Friday Night Lights, "Thanksgiving": Pride of the Lions

A review of the "Friday Night Lights" fourth season finale (and NBC viewers, I'm going to repost all these reviews once the season starts airing there on April 30) coming up just as soon as I bring my flash-fryer...

"Because Friday night... Friday night, there will be a bond formed between and among you, that will never be broken. I will not be proven wrong on that. Do I think we can beat the Dillon Panthers? I don't think we can beat the Dillon Panthers. I know damn well we can beat the Dillon Panthers. The question is, do you think that we can beat the Dillon Panthers? Then show me!" -Coach

The minute I saw the final scene of "Friday Night Lights" season three, I knew exactly how season four would go: Eric moves over to East Dillon, brings the football program back from the dead but suffers through many struggles, then salvages some measure of pride (and gets some nice revenge on Joe McCoy) when his once-pathetic team manages to knock the Panthers out of the playoffs. And then in the final season, the Lions would move more believably into being a good team, if not taking Eric to his third State championship in five years. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this is how the year would go, just so long as you had a knowledge of underdog sports movies (in this case, "Necessary Roughness"), and that's (so far) exactly how things have played out.

So the question is, is it bad that the show traveled the route so many of us predicted a year ago? Or is the predictability - and, let's be honest, implausibility - of the Lions beating the Panthers outweighed by the fact that every character on this show (and those of us in the audience who care about them) really needed something great to happen after all the darkness of this season? I say yes to the latter.

One of the key themes of the show is that, while sports may not cure most of the ills facing a community and its inhabitants, it can at least provide a distraction, and a sense of common purpose, and a feeling of uplift in the worst of times. And, therefore, after the season our characters have been through - after Vince's best friend was murdered and Becky had to get an abortion and Tami ran into trouble and Eric constantly scraped and clawed to make this new gig work, and Tim Riggins went from college scholarship kid to voluntarily taking the fall for the chop shop - I would have found anything less than a dramatic come-from-behind win by the Lions unacceptable. After all the garbage so many of these characters had to eat this year, they deserved this ending. And so did we.

And even within the usual sports story tropes, I thought the execution was wonderful, from the Coach speech I quoted above, to the sequence of everyone at Hermann Field getting ready for the game, to Coach finding the exact right words to take the weight off Vince's shoulders ("I'm gonna enjoy watching you beat 'em all night long," which reminded him that this was supposed to be fun, dammit), to Vince leading the halftime chant, to Coach screaming, "LANDRY! WHERE'S MY KICKER?!?! LANDRY!!!" and giving Landry(*) a much tougher, but equally perfect, pep talk before our man kicked the game-winning field goal. It wasn't any more realistic than most of the other dramatic victories Eric's teams have had over the years, but it may have been the most pumped-up I've ever been to watch one, and Kyle Chandler's performance showed that it was the most excited Eric was, too.

(*) The only thing that would have made it better, frankly, is if the show had had a more consistent vision to the whole Lance/Landry thing. I know it's hard to plan this far in advance, but imagine if this was the very first time we ever heard Eric call Landry by his real name. How cool would that have been?

So after the incredible high of the Lions' win, and then the devastating - and yet honorable - low of Tim walking to jail so his nephew won't be another Riggins boy to grow up without a father, and the more bittersweet endings like Tami becoming a guidance counselor again at East Dillon and Julie and Matt splitting up (but on better terms than when he skipped town), where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves us with a very strong, but also noticeably flawed, season, and it gives Jason Katims and company a pretty clean slate on which to draw the fifth and final season.

I admire the ambition that went into this season. Katims basically tore down the series' foundation and started over, turning the Panthers into the villains, introducing new characters and a whole new world into the pre-existing one, all while servicing the pre-existing characters and giving Saracen and Riggins extended farewell tours.

That would be a lot to deal with even if the show were still doing 22-episode seasons, and I would argue it proved to be too much in 13. There just wasn't enough time to deal with everything, to give each character the shading he or she needed, and to provide each story with proper closure. The Lions win and Tami gets a new job and Tim goes to jail and Matt flies back to Chicago without Julie, but lots of other things were left unresolved or inadequately explored.

Kennard's still out there, wanting revenge on Vince for bailing on the hit (and for owing him money for Regina's rehab). We don't know where either Landry or Julie are going next year (though, presumably, we'll be seeing both Aimee Teegarden and Jesse Plemons for a bit next season). The abortion story went from one about Becky and, to a lesser extent, Luke, to one about Tami, and so we never saw enough fallout from the teen's respective families. I watched Luke's parents - who have never had much use for football, who would rather he be helping out on the ranch, and who are devout Christians who feel deeply disappointed that their son would get a girl pregnant (let alone the type of girl who would then abort their grandchild) - cheer wildly for him when he finally got into the game and thought there was an awful lot of that family dynamic that went unexplored, because there was no room.

Throughout the season, there were shortcuts and/or missed opportunities. Jess's dad made a fairly abrupt conversion from bitter anti-football ex-jock to enthusiastic Lions booster (and Jess herself tended to drift in and out of the narrative). Tim's role as unofficial assistant coach was forgotten fairly quickly. The fact that the Riggins boys were working for the same criminal organization that Vince drifted in and out of would have seemed like a natural opportunity to put the two together, but it never happened. In a lot of ways - that story, the abortion plot, the Landry/Jess/Vince love triangle that was mainly about Jess and Vince - it felt as if stories were only being written with one or two characters in mind, and not all the characters who were involved. The show is about a community, yet at times this year the stories seemed as insular as they did in the mostly-disastrous second season, where it often felt as if we were watching six different shows at once that all just happened to take place in the same town.

And I understand why that happened. Again, I respect the hell out of the ambition that went into this season, and that the show was able to tackle its usual issues about race and class and sex and coming-of-age with as much sensitivity and power as it did, even as it was showing us the building of a football team (and the community around it) from scratch.

And if certain stories or characters often left me wanting more, it was because what little we got from them was so wonderful. Landry was under-utilized all year - and got a couple of consolation prizes in the finale in the game-winning kick and then the flight to Chicago to hang with ol' buddy Matt - and yet Jesse Plemons absolutely nailed Landry's stunned, hurt reaction to Jess telling him that she still had feelings for Vince. Becky never really connected to anyone on the show but Tim, but the moment where Tim gave her his mother's snow globe for safekeeping during his prison stint (and as a peace offering after her feelings of betrayal) was beautifully-played by Taylor Kitsch and Madison Burge.

Kitsch was incredible throughout the episode, and I'm still kind of amazed by how much I disliked him at the start of the series. I don't know how much of the growth was him getting better versus the producers recognizing his strengths (screen presence) and weaknesses (delivering lots and lots of dialogue), but Riggins went from one of the show's weakest links to probably its most integral character outside of Coach and Mrs. Coach. I understand why Kitsch is leaving (with a few breaks and the right roles, he could do very well in movies) and also recognize that there was perhaps only so far they could take Tim's story before he completely disconnected from the rest of the series. But damn, I'll miss him, and Kitsch got a great moment to go out on in that long, stoic, frightened walk into the sheriff's station.

And after his abrupt departure earlier in the season, and then his depressing reappearance a few weeks back, Saracen got a more definitive goodbye, and one that nicely straddled the line between too depressing and too inappropriately sunny. He and Julie ended on a better note, but it's still an ending, and now Matt has to make his way in Chicago without her. And the series finally has to move on from yet another one of its great characters, and a tremendous actor in Zach Gilford.

And that, again, gives Katims and company a fairly blank canvas on which to paint the last season. Tami's now at East Dillon, so less time has to be spent justifying Tami work stories. We don't need to be introduced to a lot of new characters, though a few additional players (and/or expanded roles for people like Tinker) would be fine. The show doesn't have to worry about preparing for the future anymore. It can go for broke, do what it wants with characters without needing to save things for later seasons, and can give Coach, Mrs. Coach, the team and the town a proper ending if they want, or just a beautiful life-goes-on kind of finale if they don't.

That finale's a long way off as I write this, at the end of the DirecTV run, and I look forward to seeing how the NBC viewers react to any and all parts of the season. But "FNL" season four lived up to the expectations created in the season three finale - not just in terms of what happened, but in terms of how good so much of it was.

Some other thoughts:

• The usual assortment of great off-the-beaten-path tunes this week, including "Sway" by Heartless Bastards (the Thanksgiving practice), "Goin' Home" by Dan Auerbach (Eric driving around with the Big Cat Classic trophy) and Steve Earle's "Goodbye" (the final montage of Tim, the Taylors and Saracen and Landry).

• Last week, I suggested that a Lions win might wind up making Coach even more hated in town than he was before, and I don't particularly buy Slammin' Sammy Mead - the unseen stand-in for all the most devout Panther-loving yahoos in town - talking about how impressed he was by the Lions' grit and determination. No. Just no. Just as people in town act like Eric "quit" on the team after last season (when, in fact, Joe McCoy got his job taken away), they would all view the Lions' win as yet another betrayal from the former coach of their beloved Panthers.

