Summary
Landman Season 2 continues to develop into a proper narrative, with Andy Garcia and Demi Moore providing a lot of welcome dramatic impetus.
Can you smell that? No, it’s not hydrogen sulphide – although, this being Landman, it kind of is hydrogen sulphide – but the skeleton of a plot, and a point, both of which seem to be manifesting in Season 2 in a way that they never quite managed to do first time around. It’s not a coincidence that Episode 3, “Almost a Home”, spends more time with Demi Moore’s Cami and Andy Garcia’s absurdly charismatic Gallino than any previous outing I can think of. As it turns out, Tommy Norris, as fun as he is to be around, isn’t the kind of character who drives a story. He’s the passenger whose job is to manage the crises emerging from the machinations of others.
Tommy has two crises here, and arguably a third that he doesn’t know about yet, though it’s admittedly less pressing. The first is that M-Tex is broke, and given that it’s facing down a lawsuit to the tune of several hundred million dollars, this is a major problem. The second is that Cooper is in bed with Gallino, the incredibly dangerous gangster who saved Tommy’s life in the first season. Tommy can’t get around the idea that Gallino is a bad guy, but given he’s also an extremely successful “investor”, he might also be the solution to both of these problems, not just the one he’s already the cause of.
That potential third problem comes up in the episode’s cold open, another example of Taylor Sheridan’s fondness for seemingly random calamities. In Yellowstone – and sometimes in Mayor of Kingstown with the whole bear thing – they tended to involve local wildlife, and there’s a sniff of that here in “Almost a Home”. But the hunters taking too much pleasure in chasing down wild boars with military hardware run right into the real problem, which is the oil well Tommy tasked Boss, Dale, Ben, Russ, and Jerrell with checking out, is belching deadly hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere, killing all the local wildlife, the hunters, and indeed anyone else who comes near.
This is a double-edged sword for Tommy. It’ll cost tens of millions more dollars to render the site safe, but it’ll prove profitable down the line. Can M-Tex front that kind of cost, given its empty coffers? Probably not, but financially speaking, it hasn’t been able to afford any of its other investments over the last few years either. At that scale, money is more of a conceptual thing than a concrete concept.
This is discovered by Cami and confirmed by Nathan and Rebecca. M-Tex’s operations are bundled up in all kinds of different LLCs and holding companies financed by lines of credit. In the shortest and most simplistic terms possible, Monty was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the company was never making any profit because the revenue, when it was disbursed at all, was solely being used to pay off the money borrowed to secure large-scale acquisitions. The account that was being used to pay off the loans is mysterious, so Tommy and Cami have to track down Alan, one of the elusive company financiers who has obviously lined his own pockets through his tax liability scam and is now screening Cami’s calls.
In the midst of this, Tommy meets with Gallino twice in Landman Season 2, Episode 3. The first time, he pays him a visit while Angela is house hunting for properties that he now knows he definitely can’t afford, and essentially warns him off Cooper. Tommy doesn’t have much leverage, though. Gallino claims the deal is mutually beneficial and isn’t anywhere near as sinister as Tommy thinks, but there’s no evidence to really support that claim. Gallino accuses Tommy of being jealous that Cooper found a gap in the market he knows so well, which may very well be true, but Tommy accuses Gallino of being a dangerous drug dealer, which is definitely true, since when Tommy storms out of his office, Gallino not-so-subtly threatens to kill him.
The second time Tommy meets Gallino is by accident. He’s in the same gentleman’s club where he and Cami turn up to physically threaten Alan into sorting out M-Tex’s finances. Since Angela arrives to get the party started, Tommy and Cami are both roped into spending the evening with Gallino and his beautiful wife. This is all very funny in a lot of respects, but it’s also giving us the general shape that the remainder of the season is likely to take. Cami needs the kind of investor that Gallino presents himself as, and it’s very likely that she’s going to make a deal with him, trapping Tommy on all sides in business with a drug baron. And yet maybe Gallino is being forthright. Maybe he is just trying to make clean money, and all the illegal, murderous stuff was just a means to an end. I’m sceptical, obviously. But you never know.
But we’re reminded again here in “Almost a Home” why you shouldn’t sleep on Landman. Demi Moore’s small speech about Monty is beautiful stuff, dripping with earnestness and insight, and when the episode ends with her hugging Monty’s photo and collapsing to the ground in floods of tears, you can feel she meant it. For all its indulgences, there’s a real drama here. Hopefully, the clear narrative throughline that Gallino’s involvement provides will help it become something more than that.
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