Plans, Tears and Sirens

Episode 9 of Landman season 2 starts with chaos in the Norris household. The offshore drill operation is about to get underway, so that means Nate and Tommy are on the phone liaising a lot.

Meanwhile, Rebecca shows up at Charles’ house and tries to rationale with him. She eventually does apologize and admits she’s lonely and smitten. Rebecca doesn’t want to lose Charles, even if they do disagree sometimes.

Charles reminds her that he’s going to be at the offshore rig for the next 6 months but they are determined to try and make this work.

At the same time, Cooper heads out with Boss and the others to make a big call over where the next drill goes. Boss disagrees on the placement but this is Cooper’s crew and he’s calling the shots here. Eventually he concedes and they get to work.
After a lengthy goodbye with Angela, Ainsley is dropped off at the dorms for cheerleading camp. Paygin is her new roommate, uses they/them pronouns, is vegan and has a pet ferret too. It’s literally the worst roommate she could have had and it doesn’t go well.
Angela shows back up and saves the day when Ainsley rings her in tears. She decides to move the entire cheerleading squad out to a brand new apartment, rented out for the fall.

Back home, Cheyenne shows up for her aqua therapy session with T.L.. Late at night, she admits that her name is actually Penny and they talk about dreams and plans.

The main crux of the drama finally lands back on the oil rigs again, and there’s quite the showing for the rig launch. There’s obviously a lot riding on this and Cami wants to go all out to make it a big deal. She’s convinced that she might as well celebrate if they’re going to take a big risk like this.

Away from the others, Cami points out she’s got a massive rush from this business and wants to lean in and embrace it. Tommy though is the complete opposite. He’s felt that rush once and almost lost everything so he’s way more vigilant over this feeling than before.

Cami sees things very differently to Tommy and eventually fires him for being risk adverse. This is precisely what Dan warned him about, and now he’s out, it spells bad news for the future of M-Tex.

Meanwhile, Johnny attacks Ariana while she’s out back at the bar. Cooper shows up to see her, and when he realizes the guy is trying to abuse her, Coop beats him to a pulp.

The Episode Review

It’s the penultimate episode and half of this chapter is dedicated to Ainsley going to college. What are we doing here, guys? This is supposed to be the chapter that gets us excited and geared up for the finale and instead we’re wasting it on trivial (and quite frankly boring) subjects.

The little chat between T.L. and Cheyenne is fine on its own but not for episode 9 when we should be ramping up the drama. In fact, aside from Charles going on the rig and Tommy getting fired, there’s very little else here in the way of plot development.

It’s actually quite baffling because the first half of this season got things off to a solid start. Dan was set up to be a formidable antagonist, the fireworks between Cami and Tommy were there to be exploited and we had all the makings of a super dramatic and nail-biting thriller. Alas, it has not played out that way.

Its such a shame too because Landman sparkled with such promise but that light has now almost completely gone out, weighed down under pointless subplots.

We’ll have to wait and see if the finale manages to pull out all the stops but based on what we’ve seen, this show is going to need a miracle to turn it around.