In America, every boomtown is just cosplaying as a bust-town. And everybody in it, from early adopters like the dreamers or the bankers or the salesmen, to the inevitable arrival of the sharks, the desperate, and the thieves, knows exactly what the score is. You gotta get while the getting’s good, and if you’re smart, save a little for when the getting goes to shit.
That’s Tommy Norris’s assessment of Midland, which in Landman is currently in a boom cycle. And because we’re in America, and because Taylor Sheridan’s writing always wants to prove a point, Tommy tells Rebecca Falcone that this particular boomtown is no different than Tombstone or Dodge City or any other example throughout US history. He knows, because he’s seen both sides. It was a boom going bust that informed the dissolution of his marriage to Angela.
“Your lawyer and her lips are welcome to join us.” When Angela and Ainsley, refused at the country club, crashed the Patch Cafe and Tommy’s after-deposition drink with Rebecca, it set up a situation where Angela was immediately, and caustically, jealous. But that’s bullshit, as Tommy said, because he can’t have a “side piece” if he doesn’t have a main piece. It continued later, as Rebecca drove the ladies back to the rental house. Tommy needs calamities, Angela said. He needs blowouts. “He needs to control things that can’t be controlled to feel like a man.” But as an attorney, and as someone who was never interested in Tommy anyway, Rebecca had to highlight Angela’s logical impasse. Why is she jealous at all? (“He’s not your husband. You have a different husband.”) This is exactly why Angela saw Rebecca as her competition. It’s not bullshit, and she’s not in Midland just because it’s Ainsley’s Spring Break. Angela’s got a notion to get Tommy back.
But first, that deposition, concerning the exploding-stolen-plane-parked-on-a-private-road. With Tommy in a Western-style sport coat and on his best behavior, and Nathan alongside, Rebecca proceeded to systematically destroy the attorneys from TTP. First, she proved that they didn’t have shit – no causation of liability, her professional specialty – and that they absolutely knew the entire deposition was just smoke. Next, she made them immediately draft an agreement of surrender under threat of legitimate and lengthy litigation. And then – and Tommy couldn’t help but LOL at this – she put the TTP attorney’s brazen sexism and ageism against her on complete and total blast. “Do you think they hired me because I’m pretty?” Rebecca’s billable rate is $900/hr, and this idiot was trying to diminish her with tone-deaf taunts. Visibly impressed, Tommy admits afterwards that he didn’t give Rebecca enough credit. She dismisses that. “Nobody does.” And she’s not interested in being anyone’s side piece, either.
While all this was going on, Cooper was working on Boss’s crew, right alongside Manuel and Antonio, the same dudes he put on the ground after they came at him in Landman episode 3. Re-piping an underperforming drilling rig, and with a demand from Monty and Tommy to get it back online ASAP, the crew worked for 20 hours straight to cycle out the rig’s corroded materials and replace them with new pipes. It’s the usual Life in the Patch quotient. Danger, divided by difficulty, equals a day and night’s work done. Nobody even quit when a piece of machinery injured Antonio. Cooper had to figure out on the fly how to replace him as a derrickhand, suspended in a safety harness hundreds of feet in the air. It’s an on-the-job training regimen that continues to be insane. But afterwards, Cooper gets a phone call that makes him immediately forget all of the dangerous sweat and toil. It’s Ariana. “I need to see you.”
Back at the house after checking on the rig rebuild, Tommy walks in on tears from all of the women in his life. Ainsley calls her mom a quitter for leaving her dad when the market crashed out, and fleeing instead to find the richest man who would have her. But Tommy knows the boom and bust cycle of his marriage to Angela was much more than a factor of financials. Which is why he’s a little floored when his ex-wife, also in tears, says she’s gonna leave her current and very wealthy husband. What? Tommy says she was miserable with him, even during the booms. And now she wants to get back together?
“I’ll always be gone, hon. That’s the job. We had great sex, and I made you laugh. That was it.”
“I’ll take great sex and a laugh any day. What else is there?”
This quiet, close conversation in the bedroom is another great example in Landman of how real Ali Larter and Billy Bob Thornton have made Angela and Tommy’s combustible but lovable relationship. Whenever the emotions run high, whenever they threaten to cycle up and down like the head of a chaotic drill rig, Landry and Thornton instead modulate the highs and lows, so the whole thing settles on the level where Angela and Tommy have always seen eye to eye. Better than anyone, they know how bad they were for each other. (“Oil and water,” is how Tommy put it to Ainsley.) But better than anyone, they also know the contours of their incongruities by heart. As she climbs on top and he sighs – “Oh, fuck”; “That’s the plan, baby” – Angela and Tommy officially decide to give being married another shot. Boom or bust, they’re back in on the dream.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
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