell other people that they’re getting cut.

For Spencer, this may have been the strongest episode of “Ballers” for the season, even with him intimidating the heck out of Travis. We just hope that the story picks up for many of the supporting cast. Episode Grade: B.

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