• Not much room to show JD and Joe dealing with their comeuppance, but the little we see - JD throwing an on-field tantrum, Joe looking mystified after Landry's kick is good - was fairly sweet. I also liked all the shots of Wade Aikman on the sideline throughout the game looking like he wanted his momma. While the talent level we'd seen of the Lions suggests they had no business giving the Panthers a game, even with Luke playing a couple of series, I can believe that the McCoy machine got over-confident and simply never took their ghetto rivals seriously.

• To spare any possible confusion: the scholarship Luke tells Coach about (yet another story that got fairly short shrift in a very busy finale) wasn't to college, but to a private high school. Luke's not graduating yet, and will surely be back on the show/team next season.

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Friday Night Lights, "Laboring": Toothpicking against the spread

A review of the penultimate "Friday Night Lights" of season four (finale airing next Wednesday at 9 on DirecTV's 101 Network) coming up just as soon as I drive 50 miles to deliver this blog post...

"I am not playing on a fair field here." -Coach
"That makes two of us, hon." -Mrs. Coach

On one level, "Laboring" is a table-setting episode, preparing us for the season-climaxing showdown between East and West Dillon, for a reckoning between Tami and the school board, for whatever's to come between Vince and Kennard, and between the Riggins boys and the cops.

But, like season one's penultimate hour, "Best Laid Plans" (with trouble swirling around the Panthers on the eve of the state championship), "Laboring" was a table-setter that brought a lot to the table on its own: great moments for half the cast and some huge developments in their own right, regardless of how things play out in the finale.

There's a real sense of despair to a lot of what happens, particularly with the Taylors. Eric knows he doesn't have much of a prayer of beating the Panthers(*) under optimal conditions, and those conditions are now far, far from optimal. Luke is out of the game, which limits his offensive weapons to, basically Vince, and takes away most of the gadget plays that were working so well earlier in the season. And because the Panthers had to use a bazooka as a fly-swatter to respond to Landry's toothpick prank, the Panthers get to play the game on their cushy home field, with the Lions and their fledgling fan base forced to feel like pathetic outsiders in a game that should have been theirs.

(*) And, it occurs to me, if he were to win that game, the people in town would only grow to hate him more. Panther pride runs a little too deep for people to applaud the plucky underdog school across town for an unlikely victory, if that victory also keeps the beloved Panthers out of the playoffs.

And Eric has to deal with this - and the idiot radio calls(**) and defacing of his car and the rest - at the same time Tami has developed her own hate squad thanks to the abortion controversy. "FNL" in general, and Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in particular, often offer up a ray of hope and idealism in the middle of potentially grim circumstances, but here our most hopeful characters were at their most hopeless. Tami doesn't want to write that letter of apology(***), but can she put her ideals ahead of her family's livelihood?

(**) I thought it was a nice touch that Slammin' Sammy, usually just as much a pig-headed yahoo as his listeners, tried to shut down that one caller's attempt to paint East Dillon as a ghetto hellhole she wouldn't take her family to. Sammy may be an ignoramus and an agitator in many ways, but that doesn't automatically make him a bigot.

(***) And would the apology letter even work? Given how dug-in the opposition seems to be, wouldn't Tami apologizing (for something she didn't do) only make matters worse? I don't know small town politics very well, but isn't the wiser course for Tami to argue that at no point did she tell Becky to get an abortion? Which has the benefit of being true?

While the Taylors are trapped in bleak circumstance, it's up to the Riggins boys to provide some hope and happiness - for a little while. After some comic relief from Billy failing to be calm about the birth, we get this perfect moment with the two brothers at home, staring down at the baby, and Tim (wonderfully played by Taylor Kitsch) getting to appreciate the site of a Riggins man being a good daddy for once.

Of course, a Riggins man's happiness can never last very long. So after Tim got to enjoy being an uncle, and showing his new ranch property to Becky, he winds up going to jail, along with Billy, for the chop shop operation. (The large wad of cash Tim gave the realtor surely didn't help.) And will little baby Stephen Hannibal suddenly have to go years without seeing his daddy? With Taylor Kitsch not being a regular after this season, I could see a circumstance in which Tim and Billy do go away for a while, and if we see Tim at all in season five, it'll be with Coach talking to him through prison glass.

Meanwhile, Vince was busy burying the man (boy, really) responsible for drawing the Riggins boys (back) into a life of crime, and then being sucked into Kennard's plan for revenge at any cost. And Jess, realizing what her ex is about to risk, fights to stop him from doing just that, even if she has to ditch Landry in the process.

As with most "FNL" stories related to the criminal world, Vince's plot was the part of the episode that most bordered on cliche. But every time it threatened to get silly or caricatured, Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett dragged it back into something real and painful, as exemplified by the scene where Jess shows up at Vince's apartment to tell him, "I know that good guy that's inside of you!" To which Vince (desperate to keep Jess away from him as he goes on a mission that could land him in jail or the morgue) replies, "I am a monster! That's what I am! I am that guy!" That dialogue could be terribly corny, bu these two superb young actors made me ignore the words being spoken and focus on the pain, hurt and love behind them.

Thanks to Jess, Vince makes the right decision in the end, but he does it in a way that puts him in the sights of Kennard (who feels like Vince owes him this killing for the rehab loan). And it occurs to me that, because Kennard was the mastermind behind the whole car theft ring, we could see a finale in which Tim and Vince's problems cancel each other out, with Billy rolling on Kennard to secure his freedom (and unintentionally secure Vince's safety).

And if that's what winds up happening, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it. On the one hand, it would seem a little too neat for a show that likes to be sloppy even with its happy endings. On the other, after so much bleakness for our characters in recent weeks, I could use a little sunlight - whether that comes from an improbable, pride-restoring win for the Lions, or Tami getting to keep her job without compromising her beliefs, or Vince and/or Tim getting out from under their criminal burdens. I don't know that I want all of those problems to be solved, but I do love these characters - both old and new - enough to not want to see them suffer any more.

Some other thoughts:

• Am I the only one who was under the impression that Jess's mom was either dead or out of the picture, and that she and Virgil had been raising her brothers on their own? Instead, this week we meet her mother, Bird (played by Lorraine Toussaint), whose appearance played out as if Steve Harris wasn't available this week and so the writers scrambled to give Jess a different parent. Then again, Toussaint's IMDb entry says she was in "Stay" earlier this season, but either I didn't notice her, her scenes got cut, or (as is often the case with the IMDb and TV guest stars) the info is wrong. Whatever the explanation, I was distracted. UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that in the final air version, Jess introduces Bird as her aunt, not her mom, which means one of two things: 1)The line was changed in post-production after the screener I got (ala Principal Burnwell's reference to the game "last night"/"last Friday" earlier this season), or 2)My hearing's going. I am open to either possibility.

• Speaking of moms, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson makes her first appearance of the season as Mindy's mom (Tyra's, too) in the labor and delivery scenes.

• Though we know Coach to be a very good and wise man, he's also a stubborn one who (rightly) views himself as separate from the kids he coaches, so we very rarely see him admit a mistake to one of them. That's why it was a bit eye-opening, if appropriate, to see him apologize to Luke for giving him a hard time about the injury. Some of you last week objected to my attempt to categorize Luke's actions as selfless - that he was doing it in his quest for a scholarship that will get him the hell out of town. And while there was certainly something to that, keep in mind that he suffered the injury in the same episode where Coach gave him a giant guilt trip about missing practice because he had to help his dad with the fence - sending a very clear message that Luke should never let his personal problems get in the way of practicing and playing for the Lions. And I'm sure Eric, away from the heat of the moment when he discovered the hip flexor injury, realized the role he played in this mess.

• Presumably, this is Jesse Plemons' last year as a regular on the show as well, and I feel bad that Landry has been a bit lost in the shuffle as we head to the end of his time in Dillon. His relationship with Jess has turned out to be more about giving us a window into Jess's feelings for Vince, and this was the first episode in a while where he felt like an integral part of the football team (between his field goal kicking being the only thing standing between the team and more jingle-jangles, and then Landry coming up with the toothpick plan). And though his big moment (waiting outside the BBQ joint for Jess, only to be told by Bird that she wasn't coming) wasn't as flashy as Jess and Vince crying in each other's arms, Plemons did again make me feel sorry for young Lance.

• Kennard said their target was a couple of hours away, and it certainly seemed like Vince got out of the car close to the end of their drive. How exactly did he make it from the middle of nowhere back to Dillon on the same night?

• Notable songs this week: "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked" by Ida Maria (Billy goes in to be there for Mindy during the delivery), "Rock Candy" by Montrose (Tim playing air guitar at Riggin's Rigs before the cops come), and "When the Night Comes" by Dan Auerbach (the final montage).

• Every time Principal Burnwell complains about all the problems Coach has brought to his school, I want to remind him that his school didn't exist before this year. But as with all things East Dillon, the show tends to wax and wane on what all these characters were doing before the redistricting happened.

