Landman finally had the guts to stop dressing the industry up like it’s some noble American frontier thing and instead just let it breathe for what it is — messy, dangerous, emotional as hell, and full of people who think they’ve got a handle on something they absolutely do not.
And it’s funny because the actual events of the episode almost don’t matter; they’re just the excuse for everyone’s insides to spill out all over the place.
The whole thing feels like one long day where nobody slept the night before and nobody’s making good decisions and the universe is kind of shrugging like, “Well, what did you expect?”
That ridiculous boar hunting tank nonsense at the beginning — I swear, my eyes rolled far enough to see my own brain — ends up being the perfect metaphor for Landman Season 2 Episode 3.
A bunch of guys driving around acting like they own the land, only to get wiped out by something they never even saw coming, and the earth doesn’t care how tough you pretend to be.
That’s the whole show in five minutes.
And the dead animals scattered all around them are when it stops being absurd and becomes genuinely upsetting because you can see right there what happens when people who chase profit don’t bother to clean up their messes.
The abandoned wells, the leaks, the half-finished everything — it’s always the land and the wildlife that suffer first, long before the humans catch up.
And I’m never going to be anti-drilling, but good lord, is it too much to ask people to actually handle what they tear open from start to finish?
You want the oil, go get it, but don’t pretend plugging a well properly is some outrageous burden. It’s basic decency, but this industry has somehow convinced itself that the earth will just… fix itself. It won’t. It never does.
Meanwhile Ariana is out here having her own miniature coming-of-age moment that’s less about bartending and more about realizing that not everything in life rearranges itself to accommodate your personality.
She’s stubborn, scrappy, and unpolished, but The Patch doesn’t require polish. It requires surviving the weeds, and she barely does that, but somehow it’s still progress.
Not a lot of it, but enough to be noticeable. In a show full of people pretending they’re fine when they’re actually unraveling, she’s the only one who’s honestly flailing, which is almost refreshing.
And then we pivot from that into Tommy’s life, which is its own kind of hazardous waste site right now.
The man is breathing stress like oxygen. You can practically feel his skull tightening every time someone new walks into frame.
MTex is a disaster, which honestly feels like something Monty might have known but hoped to outrun until he didn’t, and now Tommy, Cami, Rebecca, and Nathan are left trying to sort out a puzzle with half the pieces missing and the other half chewed up by a dog.
It’s all lines of credit and shell companies and nothing where it’s supposed to be, and you can see Cami’s whole world tilt because she didn’t just lose her husband — she lost the version of reality he built for her.
Or protected her from. Or hid. Right now, it’s hard to tell which.
But the moment she realizes none of them know where the actual money is, she sort of folds inward, and I don’t blame her. That’s the kind of moment that changes your breathing.
And while all THAT is happening, Angela is literally walking through mansions, swinging her hips like she’s the star of her own daydream again. And the thing is, she truly believes this is the right time for it.
She has no idea she’s tap-dancing on a fault line.
It’s almost funny if you don’t think about it too long because she divorced Tommy for this exact circus — the highs, the lows, the unpredictability — and now she wants the carousel ride again, but only the pretty parts, the ones with shiny kitchens and giant closets and a man who looks good in a suit.
She’s chasing the fantasy version of Tommy at the exact moment the real Tommy is drowning. And she’ll tell you it’s love or excitement or destiny, but really it’s denial. She sees the life she wants and assumes the world is going to rearrange itself to give it to her.
Meanwhile Tommy is one phone call away from discovering they actually owe more than the cost of that house. They’re not even living in the same emotional climate.
And then there’s Danny Morell. The name reveal wasn’t there to shock us; it was there to finally plant him into the world as someone Tommy can’t avoid anymore.
The way Danny gets genuinely offended at being called a drug dealer says so much more than any monologue ever could. He wants legitimacy so badly he can taste it.
He wants to be part of the club, part of the room, part of the lineage.
You can see him doing the math in real time — if he can get Cooper on his side and get Tommy (who he calls Thomas) begrudgingly tied to him and sit at the Cattlemen’s Club like he belongs, then maybe the past doesn’t matter and he can pretend he’s something new.
And Tommy, exhausted and emotionally threadbare, walks right into the trap of poking at the one nerve Danny has left: the fear that no matter what he builds, people will always see the man he used to be.
