‘Landman’ Season 1 Finale Recap: “The Crumbs of Hope”

It’s the season finale of Landman, and Monty is still dying. As a recording of conservative commentator Paul Harvey plays over a montage of one hundred years of petroleum production – “oil is the paramount factor in the political economies of the day” – we fade to Monty’s emergency open heart surgery, and the reality that he will be incapacitated even if he makes it through. As Paul Harvey alluded to, and Tommy Norris understands, even if oil men die, oil companies don’t. Not as long as demand keeps knocking. With Cami Miller’s blessing, Tommy accepts the position of M-TEX president. And as president, his first order of business will be to sell a parcel of leased oil land worth almost two hundred million dollars. Operating on the principle of WWMD (What Would Monty Do), Tommy will rally Rebecca and Nate to help him paper the deal. Result? M-TEX clears $800 million in six months. Or? Circumstances change, oil drops below $60 a barrel, and they’re all out of work in the same amount of time. 

Currently there is no official confirmation on a Landman Season 2. But we’re gonna gamble and say it’s a sure thing, especially since Taylor Sheridan has written this season finale to be so open-ended. Yeah, Tommy’s prez now. But he’s still at odds with Rebecca over their threat-trading from Episode 8. He’ll need a killer attorney like her at the negotiating table. So when she adds to her reservations about working for him a newly-appeared moral objection to working in petroleum, Tommy fracks right through her moral high ground with a Sheridan-O-Verse lecture in miniature. “Good and bad don’t factor into this, Rebecca. Our great-grandparents built a world that runs on this shit. Until it starts running on something else, we gotta feed it. Or the world stops.” 

The shale area worth hundreds of millions to M-TEX is known as Wolf Camp. It will require major investment in horizontal drilling to get at the real nut of ROI oil, which lies thousands of feet below the surface. Wait, Wolf Camp? Like the title of Landman episode 9? As in the same land where Cooper “DIY Monty Miller” Norris is currently consolidating small leaseholders and convincing them to hook on with him? As we watch Cooper use a mix of honest man hokum and fair-minded financials to secure another desolate pocket of dusty West Texas caliche for his project, it really seems like season 2 of Landman will present a father-versus-son battle across that negotiating table.

It could look like this: Tommy Norris as M-TEX’s New Monty, with Rebecca Falcone on retainer; and Cooper Norris as his own New Monty, with Ariana in his corner. Because elsewhere in episode 10, the couple borne from oil patch destruction pledges to go forth together into a shared new chapter. Ariana, reflecting on her life with Elvio as she packs his things and pages through their wedding album, understands more than anyone how she allowed Cooper to take the place of her late husband. She knows she’s giving him Elvio’s spot in her heart. But instead of making some kind of “too soon” proclamation, Ariana and Cooper peruse her old photos together. “I’ll walk through every memory with you, if you want,” he tells her.

When Ariana responds “I do,” it’s in reference to the wedding album. But is that all it’s about? Despite how they met, these two looked like a sure thing the instant they sat down next to each other. As Cooper’s oil biz plans coalesce, and his relationship with Ariana solidifies, as a couple they represent the peril and promise of linking your personal life with the relentless pursuit of petroleum.

So what if he’s M-TEX’s new president? The cartel has arrived to return Tommy’s head to a burlap sack, bind him to another chair – this time we’re in the back of a strip bar with a Mexican clientele – gleefully drive nails into his thighs, and in a cruel nod to the commodity that put him back in this situation, douse him with gasoline. While it was our growing suspicion that this business with the cartel would end up killing him, that’s not what happens. From inside his sack, as his life passes before his eyes, Tommy hears gunshots. But instead of him dying it’s Jimenez, the local cartel leader, who is killed. And through the weave of the cloth a new voice is heard. It’s a different president. One in charge of a different product. And just like Tommy’s original pitch to the criminal faction, this guy knows the score. Oil, like illegal drugs, is relentless. Therefore, Andy Garcia tells Tommy as cartel big boss Gallino, “We must coexist.”

Do you bring in Andy Garcia as a well-heeled but unscrupulous drug kingpin just for the final few minutes of your show’s only season? You do not. (And with mere moments of screen time, Garcia immediately makes Gallino as magnanimous as he is sinister.) Assuming a Landman Season 2 also assumes that Tommy – or Monty; he’s shown flatlining but maybe he gets a new heart – will enter into an agreement in kind with Gallino and the cartel, one that will function as it’s supposed to until it is inevitably scuttled by another burst of violence.

But maybe Landman Season 2 also sees a sequel to Tommy and Angela’s first wedding? At a different strip club, one without a backroom torture chamber, Angela and Ainsley put down further roots in Midland with a successful dancers-and-drinks outing for their charges from the senior living facility. Ryder keeps up his end of the agreement with Ainsley, and strips down to his jock strap to dance for the elderly ladies. And later, back at the rental house, after she repays him with intimate hijinks, Ainsley gets emotional while laying in Ryder’s arms. Would he stay, like for the entire night? It’s not something either of them have ever done, all that comfort and contentment stuff that ideally comes after being sexually satiated. But Ainsely likes it, and Ryder likes it. Which means he’ll likely also be a fixture for the future of Landman. 

Tommy told Angela and Ainsley about Monty. But he didn’t tell them M-TEX made him president, and he didn’t tell them about the cartel attack. Because there is always going to be stuff they don’t need to know about, when he’s away at work. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because as Tommy tells Angela, when his whole life flashed before his eyes – the booms and busts of the oil business, his personal wins and losses; probably a bucket or two of Michelob Ultra Lights – all he really saw was her. The couple that spent the first season of Landman finding their way back to each other will stay together for whatever the Sheridan-O-Verse has planned for them next. 

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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