SPOILER ALERT: This article contains key plot points from the season two finale of Paramount+‘s Landman.
Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy Norris is once again faced with coyotes in the season two finale of Landman.
Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace dug into all of the topics you’d expect in the second season of their Paramount+ drama: oil, tragedy and family. But they also sprinkled in a potential murder charge, rape, ferrets, a stripper-turned-physical therapist and, of course, a trans storyline that at first felt like chum for the woke-hating, Michelob Ultra-drinking crowd before taking a sharp, left turn.
But at its end, we were back where we left off at the end of season one: staring at coyotes under the Texas sun. The closing scene of episode ten – Tragedy and Flies – was a throwback to the denouement of the first season with Tommy Norris confronting his own mortality through the eyes of canis latrans.
Whereas at the end of season one, Norris had survived a brutal beating from the cartel, led by Andy Garcia’s Gallino and told the coyote to run, at the end of season two, he is more circumspect, having had one hell of a day.
“You can’t have today, bud. Today is mine,” he says.
This follows a heart-to-heart with his truffle-chucking ex-wife-turned-fiance Angela, played by Ali Larter, after he is fired by Demi Moore’s M-Tex Oil owning Cami Miller, and he seemingly gets his son Cooper, fresh from striking it rich, off a murder charge after his fiancé was about to be raped. A classic of the Sheridan genre.
“You know the time’s coming when tragedy’s going to dominate our days, maybe it’s me, maybe it’s cancer, maybe my mind goes, I wake up one morning and I don’t have a clue who you are or, God forbid, maybe it’s you, car wreck or whatever, but not today, today we win,” he says.
“Baby, I win every day,” Angela replies. “You do too. You just don’t see it. It’s there. It’s all around you, just got to take the time to notice. Like now.”
It’s preposterous but slick television. Dallas with a golden age of television budget full of slo-mos and close ups of the hairs on its chin. Sheridan clearly knows how to appeal to the middle of the country as well as the cosplay cowboys of the coasts.
In the penultimate episode, Norris is fired by Cami Miller, the widow of Jon Hamm’s Monty after he pours cold water on her latest plans but in this, he is reborn with CTT Exploration (and Cattle, obviously), a new company formed to take advantage of his son’s recent luck in the field.
He’s also back in business with the cartel. Garcia, who now goes by Danny Morrell, lends him $44M to help fund the drilling. The two characters have spent much of season two dancing around each other with Norris clearly cautious about the drug-dealer-turned-investor, but in need of his money.
Garcia knows there’s more trouble ahead for the pair. “He’s going to slip in a spontaneous moment back to that other world. I [told Billy] that his character just happens to be with him when that goes down and he’s gonna hand him a gun and you’re going to have to step in it with me,” he told Deadline.
It’s a good job that the show has been renewed for a third season, then.
Loyalty is a major theme in all Sheridan creations. Norris brings his crew into the new family business, which now has Cooper as President, Norris as Senior Vice President and his father T.L, played by Sam Elliott, overseeing drilling.
Rebecca The Lawyer, played by Kayla Wallace, is going to be Chief Operating Officer and Chief Counsel, Nate, played by Colm Feore, is Treasurer, alligator po’boy chomper Dale, played by James Jordan, is Head of Exploration and Boss, played by Mustafa Speaks, is in charge of the crew, which will enjoy a lucrative profit-sharing scheme that sounds scarily socialistic for a Sheridan show.
Meanwhile, Cami, played by Demi Moore, who joked to Deadline that the first season felt like Where’s Waldo? for her, is now further discovering her husband might not have been doing everything by the books, or at least the computers.
Whether Cami plays a big role in season three or goes back to her swimming pool is unclear, but Moore clearly relished dry land. She told Deadline that she was particularly impressed with how the Yellowstone creator wrote his female characters. “For a straight white man, that was really even more impressive, because they were so nuanced,” she said.
“He’s found an incredible ability to strike this balance between intensity drama, action and humor, all surrounded in tremendous heart. Because really, at the core of this, what’s so relatable is the humanity and so it allows us to go to these extreme places with pasta being thrown because you find you can find yourself somewhere within that,” she added.
Landman is often funny, sometimes deliberately, particularly during Angela’s dinners, which often descend into chaos with flung mushrooms, and her drunken exploits with the nursing home residents.
Other times, the show is so on the nose that it’s amusing. Sam Elliott, a giant of the screen, spends the last two episodes enjoying an “old man’s wet dream” with Cheyenne, a stripper from Rick’s Cabaret, played by Francesca Xuereb. Cheyenne, as Tommy calls her “a 5”3 blond with an ass like a bread-basket”, is helping him with physical therapy. Obviously.
Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Michelle Randolph in Landman (Emerson Miller/Paramount+)
Then, there’s Paigyn. Bobbi Salvör Menuez plays the ferret-owning non-binary character who doesn’t like music or air fresheners and scares off Michelle Randolph’s Ainsley after briefly being forced to share a dorm room at cheer camp.
At first, this arc seems like a Jesse Watters fantasy – Fox News, in fact, had the headline “Paramount’s ‘Landman’ tackles woke roommate culture and safe-space politics” – full of pronouns and veganism.
“I always wondered why they/them? Because there’s just one of you and those are plural pronouns,” Ainsley asks in episode nine. “I just never really understood the hoopla with pronouns. My name’s Ainsley and I just can’t really come up with a reason why you would address me in third person in a conversation that I’m a part of. So if you do, I’m probably not there so I wouldn’t really know what pronouns you are using anyways. So why would it matter?”
But the finale throws a curveball: Ainsley and Paigyn, a sports medicine student who is working with the cheer team, make up after Ainsley has their back in the face of some teenage homophobes.
They’re not so different, after all.
As Elliott told Deadline, “Holy shit, man, where’s this guy come up with this stuff?”
