What Happened on Landman? Here’s Our Recap of Season 2, Episode 10.

9 min read

The following story contains spoilers for Landman season 2, episode 10, “Tragedy and Flies.”

“LIFE AIN’T GOT a plan for you. You got to have the plan. Then you wrestle with life to make it come true.” It was only one episode ago that T.L. (Sam Elliott), summabitch prophet that he is, uttered those words. He was talking to stripper-turned-physical therapist Cheyenne, real name Penny (Francesca Xuereb). But of course, his words spoke to us. And they seem to have settled on T.L.’s own son, Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton), as life has him by the balls.

And so it is: Tommy is making his plan. He’ll wrestle with life to make it a reality, or fail.

Hey, being shitcanned by Demi effing Moore isn’t easy. Tommy is nursing his wounds much like T.L. would, up way too early and sitting poolside for a view of the sun-cracked dirt. T.L. halfheartedly complains that Tommy took his chair, but really the old coot is overjoyed. He didn’t just have a heart-to-heart with Penny in the pool. She slept over because of some convenient car trouble. And he held a beautiful woman in his arms for the first time in 50 years. That’s all. Just slept. Or so the summabitch says. The glint in Sam Elliott’s eye leaves questions.

Tommy is consumed with his own business. He has a “new idea,” he tells Nate (Colm Feore). It involves that contract he drew up to save his son from an oil deal with Tommy’s sworn enemy/sometimes drinking buddy Gallino (Andy Garcia). Now? Tommy wants to surreptitiously rip up the deal that Cami (Demi Moore) doesn’t know about anyway. And take those very productive drills that his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland) found and put them to work. Under a new venture, free of the shackles of M-Tex Oil.

Or as Tommy tells the CEO of Chevron when turning down a cushy seven-figure executive job for the big guy: “I just gotta know.”

Know what?

“If I got one more home run in me.”

We believe in him. Angela (Ali Larter brilliantly turns on a dime from laughing to choking up) tells him: “Believing in you is the one thing that I have no trouble doing.” The question is, does Tommy believe in himself?

There’s one more catch: To score this home run, he’ll have to get back into business with the man he’s been desperately trying to remove from his work and his life. Gallino, so perfectly named in Spanish after a chicken, cuckoos another day.

Watch Landman Here

Coop Faces the Law, and the Law Faces Tommy and Rebecca

Don’t think sleeping with Handsome Geologist has made Lawyer Rebecca (Kayla Wallace) any softer in her work mode. When the law needs manipulating to suit her client’s ends, she’s there. And Cooper needs a lawyer badly.

As we predicted (minimal gloating here), that cutaway to security camera footage of Coop nearly bashing in the Drunk Rapist’s head was put there for a reason. He may have saved his future wife from a brutal rape, but he went way beyond the point of reasonable defense several punches in.

He and Ariana (Paulina Chavez) go to the police to make their report. So the Drunk Rapist doesn’t do it again. Ariana is subjected to the usual police scrutiny, photos of her body. The bruising is excruciating just to look at. It’s clear she nearly ended up dead.

But the police have a few questions for Coop and take him into a room. This is where true crime nerds shout shut up, run for your lawyer. But Coop gullibly wanders into what is obviously an interrogation.

How many times did he punch the creep? He can’t remember.

“Try 17 times,” an officer tells him. They counted. They have every frame of what happened on videotape.

There’s another problem for Coop. That creep who tried to rape Ariana, the one he mercilessly beat until his body looked lifeless? Well, it is now. The guy died.

The true crime nerd’s whispers somehow made it to Ariana, despite her no doubt still being in shock. She senses Coop has been in that room with the cops for too long. She calls Lawyer Rebecca.

And man, does Rebecca go into action. She tells Ariana to walk into the interrogation room—“do not knock”—and tell Cooper to stop talking. Which she does. And predictably, Rebecca proceeds to tear the police to the tiniest of paper scraps over speaker phone.

But what Rebecca then does in person is a fine art. She demands to see the footage played back from when the creep knocks Ariana unconscious and starts disrobing her, before Coop swoops in. That’s what she’ll show the jury, she says. And in Odessa, Texas (population: 114,428, swarming with roughnecks), there’s no way Coop goes down for murder.

Oh, she also pulled up the case history of one of the officers who shot a suspect to death. And then kept shooting him. Was that reasonable use of force, which he was trained to practice, and which Coop wasn’t?

“I am a life ruiner,” Rebecca tells the cops flatly. It’s a beautiful moment. Rebecca finally owning up to being a savage—and saving Coop with her savagery.

The truth of the case gets more complex. Drunk Rapist died, we find out, from a heart attack. When he was in the emergency room. Cooper has a clear out. So what if being pummeled contributed to the creep’s heart attack? He could have just as easily had that heart attack while smothering Ariana to death.

Tommy flies back from Fort Worth (in the M-Tex private jet, which he plans to use until Cami finds out she owns it) to start a fire underneath the asses of everyone in Odessa PD. He has clout. And he doesn’t mince words. If he had been the one with his hands on the creep, “it would’ve been straight to the morgue with that piece of shit.” Anyone with a girlfriend, a wife, a daughter, would understand what Coop did in the moment to protect his woman. No one’s crying about the death of this cretin. Call it just another heart attack and let Coop walk.

The cops are still assessing.

“The situation’s been assessed, don’t you all agree?” Tommy says.

The room is silent. No one’s going to argue with Tommy’s logic, or his power in this town. Like a bomber pilot sent to war, Rebecca will ruin the cops’ lives, if they give her the chance. So it’s settled. Coop walks free.