• Because Madison Burge isn't technically a regular castmember, and because Becky seemed to say goodbye to Tim last week, I wondered if we had perhaps seen the last of the character - that perhaps that was the compromise the creative team had to make for this story, by letting a character get an abortion and then quickly writing her out. But she's still very much present, even if Tim won't respond to her crush on him, and even if, with Tim in jail and Luke having been pushed away, her connection to the rest of the "FNL" world is pretty tenuous.

Back next week for the finale - which will be the first one, I believe, where I'll watch it not worrying if it's the last episode of the show I'll ever get to see. Hooray for two-year renewals!

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Friday Night Lights, "Injury List": No good deed goes unpunished

A review of tonight's "Friday Night Lights" (which, for a few more weeks, debuts Wednesdays at 9 on DirecTV's 101 Network) coming up just as soon as I walk into some hit-or-miss cooking...

"You're not a loser. And you're not nothing. You're kind, and you're good, and you're strong." -Becky

The end of these 13-episode seasons can really sneak up on you. It wasn't until after I had watched and written about last week's "I Can't" that it occurred to me that we only had three episodes left to go. But with the East vs. West Dillon game coming up, and all the big, unsettling developments of "Injury List," it's impossible to not realize that the end of the season is barreling towards all our characters like a freight train.

Throughout "Injury List," we see characters suffering the consequences of their own selflessness. Tami's career is in jeopardy because she chose to be a sympathetic ear to Becky about her pregnancy, even though she's absolutely right that she never once told Becky to get an abortion (or what to do at all). Luke kept his hip injury secret for the sake of the team and allowed it to get worse as a result, ending his season prematurely (and drastically reducing the Lions' chances of a morale-boosting upset over the Panthers). Vince, having gotten back into business with Calvin and Kennard to pay for his mother's rehab, has to witness Calvin's murder in the course of a debt-collection run gone awry. And Riggins, who has been a good friend and mentor to Becky while resisting any temptation to give in to her obvious feelings for him, and who has also been a good and helpful tenant to Cheryl, winds up tossed out by a jealous Cheryl when she misinterprets an innocent viewing of "Thelma & Louise" in her bedroom.

With all the bad things happening to the team, and to his family, is it any wonder that Eric (who doesn't even know the extent of how bad things have gotten for everyone) wants to linger at the bar with Buddy, drowning his sorrows in beer rather than going home to find out what terrible development has happened next?

Let's start with Tami's story. Again, we're not going to discuss any of our own feelings about abortion (which goes against my commenting rules), but after the relative even-handedness of the last couple of episodes, it felt like "Injury List" jumped too far over to one side, demonizing the other in the process. I'm not saying the show can't have a point of view, but some of the characters opposing Tami are coming across as straw men - less so Luke's mom (who is being written as someone who isn't thinking clearly because of her personal stake in the matter) than the woman on the school board who, despite not having been there for Tami's conversations with Becky, indignantly asks, "Are you calling me a liar?" Yes, people on both sides of this debate can become irrational about it, and in a small town like Dillon it almost doesn't matter what actually happened versus the perception of what happened, but it feels like the deck is being stacked too much, both against Tami and in favor of the writers' viewpoint on the issue.

But then, nobody's head is entirely clear in this one. Luke won't see that he's putting both himself and the team at risk by not telling anyone about his condition. Vince doesn't want to accept that a sober version of his mother wouldn't want him doing this for her. Cheryl's so blinded by jealousy of the daughter she already resents that she lumps Tim in with every other jerk she's ever met.

Even Matt Saracen, who resurfaces in Chicago(*) after his abrupt departure at the end of "Stay" - a selfish but understandable extreme response to his selfless decision to stay in Dillon at the end of season three - can't quite accept (or simply doesn't want to accept) Julie's anger towards him, even though he could have easily left town and stayed in touch with her if his head had been on straighter.

(*) I was very glad to see that "Stay" was not, in fact, Zach Gilford's last appearance on the show. The character was too important for such a vague exit. Even though things with Matt and Julie don't seem to be ending happily, at least we see what he's up to, and that other parts of his life are finally starting to work out for him. I can take a bittersweet ending for a beloved character, so long as it's a real ending, and not just Matt driving off into an uncertain sunset.

Calvin's death(**) isn't entirely Vince's fault - though Kennard does have the two friends swap jobs after Vince is so reluctant to hit the guy with a crowbar earlier in the episode - but it sucks him in deeper to the criminal world he's been trying to escape all season. (And it also brings the show deeper into territory it's been skittish about since the start of season two. See the first bullet-pointed thought below for more on that.)

(**) So much for my prediction at the start of the season that we'd eventually see him put his attitude aside and ask Coach if he could rejoin the team.

It also dramatically raises the stakes and shifts the balance of the Jess/Vince/Landry triangle. It's clear that Jess really does like Landry, a lot, but it's just as clear that her connection to Vince - and to his mother (she winds up comforting both as they weep in this episode) - runs much deeper than any simple high school romance, and Jurnee Smollett was great at showing both Jess the carefree teenager having fun with her boyfriend and Jess the wise-beyond-her-years kid who has helped people around her shoulder tragedies.

Though Tim's circle of tragedy isn't quite as rough as what we've seen Vince go through this year (or what we saw Saracen go through this year and in years past), Riggins is a character defined by his bad luck - and by his optimism in the face of that. So I suspected things would not end well between Tim and Cheryl almost from the moment she complimented him on being such a good friend to the family. But I believed, based on what we've seen of this trio, that she would react this way to finding her daughter in her bed with Tim (even if they were fully clothed, eating popcorn, watching Geena Davis, etc.), and that Tim (who had a similar false assumptions encounter with Coach and Julie in season two) would swallow it and move on. But at least he has the ranch, and Becky (more mature than her mom) was able to reassure him that he's a better man than people want to think of him.

Compared to these other issues, Coach getting another loss on the record - and staring down the hated Panthers as his next opponent - could seem like an afterthought. But the show has spent the past two years building up the McCoys (and Wade Aikman) as villains, and "Friday Night Lights" has taught us over and over that if football success can't heal the other problems in a community, it can at least make them more palatable. If the season ends with the Lions beating the Panthers (and knocking them out of the playoffs in the process), it won't bring Calvin back to life, cure Regina's addiction or heal Tami's relationship with the anti-abortion parts of the community, but it could at least provide hope at a time when so many of the characters seem to be without it.

Some other thoughts on "Injury List":

• Jess's awkward dinner with Landry's parents ("So what do you think of Obama so far, Jess?") was funny. But I couldn't stop thinking about an e-mail a reader named Jodi Ross sent me last week about this storyline, which pointed out that Jess is caught between two boys, one of them known as a troublemaker even though he was never involved in anything especially serious before this week, one of them with a reputation as an innocent goofball even though he committed a murder and covered it up. "Most of Landry's luck with Jess is due to his privilege, which allows him to be the easy-going fun guy who gets to bury his past," Jodi wrote, "where Vince is struggling upstream with no cover." Now, I don't think this is what the writers are intending with this story. I think they'd like to pretend that the murder storyline never happened, and they'd like us to play along with that, and to be honest, I've mostly blocked that memory out, except when I crack jokes about Landry killing people who displease him. But when you look at the storyline in that light, it's hard to not start reading unintended sociological commentary into it, and that's yet another problem with them having gone to that stupid well at the start of season two. It's a bell that can't be un-rung, and a change in the character that can't - or shouldn't - be ignored, much as we'd all like to.

• I was rewatching part of the season four premiere earlier this week, and Calvin does, in fact, refer to himself by name in his introductory scene, when Coach is telling him to take the gold chain off during weigh-in. It just went by so fast (and was mumbled enough) that it just became easier to apply the Angry Necklace Guy nickname until I heard it again more explicitly. RIP, ANG.

• Because "Friday Night Lights" usually takes the faith of its characters very seriously, it can get away with a joke like Luke's mom ordering him to say his prayers and Luke whispering, "Dear Lord, please let me get some more drugs before Friday." (And even in that context, it's Luke praying for something to help his teammates.)

• Getting back to Julie, how well do you think Tami and Eric are going to react to her proposal to join Habitat for Humanity full-time - postponing her college plans in the process?

• Interesting that Becky so easily saw through Tim's lies about where he got the money to buy the ranch, despite being lovestruck as usual for #33.

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Friday Night Lights, "I Can't": Indecision 2010

A review of tonight's "Friday Night Lights" (which, as usual, is airing on DirecTV's 101 Network Wednesdays at 9) coming up just as soon as I crawl out of the room...

"I can't take care of a baby." -Becky

Last week, I complained that the Becky pregnancy story was a waste of time because the heated politics around the abortion issue(*) meant that a network TV drama would be extremely unilkely to show a regular character(**) choosing to terminate her pregnancy. Instead, "I Can't" proves me wrong, as Becky - after a lot of soul-searching and conversations with Tami Taylor - decides she simply can't have a baby, and goes through with the procedure.

