This might have been my favorite episode, too. I may read the Eric scene differently—he loses his temper and gets ejected. But that seemed morally and ethically appropriate. The refs were being shady and dishonest. And in Texas, after all, there’s a long history of men losing their tempers and taking justice into their own hands when the circumstances (usually corruption) call for it. The problem is that we’re not in the ethic system of the Old West anymore; we’re in the new West, where new money rules the day. And Eric’s moral righteousness opened a window up for Wade to show his stuff. And Wade, of course, is the property of Joe McCoy, rich guy. And I worry that the show is opening up a space here. A very purposeful one: The old codes of male honor aren’t enough to get you by anymore. You need to pander to the power structure, too. We’ll see what happens, but that’s clearly not the last we’ll hear about Wade.
Meanwhile, everyone is growing up and preparing to move on. Somehow, this episode really caught the flavor of senior-year joy and melancholy: the way that suddenly you feel adult, replete in the new sensations of independence, and at the same time feel the pangs of change. A new life is just around the corner for a lot of these people—even if it’s just the new life of being post-high school in Dillon, without a job. I spent this past week in West Texas, a couple of hundred miles from the real place that Buzz Bissinger wrote about in Friday Night Lights; the seniors in town had been getting their acceptance letters, and you could feel that same sense of nervy excitement around them. Things were going to change. I remember that feeling, and I was wondering if every Dairy Queen blizzard must suddenly seem a little sweeter.
Emily, I totally agree about Tami and my teenage self. You hit the nail on the head. That’s precisely the part of the show that would have been hard for me to watch. She is so easy to relate to, so powerful and real, and I am not sure I would have wanted to all the time. When you’re 17, you need to carve out a little cave to be in, separate from parents. And seeing parents be that involved—seeing yourself through their eyes—would have made me squirm. You don’t want to see yourself through your parents’ eyes at that age (or at least I didn’t) because you have conflicting desires: You want to grow up and be your own agent in the world, but you also still want to be their little girl. Just like Julie says.
I think this season has made her a more sympathetic and interesting character. Which is important, because if the show does get picked up again, she’ll have to play a larger part in it, I figure. Meanwhile—I guess Tyra redeemed herself for a bit, but I, too, was glad that Landry gave it to her with that Giving Tree speech. The show, though, indulged in one of its cheesiest moments this episode: the shot of Tyra watching Landry and his band play, where the lights of the bar cross her face, and she smiles. One of the few moments where it was too much, too obvious.