And Sheridan shrewdly threads a delicate needle here. What we witnessed is on one hand almost certainly morally right: Coop should not face punishment for murder for what he did (okay, maybe involuntary manslaughter). But has Tommy’s influence in the town revealed the rot of corruption underlying its criminal justice system?

In the end, for Tommy, it doesn’t matter. A win is a win. And today his son isn’t being charged with murder.

“Well God, you got anything else? Just dump it the fuck down on me,” Tommy cries out to the heavens, right before a lethal car crash happens in front of him on the highway. He’s spared. He might’ve gotten out of this wreck, but God is still playing games.

Cheerleading Brings the People Together

Let’s take a much-needed break and go to cheerleading practice. At TCU. Where Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) finds that she’s a bit out of her depth when it comes to training. The warmup alone has her spent. And the drills are pressing on her ankles. They’re too weak.

Who’s going to save her? Yes, it’s the return of the despised roommate, Paigyn, who banishes music and uses they/them pronouns and has a pet ferret, to make things truly awful. We knew they were studying sports medicine. What we didn’t know is that Paigyn is practicing sports medicine as a member of the cheerleading team. (Funny, since they more or less dismissed cheerleaders one episode ago, but we’ll let it slide.)

Paigyn wraps up Ainsley’s ankles, no talk of their strife, and advises her on how to strengthen her muscles for the training ahead.

In return, Ainsley basically tells a group of ogling high schoolers who heckle Paigyn for their androgyny (with the tired “what is it?” line) that they have small dicks. Problem solved.

These two sure made up quickly. Paigyn assures their former and once-again roommate (Ainsley is going back to dorm life) that they don’t hate all music. Both enjoy country tunes. Because it’s Fort Worth and that’s the law.

They’ll set ground rules for the dorm room together this time. And one nonnegotiable for Ainsley upon returning: They will bathe the ferret.

Finally, Ainsley has her friend and foil for all the college scenes we’ll get in season 3. (Hell maybe even a spinoff, given how shamelessly Sheridan loves to spin off his own work—something like The Odd Couple meets gender nonconformism. She and They?) At least Sheridan is trying to create nuance in the conversation around gender identity, and not just make a dig. Paigyn is no longer just they; They’re now a full-fledged character.

Cheers for CTT Oil Exploration … and Cattle?

The camera orbits around Tommy now like an angel determining if he’ll live or die, whether he goes to heaven or the trenches below. After learning that the rapist creep died of a heart attack, he’s not feeling so well himself. We watch him down aspirin like mints. Maybe you’ll get him tomorrow, Satan. But not today.

Because it’s time for Tommy to unveil his master plan. He gets the whole gang together at the drill site that his son, for what it’s worth, started, and which he’s oh so casually usurping as only a father could. There’s Nate, Rebecca, Dale, the roughnecks, Coop, even T.L. and Cheyenne/Penny, who is tasked with teaching T.L. how to operate an oil rig via joystick. Surely this is a no-fault plan.

But everyone’s in. Goodbye to M-Tex. They’re starting their own company together, with Coop at the helm as president (he did find the oil, after all), Tommy as senior vice president (“unless my son decides to fire me”), Nate as treasurer, Rebecca as counsel, Dale in charge of exploration, and the crew being, well, the crew. Ariana, done with the Patch Cafe, seems to agree to office manager depending on the pay.

It’s official. And Tommy already came up with the name on the checks that Gallino wrote to kick off this venture. It’s terrible: CTT Oil Exploration and Cattle. CTT as in Cooper, Tommy, and Thomas aka T.L. And cattle? Everyone’s confused. No, they won’t have anything to do with cattle, but cut the guy a break, he’s fighting a potential heart attack and had to come up with an LLC name that wasn’t already taken on the spot.

Which leaves us with that catch in the deal: Being bankrolled by noted drug cartel leader Gallino goes against every fiber in Tommy’s being. But he has no other choice. If he wants a home run, this is the only way.

So Gallino wins again. And as he hands off the checks, he reminds Tommy: If he doesn’t make him money, Gallino will destroy the thing he loves most. What a promising way to start a partnership!

Cut to the thing Tommy loves the most, Angela, bathed in the golden hour of sunset. Tommy has found his plan. And he tells the love of his life, whatever hardships are ahead (and there will be many), “Today we win.”

Angela disagrees. “Baby, I win every day. You do too, you just don’t see it.”

Angela sees it, we see it. Tommy just needs to believe in himself. And make Gallino plenty of money, or else.

Notes from the Patch

• With M-Tex Oil’s gulf drill project likely doomed to catastrophe, and CTT starting up, where does that leave Cami? We sense this might be the exit of Demi Moore from the series. She’s given us enough, though we would be happy with more.
• Cooper is still shaken by the questioning he got from the police. The death of that creep will haunt him, even if he’s not going to jail for it. “I went past defending her,” he admits to Tommy. Understandably, Tommy will have none of it: “Don’t ever say that again.” Yet Coop will say it to himself for a long time.
• Andy Garcia as Gallino gets the funniest line of the episode, staring into Tommy’s soul: “It’s like I’m looking in a mirror except I’m skinny and I wear a hat.”
• Tommy gets the second-funniest line, referring to Cooper mowing the lawn: “That’s what I always do when I’m being investigated for murder.”

Tune of the week: “Whiskey Lullaby” by Brad Paisley featuring Alison Krauss. What a lovely way to spend the rest of that music licensing budget.