(*) I want to again remind you, in no uncertain terms, about this blog's No Politics rule, which absolutely extends to the subject of abortion. We are not going to talk about this story in terms of anyone's personal beliefs about the subject. Any comment that doesn't discuss the topic solely in the context of how it was used within the drama of this episode will be deleted. I know this will be difficult, particularly since we so often discuss matters on this show in terms of whether the characters did or didn't do "the right thing." But I know that this is one of those subjects that very few people on either side of the debate can discuss rationally anymore, so we're not even going to try.

(**) I only recently noticed that Madison Burge, who plays Becky, is the only one of the four new actors who isn't featured in the opening credits, so technically she may be a day player rather than a series regular. But that's really a matter of semantics, as I've often seen people in recurring roles on shows appear more frequently than some people in the regular cast with their names in the title sequence. Certainly, the show has acted as if Becky were just as much a regular as Luke or Vince, and she's been much more prominent than Jess.

We're not going to talk about whether we agree with her decision, but "I Can't" effectively showed how she came to it, even as it showed her unsure even afterwards that it was the right one.

Becky has her mom as an obvious, close-at-hand example of a woman whose life was derailed by teen pregnancy - and who, as Becky strongly implied to Tami, has resented her daughter for it ever since. Becky, like Tyra before her, wants to get out of this town and have more opportunities in her life than her mom had. But she also heard what Luke told her last week, and she recognizes that her mom could have aborted her 16 years ago, and as we see at the end after she hangs up on Luke, the end of her pregnancy is weighing heavily on her.

Becky was annoying when she was introduced, no doubt by design, but I think Madison Burge has done a great job of showing the anxious, uncertain, ambitious girl hiding behind the bubbly beauty pageant chatterbox that Tim Riggins first met, and she ran with the ball when given an opportunity here. (The difference between Pageant Becky and real Becky is most obvious when she walks away from a difficult conversation with Luke in the hallway to ask a girlfriend about her notes.)

And Connie Britton, as you'd expect, was just as good at showing Tami struggling with whatever her legal obligations are as a principal (if not Becky's principal) versus what she would say to Julie, versus her recognition that Becky is not her daughter and she therefore can't tell her what she should do. And there's always been the suggestion, whenever the subject of Julie's sex life comes up, that Tami was incredibly wild in high school. Watching Britton play her scenes with Burge, I couldn't help but wonder if the reason this girl's situation hits so close to her - and the reason she freaked out about her daughter losing her virginity - is because she had to face it herself when she was Becky's age. (It's also entirely possible, of course, that Tami is just the empathetic person we know, and also that she really does start thinking about what would happen if it were Julie, but Britton and the script and direction leave the ambiguity in there.)

And where Becky ultimately makes a painful choice to preserve her own future, our other main story has Vince once again jeopardizing his future for the sake of a loved one.

It's a recurring theme on "Friday Night Lights" that so many of these kids have had to raise themselves, and/or that they're more mature and self-sufficient than their actual parents. And we've seen throughout the story with Vince's mom that he's used to being the man of the house - to getting the bills paid and looking after Regina instead of vice versa. But we also see when he's at her hospital bed - in a killer scene from Michael B. Jordan - that Vince is still just a kid who wants his mom around, and who doesn't yet have the maturity or wisdom to realize that his mom's addiction has nothing to do with him.

So despite a bonding moment with Virgil - who, when hit up for the loan to pay for Regina's expensive private rehab facility, tells Vince he's proud of him, and that, "I'm saying no to the money, not to you" - Vince feels he has no choice in this. He has to save his mom, at all costs, and so he gets back in with Calvin and his criminal buddies, and gets another gun to replace the one he brought to Coach's house.

Virgil's own story also deals with self-preservation vs. family. It's clear from his conversations with Eric about coaching Vince, and then from his advice to his son Caleb at the Pee-Wee game - "You have fun out there, alright?" - that his own coaches took all the fun in football away from him. He quarterbacked a state championship team in 1983. Black QBs weren't unheard of at the time, but they were rare, and often colleges and/or the pros tried to turn them into defensive backs or receivers or some other position. Based on Virgil's comparison of himself to Vince, he would have been a player ahead of his time, one who could very easily have run into a coach or coaches who tried to change his game to fit the playbook rather than changing the playbook to fit his tremendous athletic gifts. So when his football career ended abruptly (something Jess alluded to when she was giving Landry punting lessons), he backed away from the game - and, in the process backed away from his children, who all grew to love football in spite of their old man.

Virgil showing up at Caleb's game doesn't instantly heal things between this father and his kids, or between Virgil and the game he played when they called him Big Mary, but it's one of the few upbeat moments in an episode that mostly deals with characters making agonizing choices in impossible circumstances.

Some other thoughts on "I Can't":

• It's unclear whether the show has dropped the story about Luke's hip injury and painkiller habit (he tells his dad the hip is fine, but we also see him limping when he gets out of his truck before the scene where his parents confront him), but it's pretty clear that his role as the former baby daddy will not be dropped so easily. How will his devout Christian parents react to learning that Becky had an abortion without telling Luke or giving them an opportunity to intervene? This could get ugly.

• Tim seems to have talked Billy out of the chop shop business (and Taylor Kitsch's native Canadian accent has never been more apparent than when he says the phrase "chop shop" over and over in a scene), but I wonder if it's going to be that easy. Billy didn't look to me like a man ready to quit just yet, and I also don't know if Calvin's boss is the type to just let a partner walk away clean.

• Julie's healing from the Saracen break-up continues, but there are hints dropped here that she might be on the verge of quitting school to follow Ryan around the world with Habitat. I'm not saying that teenage girls don't often make dumb decisions because of boys they've fallen for too hard, but I feel like we've seen variations on this particular story a few times too many on the show, in plots like Julie with the Swede or Tyra with cowboy Cash.

• Vince and his mom live at 2609 Chavez, an homage to one of the players on the Permian football team Buzz Bissinger chronicled in the "Friday Night Lights" book.

• Getting back to the Big Mary plot, it's interesting to see that Eric can't quite see past the racial thing when Virgil tries to explain about Vince. I think it's because Eric prides himself on being a great offensive coach, so when Virgil tries to point out a flaw in his playcalling, Eric's blinkers go on and he can only accept the idea if it comes from a cultural issue rather than a lack of imagination on his part.

• Not as much obvious music this week than in some others, but the song playing over the early Lions practice scene was "Percussion Gun" by White Rabbits.

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Friday Night Lights, "The Lights of Carroll Park": All prologue

A review of tonight's "Friday Night Lights" coming up just as soon as I'm due for a rinse...

"So my question to you is, do you really want to make a difference, or are you just feeling sad because you saw a boy get shot?" -Elden
"Both." -Eric

I had an interesting conversation with "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence yesterday, in which he admitted that some of the creative problems with this season came from his attempt to treat it as a brand-new show with a few familiar characters, when viewers were looking on it as the latest year for an old favorite. Had he realized in advance how the show would be perceived, he would have written certain characters (notably Zach Braff's) differently.

I think this season of "Friday Night Lights" works whether you look at it as year four of "FNL" or year one of a spin-off in which the Taylors, Landry and Riggins wind up on the east side of town. But watching an episode like "The Lights of Carroll Park" made me think Bill's onto something about how people view new shows versus old ones.

As mentioned in several previous reviews this year, Jason Katims and company have had to serve several masters at once in saying goodbye to Saracen, preparing to see off Landry and Julie (and, as I'll discuss below, Riggins) and establishing this new world of East Dillon and all its residents. With so much ground to cover, shortcuts inevitably have to be taken, and so far it feels like some of the newbies have been the main victims. There's a lot of pre-existing history between Jess, Vince and Jess's father Virgil (aka Big Mary), but because we don't know all the details - and because the show hasn't had the time to fill in the gaps - we have to guess a lot.

And yet watching the scenes with the three characters in this one made me think back to the beginning of the series. We entered into the middle of these characters' lives, and there was already a long history among Street, Lyla, Riggins and Tyra. Some was made explicit (Lyla basing her entire life on following Street around), some strongly-implied (the dysfunctional, on-again, off-again nature of the Tim/Tyra relationship), some only hinted at (the reasons for Lyla's distrust of Tyra), but because it was a new show, we went with it, and very soon the present-day storylines were outweighing the pre-show history we never got to witness.

It's hard to view the East Dillon characters in the exact same way, because they're surrounded by people like Eric and Landry, whom we know so well by this point in the series. But when I took a step back and tried to see this as midway through "East Dillon Lights" season one, I was able to make allowances for what we don't know about Vince and Jess's relationship, their break-up, why Big Mary distrusts Vince, etc., etc. After all, even in the early days, "FNL" wasn't always perfect at servicing all the characters - in between when she broke up with Riggins and when she became Julie's BFF, Tyra practically disappeared from the show - and it's clear that more of an effort is being made in these post-Saracen episodes to make Vince and company important to the show's future.

