‘Landman’ Season 2, Episode 9 Recap: Tommy is Removed From M-tex, Cooper Might Be Jailed

For such a laidback show, Landman relishes chaos. There’s something about the rhythm of an argument, the back and forth of problems being deliberated over and weighed up but never quite solved, that suits it. It lives in the space between problems, the snatched moments of uneasy peace until the next issue presents itself. It’s the mornings before work, the evening dinners after, the long car journeys between one place and another. Season 2 has embodied this just as well as the first season did, but there’s a lovely stretch opening Episode 9, “Plans, Tears and Sirens”, that really encapsulates it

Everyone’s on the phone in Tommy’s household, arguing over bridges and Ainsley’s near future in campus dorms. T.L., the oldest and wisest of the clan, is outside watching the horses, who aren’t doing much of anything, which is kind of the point. Then again, his peace might have more to do with the anticipation of more afternoon physical therapy with Cheyenne — it’s difficult to tell. Cooper and Ariana are preparing for the day; Gallino and his wife are doing the same. You can tell that this is the calm before the storm, and in most cases, it isn’t even that calm.

It’s oddly idyllic for some, I suppose. Rebecca shows up on Charlie’s doorstep as he’s leaving for a six-month stay on the rig and informs him that she is lonely after all, just as he claimed in their nasty spat last week. And the best way to alleviate her loneliness is to formalise her relationship with him, a level of vulnerability and supplication that is deeply out of character for her. It has been a few weeks of this now, and I can see why people might be a bit irked about it, since Rebecca has kind of morphed into a completely different character the second she has met a nice-looking dude. We’re to assume that this is something that has always been latent inside of her, and the no-nonsense legal shark demeanour is just a bit of a smokescreen, but I’m not sure it entirely takes. Luckily, if Charlie is out of the way for six months, she can get back to doing what she was doing before, just with a little more growth under her belt. We’ll see.

The bulk of the first half of Landman Season 2, Episode 9 is devoted to Ainsley, oddly, who immediately runs into problems with her new living arrangements since she’s rooming with a militant vegan environmentalist named Paigyn who uses they/them pronouns and keeps a ferret — in other words, the worst possible roommate that Ainsley could have. Now, this whole sequence confused me. Paigyn is obviously a broad caricature meant to poke fun at liberal amateur activists, but Ainsley is so intensely well-meaning in her efforts to make friends and understand an opposing point of view that Paigyn’s hostility just seems forced. I was firmly of the opinion that this was going to lead to Ainsley somehow finding common ground with Paigyn, as the curt admissions officer, Greta, suggests. But instead, she calls Angela to come and solve the problem, which she does by booking Ainsley into a suite for the duration of the entire camp and renting the pool for the whole cheerleading squad.

The point of this development is to show that Ainsley isn’t prepared for the real world, and to highlight that Angela’s life in the lap of luxury has given her a totally skewed vision of how the world works. She’s buying Ainsley’s friends and keeping her so comfortable that she never needs to suffer any difficulty or hardship at all. She diagnoses Paigyn as not liking herself and being angry at the world because it’s easier than addressing her own issues, which could well be true, but feels a bit presumptuous and holier-than-thou. It’s like the show can’t quite decide who it’s really critiquing here.

But maybe this isn’t clear yet since it’s building to something else. The big development of “Plans, Tears and Sirens” is Cami firing Tommy, which doesn’t occur in a big, dramatic sequence but in the middle of a low-key Louisiana trip to celebrate the beginning of the offshore drilling operation. Cami’s justification is that Tommy is too risk-averse to be the president of a company built on risk, which is absurd when you think about it, but it’s all part of Cami’s ongoing villain arc, if you interpret villainy as being pathologically predisposed to making the worst possible decision at every fork in the road.

But the bigger implication of this is that Angela and Ainsley are spending M-Tex money like it’s going out of fashion, and now they’re presumably going to have a lot less of that money to play with. What are we betting that Ainsley finds her way back to being Paigyn’s roommate sooner rather than later? Maybe then we’ll get a better sense of what Landman is actually trying to say about those two.

And there’s a final problem. After a long day asserting himself as the leader of his new crew, Cooper goes to see Ariana at work, but happens to arrive at exactly the moment a sour, racist customer she threw out during a previous shift is trying to rape her out back. Cooper does the logical thing and beats the man half to death, but the incident is filmed, and when the police arrive, he’s probably going to have some explaining to do about quite how many punches he threw after the guy was no longer a threat. And, again, without Tommy’s leverage, how’s that going to go?

If nothing else, for T.L.’s sake, I just hope Tommy can afford to keep paying Cheyenne. Their conversations are the best part of the show.