Landman Recap: The Wrong Hillbilly
Though he was beat within an inch of his life, on this week’s Landman, Cooper lives. And when Tommy finds out who hurt his boy, Manuel and Antonio are going to wish they were dead.
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Read on for the highlights of “The Second Beating.”
Tommy gets to Monty’s insanely palatial estate at 5 pm, Angela asleep in the passenger seat. While she grabs an Uber to Victor’s place — “I’m not leaving without my Bentley” — Cami greets Tommy warmly. (Side note: I think about 50 percent of the lines Demi Moore has had in this series so far take place in this scene.) While Tommy gets Monty up to speed on everything (the accident, the drug cartel’s threats, the payouts to the explosion victims’ families) he leaves his cell in the truck. So he doesn’t see when the sheriff calls him 12 times in a row.
Nathan and Rebecca visit Ariana and the other two accident victims’ widows, offering them $250,000 each to promise they won’t sue the company later. Ariana is put off by the situation, and Rebecca’s get-on-with-it attitude, so she steps into the kitchen to call Cooper. Sheriff Joeberg picks up the phone.
He’s at Cooper’s trailer, which has been trashed in the wake of the fight. Cooper is hurt very badly, Joeberg tells her; in turn, she lets him know about Manuel’s threat from the day before. “How badly is he hurt?” she wonders, tearing up. “Well, that depends on how the night goes,” he answers. She immediately leaves for the hospital, telling him to meet her there if he wants her statement.
Angela returns home to find that Victor has changed the locks and isn’t even there; instead, his lawyers greet her and announce they’ll walk her through the dissolution of the marriage. They cite the infidelity clause in her pre-nuptial agreement, pointing out that she slept with Tommy. “That’s not adultery. He’s my ex-husband,” she says breezily. That, actually, is adultery, so she loses everything: their four houses, their joint bank accounts, their cars — but not her Bentley, which was a gift, nor her personal bank account. On the way out, she meets Victor’s new, bikini-clad girlfriend and steals a bottle of something expensive from the wine cellar.
Nathan calls Monty’s phone to get to Tommy and tell him that Cooper is in surgery; instantly, Tommy is on the road back to Midland. Cooper comes out of surgery (for a collapsed lung) while Ainsley, Dale and Ariana are in the waiting room. The ladies meet. It goes about as well as you’d expect, especially when Ariana says her relationship to Tommy is “harder to explain.” And when Ainsley sees Ariana pumping breast milk, her face says she’s Thinking Things.
When Cooper wakes up, in rough shape but relatively OK, considering, he makes sure Ariana knows: “Not your fault.” Still, she feels guilty. But he points out that Mauel wanted to beat him up; it had nothing to do with Elvio. She’s holding his hand when Tommy and Angela arrive; everyone assumes the younger pair is dating.
After Ariana leaves, Cooper balks at Tommy’s insistence that he let him rectify the beating. But Tommy asserts that it’s his job as the oil company’s general manager, plus he already knows that Manuel and Antonio were involved. Cooper concedes, saying that he doesn’t know the others but he can identify the crew they’re in. On his way out, Tommy warns his son to move slowly with Ariana. Then he has the security cameras turned off outside Manuel’s trailer and grabs Dale to help him do what he thinks needs to be done.
Tommy, Dale, Boss and a few others knock on Manuel and Antonio’s door and immediately begin hitting the pair with their guns. When Antonio won’t call the other people who hurt Cooper, Boss and his friends take him in the back and beat it out of him. Then he fires him and points out that the sheriff is going to be there any minute and find a ton of stuff that violates his parole. “You f—ked with the wrong hillbilly,” he says, promising to kill him if he ever comes back.
“I’ve gotta get my boy out of here before somebody kills him,” Tommy tells Dale on the ride home. “He ain’t mean enough for this place.”
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!
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