So we see Vince trying to better himself by looking for a legit job instead of boosting cars, and - in a great duet between Michael B. Jordan and Kyle Chandler that showed how much each man is opening up to each other - asking Coach to be a reference on job applications. And we see Jess moving on to Landry while still coping with Vince's presence in her life - and Vince deciding, ultimately, that the team matters more to him than his feelings of jealousy, when he declines to pick a fight with Lance before the Carroll Park game.

It's not all clean and neat - the show skips over Big Mary's conversion from the guy who in early episodes had no use for the football team to the guy willing to let his daughter's hated ex-boyfriend work at the family restaurant as a favor to Coach - but there is definite, intriguing progress.

And if the new season/series had to rewrite the show's old universe in order to invent this seedy side of town that Eric seems barely aware of, the creation of East Dillon has paid real storytelling dividends, never more than in "The Lights of Carroll Park." We see an Eric out of his depth in this world, not just as the coach of a losing team, but as a privileged white man in a predominantly black, poor, crime-ridden part of town. Until now, he's been looking at how he can get the town to support the team. But when he stumbles across a seemingly senseless shooting at Carroll Park, he realizes that the relationship has to work both ways - that East Dillon can be inspired by the Lions just as much as the Panthers provide solace for folks on the west side of town.

And where Buddy, with all his talk of "taking back the park," is looking at this like the conquering hero he thinks he is for the Lions, Eric's goals are more modest (to get the lights turned back on), empathetic and self-aware. He knows he's still just a visitor to this part of town, but he also understands about people in need no matter where they live or what their skin color is, and so he'd like to help - even if, as he admits to Elden, it's partly out of guilt for seeing the kid get shot.

After the trouble Vince had with his criminal ex-friends at the BBQ place, I feared that the pick-up game between the Lions and the street team would turn ugly. Instead, it was exactly what Eric wanted it to be: a feel-good event for both his team and the kids who hang at the park, something that (like the Mud Bowl in season one) could just remind everybody of the fun of football for a night, without all the pressure and headaches that usually accompany the game in this town.

And as Eric was doing his good deed for the week at the park, Kyle Chandler also got to play some of his funniest scenes of the series as Glenn confesses his "Wow, my mouth is on Tami Taylor's mouth" moment to Coach. The glazed, horrified look on Chandler's face throughout that scene was hysterical, as were the Jack Nicholson laugh and the threat implied in "Oh, I'll see you sooner than that." Other than some missteps in season two, the writers have always had a firm handle on the Taylor marriage, so I wasn't worried this would cause a real problem - and sure enough, while Eric was annoyed Tami didn't tell him, there was never a suggestion he was mad at her for what happened. Instead, it turned into a running joke, letting Eric suggest that he had now, by proxy, kissed Glenn, and then letting Tami react to Eric canceling their "date" by offering to call Glenn. (Eric: "You call Glenn, you make sure he doesn't drink all my scotch.") The Taylors don't get their at-home date, but they do get to enjoy a nice moment together by the lake the morning after the Carroll Park game, and we know that things will always work out well between them, unlike the divorcing McCoys.

Becky's situation is much dicier - for the character, and the show.

Before we go any further, I want to remind you of the No Politics section of the commenting rules and to make clear that any attempt to turn the comments into a referendum on abortion itself will not be tolerated, no matter what your views are on the subject.

I want to only discuss it in the context of Becky's story, and of how TV generally deals with abortion - which is to say, awkwardly.

Because opinions on either side of this debate run so hot, it's incredibly rare that a pregnant TV character will ever actually get an abortion. They might think about it, but in the vast majority of cases, they'll either go ahead with the pregnancy or the writers will cop out by causing a miscarriage. (Two notable exceptions, but not the only ones: Bea Arthur had one on "Maude" in the '70s, but that was before positions were quite as stratified as they are now, and at a time when network shows actually had more freedom to be politically adventurous; and Claire Fisher on "Six Feet Under," but that's on a pay cable channel that doesn't have to worry about appeasing sponsors.)

We've had two unplanned young pregnancies on "FNL" so far - first with Street's waitress one-night stand, now with Becky - and in both cases the father has either argued strongly in favor of having and keeping the baby (Street) or at least expressed deep unease with an abortion (Luke). These are perfectly reasonable positions for these characters to have, given what we know of them (particularly Street, with the miracle conception), but I always find it hard with these stories to separate what's consistent for the characters with the pressure the writers are under from outside forces. These episodes debut on DirecTV, but they do eventually have to air on NBC, and when Luke tells Becky he's not comfortable with this, all I can do is think of someone in Standards & Practices drafting a cautionary memo to Katims, you know?

Madison Burge and the writers have made Becky the most clearly-established of the four new characters this season, and I can understand how she might wind up accidentally repeating her mother's history, even though I was surprised to realize she had sex with Luke after she ran into him at the liquor store in "The Son." But I'm wary of where this story goes over the rest of the season.

Some other thoughts:

• As soon as I saw Larry Gilliard Jr. as Elden, my heart sang, because it meant for sure, I thought, a scene between Elden and Vince - and a "Wire" reunion between D'Angelo and Wallace. But though the two characters were both part of the big group scene at Carroll Park, they never had any one-on-one interaction, and when I asked Katims about it at press tour a few days ago, he said for now Elden is a one-episode character. I then laid some "Wire" guilt on him, and he sheepishly offered to find an excuse to bring him back and put him with Vince; I'll be disappointed if he doesn't.

• Two other bits of "FNL" news from press tour: 1)NBC originally wasn't going to air this season until summer, but because they're about to have five hours of primetime to fill after the Olympics - which is also the exact point when DirecTV's exclusivity window lapses - there's a chance the episodes could turn up on free TV sooner rather than later. Based on a conversation I had with Angela Bromstad, I'm guessing not - the season three NBC ratings were really, really pitiful - but this is a desperate network without a lot of inventory lying around. 2)Katims (who was here to promote "Parenthood") told TV Guide that Taylor Kitsch won't be a regular next season because of his budding movie career. I love Kitsch, and I think Riggins' story this year (until the chop shop story, at least) has helped capture what life is like for a former football hero who's not ready/able to move on to college, but I also know his absence (or diminished presence) will allow Katims to focus more on the high school kids.

• Speaking of Riggins, my recollection from the end of last week's episode is that Becky kissed Tim - his mistake was not pulling away fast enough - where in his apology here, he suggested he was the one who kissed her. Can we get a ruling?

• After being in a hurt, angry shell for the post-Saracen episodes, Julie finally gets a bit of happiness with her new Habitat For Humanity boyfriend. A welcome, needed development for the character, even if her moping made sense given recent events.

• The McCoys have occasionally bordered on cartoon villains this season, but D.W. Moffatt was very good at playing a defeated Joe McCoy, coping with the end of his marriage and the realization that his behavior with JD - focusing on football to the exclusion of all else, moving the family to Dillon, the violent, controlling temper - may have driven his wife away and turned his son into a punk. I've been assuming the season will climax with the Lions beating the Panthers and giving Eric some karmic retribution over Joe and Wade. Depending on what's done with Joe over the next few episodes, revenge may not feel quite so sweet; the guy's already suffering the consequences of his actions.

• Though the episode begins with Eric venturing to Carroll Park to look for Tinker, Tinker himself barely figures into the episode, and doesn't seem to get in much trouble for missing school and/or practice.

• Okay, now that the character has been referred to on-screen as Calvin, I guess I have to retire the Angry Necklace Guy nickname. Faretheewell, ANG...

• So, should we expect to see Maurice from the street team suiting up for the Lions in season five?

• Has anyone kept track of how many season four episodes have featured a football game? And how that compares to season one? This is the second bye week the Lions have had so far, and I can think of a couple of other episodes whose timespan didn't include Friday night. There's still plenty of football focus, don't get me wrong - this isn't like when the writers tried to downplay the team during season two - but it feels like the Lions have had a bunch of weeks off from playing a real game.

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Friday Night Lights, "Toilet Bowl": Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies

A review of the latest episode of "Friday Night Lights" (which, again, you can catch each Wednesday at 9 p.m. on DirecTV's 101 Network) coming up just as soon as I make the clutch my best friend...

"We're not scrappers anymore. We're Lions. And this is our time. This is your time." -Coach

We're in the second half of this season now, which means it's time for the Lions to finally get in the win column (in part because they've improved, in part because they're playing an even worse team than they are). But it's also time for the characters to start thinking more seriously about their futures, and for the show to start moving them into position for the fifth and presumably final season.

So even as Eric is coaching the boys up to play Campbell Park, we see lots of characters being interviewed for future opportunities: Julie (at Boston College) and Tim (at Sears) most obviously, but also Buddy trying to cut a deal with the Spanish-language radio station and Luke faking his way past the doctor so he can keep playing and hoping for a scholarship. Even the awkward dinner with Vince, his mother Regina and Jess has the feeling of an audition, with Regina desperate to win the role of sober, attentive mother, and struggling right off the bat because she missed (presumably while high) Vince and Jess's break-up.