And that’s why Danny spirals, not because Tommy insulted him, but because Tommy saw him clearly.
I hate to admit it because Tommy clearly wants nothing to do with him, but Danny actually did right by Cooper. The deal he made with him is wildly fair. Too fair.
Its the kind of fair that makes you suspicious, except it doesn’t feel like manipulation so much as Danny trying to buy his way into the kind of legitimacy he sees in Tommy.
Danny keeps saying he’s an investor in people, and he says it like it’s a compliment to himself, but the truth is he wants to be tied to Tommy so badly he can taste it.
He wants whatever Tommy has — his determination, his history, his place in the ecosystem — and he’s convinced that if he throws enough money and respect at Cooper, it’ll force Tommy into the picture whether Tommy likes it or not.
Any other time, Tommy might have dodged it again, but Cami’s drowning, MTex is a financial sinkhole, and when Danny offers that lifeline — the money, the stability, the future — we all know exactly where this is heading.
Tommy can’t outrun him forever, not when the walls are closing in and the MTex is gasping for air. I just don’t know what that kind of partnership means for Tommy, or who he becomes once Danny Morell is tied to his name.
The whole Cattlemen’s Club sequence is basically Sheridan throwing all the characters into a pressure cooker and shaking it. Nobody is being honest. Everyone is posturing.
Angela and Bella are bonding over fantasy lives, Cami is quietly drowning in grief, Danny is trying to rewrite his entire identity with posture alone, and Tommy is trying to hold himself together long enough not to explode in front of strangers.
You can feel the walls closing in on him. And then he calls Angela his wife and it’s like lighting a match in a room full of fumes.
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a pronouncement. They were married, and they’re basically living like a married couple again whether either of them has bothered to say it out loud.
They’ve slid right back into the same orbit, the same bed, the same mess, and Tommy said “wife” because in the middle of everything else falling apart, that’s the one role that hasn’t changed.
But Angela doesn’t hear it as a reflection of where they already are; she hears it as a renewal, a promise, a next step. She grabs onto it like he meant it as a proposal, because she needs it to mean something bigger than it does.
He was speaking from exhaustion and familiarity. She was hearing a fairy tale she’s already sold herself on.
And suddenly she’s crying and climbing all over him in the truck and he looks like someone who’s trying to remember which pedal is the brake because everything is happening at once and none of it is grounded in reality.
The one person who saw all of this the clearest was Cami, which is interesting considering she spent most of Landman Season 1 hovering on the edges like furniture.
The way she looked at Tommy and Angela and then Danny and Bella — not judging, not sniping, just taking them in — tells you she understands love.
I loved what she said about rare it is to love someone long enough to actually know them, really know them. It explained a lot about her marriage with Monty that we never got to see.
It was the kind of marriage that went past the shine and the newness and the thrill and settled into something deeper and quieter that most people never reach.
She was watching those two couples sitting there — Tommy and Angela clinging to whatever fantasy they’re constructing today, Danny and Bella wrapped in their curated glamour — and you could feel her thinking, “You have no idea what this actually costs.”
That one line gave us more insight into her marriage with Monty than an entire season ever did, and it made her grief feel so much bigger than just losing a husband. She lost the person who knew her the longest, the truest, the best.
And then the hour had the nerve to end with Cami alone by the pool, clutching a photo like it’s a lifeline, with the coyotes howling along with her pain. Maybe it’s not subtle, but it is honest.
She’s grieving the life she thought she had, and the universe is echoing it back at her because sometimes the grief is so big it spills outside of your own body. It’s a show-stopping moment that only arrives because she let her mask of grief slip.
Landman slowed down to expose the risk, the denial, the delusion, the grief, and the instability inherent an industry like this. With the stunning highs come the devastating lows. What goes up, must come down.
The industry is dangerous, not just in the explosion-and-fire sense but in the way it eats people’s lives from the inside out while convincing them they’re building something permanent.
They’re all out there trying to make a home in a world that won’t stop shifting underneath them, and “Almost a Home” finally let us see the cracks forming before anyone else admits they’re there.
But what about you? Did this episode work for you? Let me know what you took away from it in the comments below.
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