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The following story contains spoilers for Landman season 2, episode 4, “Dancing Rainbows.”
THE LATEST EPISODE of Landman, the deceptively titled “Dancing Rainbows,” starts with one of the epic vehicular crashes that have become a motif of the series. An M-Tex Oil trucker barrels his way to a drill site in the middle of night, and runs right into a pickup. Inside that pickup? A man dying from gas that’s being pumped into his interior. Both of them are wiped out instantaneously in the fiery crash. But questions abound: Who was the man in the pickup? Who left him to die?
That’ll be Tommy’s (Billy Bob Thornton) problem soon enough. But first, he has something closer to home to deal with.
The opening is a fitting metaphor for the series of collisions that make up “Dancing Rainbows”—between generations, as well as the very physical blows of drills, cars, and bodies that are commonplace in the oil towns of West Texas. It’s all coming to a head as we hit the midpoint of season 2.
Here, Tommy is mostly catching up with collisions of the familial kind. The funeral of his mother—remember, the raging cokehead he left in his past—has finally arrived. The whole gang—Tommy, Angela, Ainsley, Cooper, Ariana coming back to Cooper’s side, even Dale (looking slimmer in a blazer, Angela notices, complimenting him, to which he explains that he’s on Adderall, because everyone here has to have a vice)—drives up to Canadian, Texas, a real place in the panhandle of Texas that we’re sure Taylor Sheridan chose for both its humor and loaded political meaning, for the remembrance of the not-so-dearly departed. And finally, Sam Elliott, as Tommy’s estranged father Thomas, aka T.L., gets to prove why he was brought onto the show.
Slinging Vodka Watermelons on the Private Jet
Before that, though, a more lighthearted collision: Rebecca (Kayla Wallace) boards the company plane, which she’s told is going to hit some heavy winds on the trip. “I have control issues,” she tells the suspiciously good-looking oil driller next to her, as if it wasn’t obvious to anyone watching her face. (Those guys get to ride the Gulfstream? Suddenly being a roughneck doesn’t look so bad.)
So in a rare moment of misjudgment, Rebecca calms her nerves by drinking the hooch out of the driller’s thermos. Which isn’t so roughneck, but rather vodka mixed with watermelon juice (and his own homemade simple syrup, he notes proudly). As the turbulence gets worse, she happily guzzles it.
We know where this goes before she does: Rebecca wakes up the next morning in the man’s bed, and we’re treated to an awkward hangover kiss between the two before she jumps into his shower. In keeping with his softer side, the mullet-haired gentleman has a heap of grooming and aromatherapy products he suggests she try. As far as Texas roughnecks go, he’s starting to look pretty rosy. We’re guessing we’ll be seeing Mr. Mullet again.
Cami Says Her Graveyard Goodbyes
One funeral isn’t enough. Though Don Draper, err, Monty Miller’s body has already been laid to rest, his widow Cami (Demi Moore) visits his grave, where a headstone is installed, to say some final farewells.
“My therapist thinks I should write you a letter,” Cami tells her second half six feet under. But in true Fort Worth style, she instead gives him an illegal Cuban cigar and a bottle of very, very, very, expensive Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which she proceeds to pour all at once over his resting place. Here’s hoping ghosts don’t get hangovers.
Then she slips over to a rich-oil-tycoon lunch with Gallino (Andy Garcia), where she asks him for a giant loan to save M-Tex. But Gallino will only negotiate with the hawk to his snake, apparently: none other than Tommy. Again, he’ll have to wait on that fire.
Jerrell’s Fate Hangs in the Balance
Damn, we’ve barely gotten to know Jerrell (Elijah Collins), and we’re already brokenhearted over his very bad situation. After his poisoning at the drill site littered with human and animal corpses, he’s rushed to the ER, where his M-Tex Oil coworkers are there to check on him.
Unfortunately, it’s not looking too good. The doctor says the neurological damage is still unknown: whether he’ll walk again, smell again, taste again.
When the nurse takes off the compress bandaged on his head, Jerrell realizes he can’t see. There’s fluid oozing out of his swollen eyes. Is he blind? How will he provide for his family? Well, a check from M-Tex, surely, but we’re hoping Jerrell makes a full recovery and gets to enjoy his venison-less breakfast burritos again. For now, all he can do is scream in misery.
“What Does ‘Deserve’ Have to Do with It?”
Speaking of misery, the amount of heartbreak under the surface of Tommy’s mom’s funeral is grim even for this show. T.L. (Sam Elliott) barely has a chance to show off his cool bolo tie to Cooper’s sexy girl-once-again Ariana (Paulina Chavez) when Tommy brings the mood down by reminding everyone of the monster they’re here to bury.
“Let’s get this over with,” T.L. says, seemingly speaking for the group.
After the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it funeral, they dig into chicken-fried steaks and dry chicken caesar salad (for Angel and Ainsley, of course) and corn dogs (for T.L., naturally) at a local greasy spoon. Ariana makes the mistake of asking why no one is doing the normal thing and saying nice things about the departed.
“I don’t have any memories worth sharing,” Tommy says curtly.
But, oh, does he ever. He launches into the saddest sob tale we’ve heard yet on Landman: finding his mom face-down in the bathtub at 14 and bringing her back to life with CPR, only to have her kick him in the head. That was when Young Tommy loaded his backpack, left home, and never looked back.
So yeah, there’s a reason Tommy smokes so many cigarettes. “I didn’t come here to mourn her passing,” he says. “I came here to celebrate it.” Funny, he doesn’t look very cheerful.
T.L. has more fond (read: misguided) memories of his once-sweet wife, before she was wrecked by the grief of losing Tommy’s infant sister, dancing through a rainbow.
“But demons run faster than rainbows,” T.L. explains, “and hers caught up to her. I spent 60 years waiting for her rainbow to return. It never did. But that’s life. And I wasted mine on hope.”
Yikes, these guys don’t need chicken-fried steak, they need that Pappy Van Winkle to drown sorrows this deep.
And as soon as Tommy can finally breathe at home again, Angela drops another bombshell on him: T.L. will be moving out of his hellhole of a retirement facility and into Chateau Norris with the rest of the family. Tommy responds appropriately: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
But he fetches his dad, of course. And the summabitch finally shows something like gratitude.
“I’m not sure I deserve this,” T.L. says as Tommy wheels him back into his life.
“What does ‘deserve’ have to do with it, Pop?”
And so Tommy’s Freudian shitshow of a family past has collided once again with his future. No one deserved it, but that’s how it goes in West Texas. And we can’t wait to see what kind of fresh hell it unleashes.
Notes from the Patch
- The funniest line of the episode goes to Tommy driving the family to the funeral, and man does Billy Bob Thornton do it justice. Angela: “I’m driving you to smoke?” Tommy: “No, you’re driving me to suck Freon out of the back of an AC unit. I’m settling for a cigarette.”
- Ariana has had one day on the job as a bartender at the Patch Cafe, smashed a customer’s nose, and is already asking about taking the busiest shifts and how much of her tips she has to give to the barbacks. She’s more driven than we gave her credit for.
- Jam of the episode goes to “Time Bomb” by Whiskey Myers, just the kind of kick-in-the-face tune to ignite the back half of this season.
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Paul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor covering pop culture and the entertainment industry. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Men’s Health, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles magazine, and others.