(Vince doesn't have a comparable audition scene himself this week, but we see in his conversation with Angry Necklace Guy that he's just barely hanging onto being an attentive, rule-following football player in the same way his mom is just barely hanging onto her sobriety. One bad development, and either one could backslide into a life of crime/addiction.)

In the end, some of the interviews go well, while others don't. Julie impresses the admissions officer, Buddy signs a deal with the station and begins a second career as the team's radio color man, and Luke is able to get a new painkiller scrip to allow him to play a key role in the team's first win of the season. But Tim doesn't get the job at Sears, even after all of Becky's (very funny) pageant coaching, and has to stupidly(*) go in with Billy on the chop shop scheme so he can afford his dream ranch. Vince is still wary of his mom. And after Vince's awkward quasi-date with Jess seems to have gone better than the one she has the next night with Landry, it's the pasty punter Jess tracks down to celebrate with after the big victory.

(*) I still feel way too burned by season two - both the murder and then the pointless Ferret Guy storyline - to ever feel totally comfortable with the show getting into the world of crime. But at least the Riggins boys have established a pattern of criminal idiocy in the past, so I believe they would do this, even though I wish they - and the show - wouldn't go there.

Of the stories unfurling here, the one I think I'm most interested in is Luke's. One of the things that usually sets "Friday Night Lights" apart from the average teen drama is its reluctance to moralize about underage drinking (save for those periods when Riggins does nothing but drink) and willingness to accept it as a fact of life. I don't expect Luke's painkiller dependence to end well (not to mention the abuse he's putting his body through just by not letting the injury properly heal), but I'm expecting the story to play out with more nuance than the typical Drugs Are Bad, Mmmmkay? approach you usually see on high school shows.

Julie and Tami's Boston trip didn't have quite the resonance of Street and Riggin's New York adventure last season (both of them shot on location), but the earlier one had the advantage of being our final glimpse of Street, where Julie still has the rest of this season. (And given the character's connection to our two leads, I'm sure we'll be seeing some of Aimee Teegarden next season.) But I thought it did a nice job of again showing Tami Taylor, perfectly imperfect mom, in that Julie was probably right at the start (Tami enjoyed that professor's attention way too much) before coming up, as usual, with the necessary words for her daughter at the end.

And getting back to the Landry/Jess/Vince triangle, I'd like to see Jess move more into the forefront in this back half of the season. I want more of an idea of how things with her and Vince fell apart, and what she sees in Landry besides his sense of humor (and obvious willingness to kill for his woman). Again, the show is juggling a lot of characters, both new and old, both staying and going, and it's hard to service them all every week. But I'm assuming Jason Katims and company were smart enough to make all four newbies underclassmen, which means they'll be carrying a post-Julie-and-Landry show next season, and I feel like I have a much stronger handle on Luke and Becky at this point than I do Vince and Jess.

"Friday Night Lights" doesn't need to audition for me to get it to watch the rest of this season or all of next. It already nailed the job, way back in the pilot episode (around the time Street's helmet was cut open in the ER). I just want it to be working as well as it can going into the home stretch.

Some other thoughts on "Toilet Bowl":

• As I've mentioned in the past, Taylor Kitsch went from cast weak link to indispensable around the time the writers started to take a less-is-more approach to his dialogue. Every now and then, though, we get an episode like this where he's asked to talk a lot - particularly in the scene where he confronts Billy about turning the Rig into a chop shop - and I'm reminded that talking is the one part of his game that still needs work.

• While it was nice to see Buddy being active in his role as a Lions booster, didn't he more or less agree to be a booster four episodes ago? Why is he talking to Eric like he's just finally decided to get with the program?

• With Matt Saracen gone, Landry needs other platonic friends, and thank goodness the show hasn't forgotten about his band. Devin and Jimmy's bored, frustrated reaction to Landry's latest romantic crisis was hilarious, particularly when Jimmy played a rimshot in the middle of the discussion.

• As mentioned often in the past, the show is much better at being a realistic depiction of football culture than it is being a realistic depiction of football itself, but rarely has the show seemed as bad on that front as it has with Landry as placekicker, because Jesse Plemons' kicking form looks awful. When we saw the ball go through the uprights during the game, in the same shot as when Landry kicked it, I started wondering if they had to create a CGI ball to get that effect.

• Two notable songs this week: Delta Spirit's "Trashcan" over the Taylor women's arrival in Boston, and "Killed Myself When I Was Young" by A.A. Bondy over the final sequence.

• A reader last time out pointed out that, in the credits, Angry Necklace Guy's name is Calvin Brown (and he's played by Ernest James), but until a character refers to him by that name on-screen, I'm sticking with Angry Necklace Guy. And now that he seems excited by the Lions' (one-game) winning streak, do I need to re-revisit my prediction that he'd end up back on the team before the season's over? Or will he continue to exist just to tempt Vince and the Riggins boys over to the dark side?

• Was anybody else expecting Tim to reach out to crazy Stan to help get the Sears gig? And has Sears replaced Applebee's as the show's main source of product integration money?

• I was worried at first when Tim didn't pull back from Becky's kiss, but he did eventually, and even she reacted like she just remembered why she wasn't supposed to do things like that.

• Gracie continues to be comic gold. The scene where she stands in a daze, pants-less, just watching the rest of her family be crazy, was another great usage of that little girl (and/or her twin).

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Friday Night Lights, "In the Bag": Don't fence me in

A review of tonight's "Friday Night Lights" coming up just as soon as I swaddle and shush...

"I'm offering you all I got. This is not just about football. Think about that." -Coach

Now that Matt Saracen has placed Dillon in his rearview mirror, the latest episode of season four focuses on the characters who are still stuck in town, and focuses on new bonds being forged or old ones being strengthened.

Eric learns to place some trust in Vince over the gun situation, and Vince responds in kind. Julie leans on Landry and an extra-curricular overload to get her over Matt's abrupt departure. Landry realizes that the long distance thing with Tyra ain't happening and makes his move with Jess. After Becky's dad shows up briefly and turns out to be every bit the waste of a paternity test that Papa Riggins was to Tim and Billy, Tim steps further into the role of father figure for Becky, much as she'd like him to be interested in her in a different way. And Luke gets his dad to see the value of the football team in his life just an accident with the repaired fence and the cattle may sideline Luke from that team for a while.

And if Luke is out of commission, that's going to put even more of a burden on Vince - is the wildcat really the wildcat if one guy's taking all the snaps from center? - and his tenuous but growing relationship with Coach.

As I discussed around this point last season, one of the drawbacks of the 13-episode order, when combined with the show's desire to give its outgoing characters multi-episode send-offs, is that some storylines wind up with a lot of blanks left to be filled in by the audience. Vince's story here felt like it was either missing some pieces from his perspective, or else was designed to be told mostly from Eric's POV. In other words, Coach doesn't know if Vince has a gun at school, or why, or whether he's sliding back into the criminal life that landed him on the team, and therefore, neither do we. And if that's the plan, that's fine, but I'd like to get inside Vince's head more as the season goes along. We know from "The Wire" that Michael B. Jordan's good enough actor to carry whatever they want to throw at him here, and with Luke potentially sidelined and Landry a scrub-slash-kicker, the only other good active Lion that we know might be helpful, fry-mooching Tinker.

Landry has less time to work on his kicking game, as he winds up a one-man support system for Julie, who's still struggling to deal with Matt's departure, then hit harder when she learns that she (currently) comes in behind Grandma and Shelby on Matt's priority call list.

There was a time early in the series where I would have lumped Aimee Teegarden in with Taylor Kitsch and Minka Kelly as the cast's obvious weak links. But Kitch is now an indispensable part of the show, and it's been a long time since Teegarden hasn't been up to the challenge of a script. (Kelly? Well, at least the writers figured out how to write around her limitations.) Julie's reaction to hearing that Matt called someone other than her, and her trembling trip to the podium during Academic Smackdown!(*) were wonderfully played. We've been so focused on Matt's departure that it's easy to forget the girlfriend he left behind; this episode made forgetting Julie impossible.

(*) Vince McMahon has taught me that the word Smackdown! must be both capitalized and accompanied by an exclamation point. Who am I to argue with the man who made stars of the likes of Haku and The Brooklyn Brawler?

Of our four new characters, Becky has been the least integrated into the world as a whole. Other than her brief, currently on hold flirtation with Luke, she's appeared almost exclusively with Riggins. But even if she's still on the outskirts of the series, it's hard not to feel sympathy for her after an episode like this one, and also to see how complicated her relationship with Tim is going to get. She's crushing on him madly; he's not interested. Becky worships her daddy; Tim sees the guy as an exact replica of his own deadbeat dad, and while he's not necessarily wrong, it's clear Tim's taking out some anger towards Walt when he picks a fight he knows he can win with this guy. And by shattering Becky's illusions about her dad, Tim might chse her away (not in a way he intended), or he might make her lean harder on him than ever.

Lots going on here. Lots of characters in flux, and lots of potential for the latter half of the season.

Some other thoughts:

• Because there are so many new and old characters to service, and because Adrianne Palicki wasn't available to stop by this season the way Minka Kelly did, our closure (for now) on the Landry/Tyra romance has to come via a one-sided phone call. But it felt right to me (even if the show/Landry maybe waited too long to make that call), because as good as Tyra could be at times, and as much as she cared for Landry, she also was desperate to get the hell out of Dillon without looking back, and she has a history of treating Landry badly even though he went on a five-state killing spree for her that one time. So while it makes me sad that she didn't even have the courtesy to write a "Dear Lance" e-mail or text message, I buy that she would have moved on with her life and tried not to look back. (Or that she looked back but didn't have the heart to tell Landry it was over, possibly out of fear that he might kill her.)

• We've established a pattern by now that Billy Riggins is both none-too-bright and a little too eager to try on a life of crime when his finances get tight. So I can buy that he would let himself get drawn into Angry Necklace Guy's pitch about turning Riggins Rigs into a chop shop, and this could potentially tie Tim to Vince down the road, when for now the only new character he has a relationship with is Becky. But season two has made me incredibly wary of this show dabbling in crime, you know?

• And what are we to make of the final scene, with Tim and the renamed Skeeter stopping by a large piece of ranching property for sale? Is Tim going to take the Riggins Rigs cow and start his own cattle operation?

• As we see, West Dillon (formerly Dillon High) has its own Smackdown! team, so how did Landry the chess club nerd not know about it?

• Barry Tubb, who plays Luke's dad, knows a thing or two about TV ranching, as he played a supporting role in the original "Lonesome Dove" miniseries and the "Return to Lonesome Dove" sequel.

• When we met Glenn at the start of season two, I wondered if the writers were going to have him throw himself at Tami while Eric was still commuting to and from TMU. Two seasons later, he finally does it, fueled by booze and tequila and a blue ribbon award for West Dillon, which clearly has as many academic advantages over East Dillon as it does athletic ones. Tami's response to this, both in the moment and the next day (after Glenn has an attack of liberal guilt and says, "It's like I mouth-raped you!") was yet another example of how great this woman is under pressure.

Just a reminder, this is the last original episode to air until January 6, in the usual timeslot, Wednesday at 9 p.m. on DirecTV's 101 Network.

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Friday Night Lights, "Stay": Do think twice

A review of tonight's "Friday Night Lights" coming up just as soon as I talk about my history of quitting...

"You know, I really don't know what I'm doing here. You go away to college, and you think you're getting over the whole thing, because being away helps with that. But now I'm here, and here we are." -Lyla

Dillon, Texas is a strange little place. It's empty and depressing and most of the characters on the show rightly dream of getting out and never looking back, but it also - like any place where you grow up, and/or where you find people you care about and who care about you - has this uncanny pull on its residents. They don't always leave when given the chance, or come back briefly to wonder why they ever left, or fear the inevitable departure of someone close to them. You can take the head cheerleader out of Dillon, but you can't take Dillon out of the head cheerleader, you know?

So in "Stay," we see Lyla still home for mid-term break (and not, thankfully, having just come home for the funeral) getting pulled in one more time by the bad boy magnetism of Tim Riggins, see Julie fear that she's going to lose Matt, see Tami come to terms with the fact that she's going to lose Julie within a year, and, in the end, see Matt decide that he made a mistake in staying for Julie.

And it's with that last part that I ran into some trouble with this one. Last week's "The Son" (one of the best episodes this show has ever done) was always going to be a tough act to follow, particularly in the Matt scenes. And "Stay" didn't help its cause by being fuzzy about many things Matt-related.

I still don't like that they rewrote his motivation for staying to be about Julie, not Grandma, when it was damn clear in "Tomorrow Blues" that Lorraine was his reason for turning down Chicago. It feels like they did that at the time because they didn't know if the show would come back, and it was a fitting (if somewhat depressing) ending for Matt. Once the show got renewed, though - and then once the creative team realized that only Tim Riggins would work as a full-time Panther alum - they had to scramble to justify writing Matt out. So now Julie became the lure of Dillon for him, which meant that as soon as there was trouble in the relationship - and as soon as Matt had suffered a major emotional blow like the death of his old man - it would become much cleaner for him to hop in the car, crank up the Bob Dylan(*) and just drive. I know that Matt earlier mentioned the "death gratuity" would help keep Lorraine financially secure, and we got that shot of Shelby and Lorraine finally getting along as Matt watched them from his car, but the whole point of all this was that Lorraine needed a full-time caretaker, and Matt wanted to provide that for her because of all she'd done for him. Now we're supposed to forget all that, pretend Shelby will want to move to Dillon forever, and not worry about details about where Matt will live, what he'll do, school, etc. He just has a fight with Julie, hops in the car, and goes. I'm sure this isn't exactly the end for him on the show, but right now it's a very bizarre exit for one of the series' best characters.

(*) Nice touch on the use of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," since Matt's love of Bob Dylan was established in the second episode, when Jason Street told Coach all the ways his back-up was different from him, but cool.

And despite being more clearly written out at the end of last season, Lyla comes back so she can be even more explicitly written out. I enjoyed the Tim/Lyla stuff, as being in Tim's orbit - and being amused by all the shenanigans that come with Tim Riggins(**) - made Lyla a much more appealing character than she ever was with Street, or with Chris. And it's certainly fun to see anyone ride a mechanical bull (especially someone who was once so prim and proper).

(**) This includes the presence of the over-eager, chatty girl next door, and it was funny both to see Lyla roll her eyes at Becky, and to have Tim finally tell Becky to shut up. I just hope Tim's resolve can hold now that Lyla's out of the picture for good.

But while Minka Kelly and Taylor Kitsch's scenes were entertaining, they felt unnecessary, and again had a rewriting of a motivation from last season. Remember, Tim said he didn't want to be the guy holding Lyla back, and yet here he all but begs her to stay. Now, I can see circumstances changing things - Tim threw away his scholarship because he thought he'd be happier back in Dillon, but has mostly been miserable - but coupled with the Matt/Julie thing, it felt off.

Not a bad episode, but it strained more than it should have to get the results it wanted.

Some other thoughts:

• Things seem to mostly be going well for Vince in this one. His mom is sober for a stretch (though Vince's wariness suggests this isn't the first time she's cleaned up, and that it doesn't tend to last long), and Coach's wildcat offense is not only working, but seems to be giving Vince better opportunities than Luke thus far.

• The football stuff was also odd, but in that usual detail-weird "FNL" football way. The Lions' opponent gets way oversold - if no one had scored a touchdown on them in two years, how were they not in the state championship ahead of the Panthers? - and while we get some explanation for how the Lions' offense is able to be effective against them, there aren't any signs of how the team's defense is able to limit what's supposed to be a McNulty juggernaut to only 14 points.

• No movement on Stan being in the closet, but we get glimpses of both the bad Stan (impetuously guaranteeing a win) and the good Stan (scaring off JD and his crew from hassling Vince and Luke at Sears). Of course, both Stans are basically the same guy; it's just the context that's different.

• The guarantee doesn't really lead to anything - much like the episode from a while back where they made a big deal about a game being televised and then never dealt with that again - except for the one very funny moment where Tinker (the big Lions offensive lineman) is asked about it and cackles hysterically at the notion that they have a shot.

• Once again, we get weird with the ages of the original kids. Landry notes that he and Matt have been best friends since they were both five, yet Landry (the smarter one) is a grade behind. I suppose you can chalk that up to deadlines for determining grade eligibility, but again it reminds me of how silly all the age business is. (Landry was driving a car as a freshman?)

• Lyla returns, and Tyra gets name-checked by Landry, who deservedly gets slapped in the face by Jess for doing it. (The kid just kept talking and talking and talking, didn't he?) And with Vince still interested in Jess - and Jess's dad hating Vince - we could wind up with our first triangle on the show since the early days of Street/Lyla/Riggins. I just hope we don't have two, now that Becky keeps waffling between the available, interested and age-appropriate Luke and the uninterested Tim.

• You get the feeling the directors and camera guys like shooting the twins who play Gracie, don't you? There was a lingering, tight close-up on her with a huge smile in this one.

• Nice to see, in the episode that brings back former head cheerleader Lyla, a bit more of Jess's similar role on the East Dillon squad. (Do we call them cheerleaders? A dance team? What? The lack of pom-poms and flips is throwing me.)

• Amusing as it was to see Tim and Billy suit up to help Coach run a practice, wasn't Billy's sport golf? Or was there a previous reference to him having also played for the Panthers?

• Julie's unauthorized trip to Austin led to a bunch of hilarious Coach and/or Mrs. Coach moments, from Tami interrogating Landry to Eric listening to Tami's monologue and saying (as he knew he had to) that he supported her 100 percent, to Tami whispering, "We're just going to beat her ass when she gets home."

• Roger Ebert likes to joke that anytime a movie character gets a hotel room or apartment in Paris, the Eiffel Tower is clearly visible outside their window. I'm starting to feel the same about any "FNL" scene set in Austin, which always has to feature the capitol building.

Finally, the good people at DirecTV who make it possible for me to see these episodes ahead of time have asked me to remind you that you can see new episodes of "Friday Night Lights" on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The 101 Network. There's a new episode next week, then the show takes the next two weeks off before returning on January 6 for the latter half of the season.

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Friday Night Lights, "The Son": Here lies a funny, funny man

Spoilers for tonight's "Friday Night Lights" coming up just as soon as I reminisce about three years ago...

"Stuff happens. Right now, it's happening to me. Someday, it's going to happen to you." -Matt

A lot of stuff happens to the characters on "Friday Night Lights," but then, a lot happens to the characters on every TV drama. What separates "FNL" from the pack, what makes us care deeply about it whether we know or care about Texas high school football, is the rawness with which the show has its characters deal with all the stuff, good and bad, that happens to them.

Most dramas, even the really good ones, will take you so close to the characters' emotions and no closer, as if they fear the audience will grow uncomfortable if there isn't some distance between themselves and the characters. (Based on the show's microscopic ratings, those other shows are probably, sadly, correct.) But the improvisational, documentary-style aesthetic that Peter Berg created in the film and the series pilot, and that Jason Katims, Jeffrey Reiner and company have continued over the last three-plus seasons, shatters any kind of barrier between viewer and viewee. The actors are encouraged to let everything hang out, to let us feel the fear that Tami might be feeling as she has the sex talk with her daughter, the anticipation and joy that Smash has when he gets the call from Texas A&M, the heartsickness that Eric feels when he tends to his shell-shocked troops at halftime of the Lions' first game.

Most of the actors on the show are great at this (it's no doubt part of why they were cast), but few are better at it than Zach Gilford, who owns every minute of his greatest spotlight to date.

Every character on "Friday Night Lights" gets a raw deal in some ways - this very episode reminds us of that with the stories about Vince and Becky and Luke - but Matt Saracen has consistently been the universe's punching bag, in part because the writers recognize how well Gilford plays Matt's pain and confusion every time life comes in to mock him again.

The physicality of his performance throughout this episode is exceptional: the catch in Matt's voice when he says the words "delivers pizza" while describing his life to date; his snot-filled, jittery demeanor outside the Taylor house; and, especially, the complete abject horror in his eyes (and the way his throat seems to flare out with his eyes) as he stares at his father's wrecked corpse inside the coffin. In that moment, I was there, you know? Just incredible work, and whatever reservations I had about the writers keeping Gilford around this year were entirely dispelled by this knockout episode.

As Matt struggled to come to grips with the death of the father he never really knew, "The Son" wasn't all tragedy and depression. For all the bad things Matt has suffered in his life, for all that his family was never really there for him, he lucked into a perfect second family with the Taylors, who all(*) stand up to be counted during Matt's hour of need. Tami takes care of the funeral director, Julie provides a shoulder to cry on when needed (and doesn't smother Matt when he needs his space), and Eric is there to walk Matt home in his biggest moment of despair. A lot of shows might have tried to have Eric give Matt a big pep talk, or even to spell out that Matt could always count on him, but the writers here were wise to recognize that nothing Eric could say would have made things even a hair better for Matt right now, and that actions would be more powerful than words.

(*) Well, maybe not Gracie, but lay off her, okay? She's still learning to talk!

In the end, Matt makes peace with his father's absence in his life, and the difference between the man he barely knew and the picture that the Army painted of Henry, with a really lovely eulogy. I don't know how much of that speech was Matt being sincere and how much was Matt doing what Matt does - swallowing his pain for the sake of good manners - but he already said the worst things about his father to the Taylors and the guys on the football field, and it seemed useful for him to remember the good times, too, and to realize that maybe Henry really was funny. (And speaking from personal experience - albeit one that didn't leave my hands raw and bloody the way Matt's were - shoveling the dirt yourself at a loved one's funeral is incredibly cathartic.)

Matt's still going away soon, but an episode like "The Son" is a powerful, powerful reminder of how much the show will miss him when he's gone.

Some other thoughts:

• Matt's story was the focus, but it didn't dominate the show, as we got to check in on Vince and Becky and Luke. However, because Matt gets so much screen time, the other plots didn't always move gracefully (there needed to be a transition scene, I think, in between Vince finding out the lights are off and Vince and Angry Necklace Guy getting a car theft tutorial), but this was probably the season's best balance between moving lots of stories forward while still providing the show's trademark emotional wallop.

• Eric is a good father figure to Matt, but he's also a great father to Julie, and it felt exactly right that he would recognize she was worried about losing him without her having to spell it out. Some things, dads just know.

• Before the season, the producers were very clear that Adrianne Palicki wouldn't be turning up until season 5, but they were vaguer about Minka Kelly, and now we know why: so Lyla's appearance at Henry's funeral would be a big surprise. Her presence felt a bit odd to me, though. On the one hand, having Lyla come back from Vanderbilt for the service illustrates how seriously the community responds to a loss like this. On the other, Lyla has no real relationship with Matt - I'm not even sure I can think of any meaningful on-camera interaction the two characters had over the last three seasons - and so I'd rather it turn out that Lyla was back in town anyway and decided to go to the funeral because it was the right thing to do. Presumably, there's more planned for her with Riggins (who shared a nice, knowing, sad look with her at the end of the service) and/or Buddy.

• While one alum came back, another was mentioned but not really seen, as Eric has a Texas A&M game on while he's reading to Gracie, and we learn that while Smash is still coming off the bench (a realistic touch, given the stature of the program and his own entry into it as a walk-on last year), he's at least impressing in garbage time of blowouts and has a promising future ahead of him.

• It's still fascinating to see Eric deal with a mostly hopeless team instead of his Panthers juggernauts. He doesn't want his players to call their own plays, but he can't let himself get too mad when the inevitable wildcat play works, and he allows them to enjoy their moral victory in the locker room afterwards by telling them they have nothing to be ashamed of. A program much further along can only concern itself with actual wins and losses, but right now Eric has to build the confidence of these kids, to make them believe they're not hopeless, and the end of that game was a start.

• I'd like there to be more consistency with the Landry/Lance thing. Either Eric knows his real name by now, or he doesn't. In theory, they could turn the joke into something a bit deeper by having Eric call him Lance when he's annoyed with him in practice, or just in a light moment, and shift to Landry when things are more serious. But to call him Lance while asking him to say a prayer for his best friend's dead father was a distraction.

• Speaking of Landry's name, I'm not sure if it was an intentional running joke or not, but I was amused that the episode featured Landry and Julie arguing over what his nickname should be ("Twinkle-Toes" vs. "Golden Foot") as well as Billy trying to retroactively dub Matt "Mayday."

• I thought the writing of JD McCoy was much better than in his first appearances this season. He's still a jerk and a bully, but he's a more realistic, nuanced jerk in the way his friendly teasing of Luke turned ugly when Luke refused to forgive JD. And I liked how good he was at talking to the pancake breakfast kids (particularly in contrast to Vince, who was not well-coached by Eric in this circumstance), because of course Joe McCoy would have programmed his little robot son to be a great public speaker as well as a great passer.

• JD and Joe's presence also led to one of the episode's funniest moments, as a frustrated Matt simply closes the door in their faces when they show up to offer condolences on behalf of the Panthers.

• I don't want to constantly be making "Wire" references just because Michael B. Jordan has now had supporting roles on two of my all-time favorite dramas, but it's hard to look at Vince carrying his passed-out mom back into their apartment (like he's the parent and she's the child) and not see echoes of what little we knew about Wallace's relationship with his own junkie mom.

• Riggins' nightmare of accidentally having sex with Becky nearly came true, but he managed to stop it in time, driving the mortified girl to go on a fortuitously-timed beer run that finally gets things cooking between her and a shirtless Luke. It's about time, too, that Madison Burge starts having regular interactions with castmembers other than Taylor Kitsch.

• The editing on the pageant and wake sequences was odd, making it seem like they were going on simultaneously, with Riggins somehow teleporting across town as soon as Becky finished singing "Popular" so he could be in both places at once. I know that both wakes and pageants can be very long affairs, but the way the two sequences were cut together became a distraction when Tim was in one place and then suddenly in the other.

• Jess hasn't gotten a lot of screentime in the last few episodes, but she's quickly become the show's go-to person for reaction shots during Lions games. Jurnee Smollett does a really good job of conveying just how much Jess cares about the game and the team - and since we care about the team going in, it makes us like her even though she's a newbie who hasn't had a lot to do yet. Well-played, show.

• The song playing over the end of the funeral, and as Matt works his hands bloody with the shovel, is "Driveway" by Great Northern.

Finally, the good people at DirecTV who provide me with access to these episodes have asked me to remind you that you can catch new episodes of "Friday Night Lights" ever Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern on The 101 Network.

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