Friday Night Lights Review: Finding a Future. . .

So, Inisia’s out this week and next, and I’ve been tapped to fill in.  Normally, a writing assignment on a weekend is not exactly my thing, but at least it’s FNL, right?  I mean, there are worse ways to spend Friday nights.  For instance, two weeks ago I saw the A-Team.

This week, the theme was all about being tied to your past while at the same time trying to figure out a future for yourself. A few questions emerged:

Q1: Will Julie stop being a snotty teenager long enough to not sabotage her future?

In many conversations with others about FNL, I’ve talked about how annoying Julie is.  It’s not her fault — she’s a teenager, so she has to live an aggrieved existence, never quite fully appreciating how well she’s got it.  This disappeared over the second half of last season and most of this one — largely because of Matt.  I liked watching her grow in that relationship.  Well, now that’s over and Julie, broken-hearted, has returned to her default status of the-world-sucks-and-no-one-understands-how-hard-my-life-is mode.  I’m not saying she can’t be there for awhile — I was in love with Matt Saracen too, you know — but, my god, was I happy when Tami finally gave her the talking to she deserved while on a trip to Boston College. Julie was sullen and stubborn the entire time, and muscling up all her angst to blame Tami for forcing her to visit the school in the first place, calling going to the school Tami’s dream. Tami told her that however hard she’s been trying to pull it together, she needed to try harder, cause she was in danger of screwing up her future.

So Julie tried harder.  We don’t see the light bulb go off, but when Julie is interviewed, she gets in a few literary references, and plugs her town Dillon for making her the person she is today.  There’s hope for this kid after all. Afterwards, Tami tells Julie she doesn’t want Julie to go to Boston College because it’s Tami’s dream.  Tami got her dream.  She got a college degree, she met Coach Taylor, and she got Julie, and Julie is Tami’s dream.  Now, Julie’s got to go after her own dreams.  And I cried a little, because Tami gives the best speeches.

There was also a great detail here that I totally missed the first time I watched the episode.  When Tami and Julie initially meet with a BC administrator, the administrator tells Tami that BC never got applications from Dillon before Tami became a guidance counselor.  It’s a great takeaway — a little reminder of what Tami has done at Dillon High School for those kids.

Q2: Who will win the Toilet Bowl?

While Tami & Julie were out east, Coach was facing the Toilet Bowl, the name not-quite-affectionately given to a game between the two teams in last place in the league.  This lead to entirely too many toilets — a gold one outside a store that Buddy glimpses as he rides past, another one confiscated from who-knows-where to be placed on East Dillon’s field just before practice, and a stopped-up one in Mindy’s house that Tim’s got to unplug because Billy’s leading a life of crime (unbeknownst to poor Mindy, who just thinks he’s cheating on her.)

Which leads us to our next question. . .

Q3: How good of a guy is Tim Riggins, really?

Oh, Tim.  My poor, lovely, Tim.  I don’t entirely blame you for letting Becky kiss you a little too long on tonight’s episode.  I get it.  You’re lonely.  Nothing is really working.  You can’t get a job, which means you can’t get that land, which means you can’t build a house with a wraparound porch.  (I love wraparound porches, too).  And here you’ve got sweet, earnest, naive Becky saying things to you like “I think you’re a strong person, and an honest worker.  And I think you can grow up to be whoever you want to be,” and you’re feeling so low, it’s hard to resist the comfort Becky’s offering.  But resist, Tim Riggins, resist.  Don’t be that guy.

But also — don’t be the guy who chops up cars, either.  Not for Billy, and especially not for yourself.  It feels expected, and for this show, a little contrived. So Tim?  Please, please, please find another way to make some $$.

Speaking of contrived, can we do something more with Vince’s friend, Mo, the guy who got Billy in the chop shop business in the first place?  This week, Mo paid Vince a visit, trying to get him away from studying plays so that he can play basketball in the neighborhood, and maybe steal some cars.  Vince refuses, he’s got his head on straight (for now).  But the Mo character has been more one-dimensional than Vince deserves; he’s just bad-influence-friend.  I think the writers can do better with Mo, and I hope they do.

Q4:  Will Buddy’s former glory be restored?

I love me some Buddy.  I really do.  And I absolutely believed him when he told Coach “I used to be something in the Dillon Panthers. I want to do that here.”

So are Buddy’s glory days as a booster behind him?  Was he only good when working in service of a team like the Dillon Panthers?  Or can he find a future with East Dillon?  Methinks he can; I’m an optimist that way.

Q5:  Will Vince kick Landry’s ass?

My favorite thing about Landry: He consistently goes for girls totally out of his league.  And make no mistake about it, Jess is totally out of his league.  I mean, Landry has shirts with periodic tables on them; she’s being pursued by the Vince, the quarterback.  And, c’mon, the girl’s got fantastic hair.  Landry can woo her by being incredibly cute to her younger brothers, but he still got the cheek on their date.  And when faced with the choice between a date with him, or dinner with Vince and his mom, she chose the latter.

But later that week, at the end of the Toilet Bowl, she walked off with Landry, and Vince noticed, and I bet he felt that rejection.  So, is he going to kick Landry’s ass, as little Caleb or Darius or Andre Merriweather suggested (didn’t catch which one of Jess’s cute little brothers actually asked that)?

Speaking of dinner with Vince and his mom, how awkward was that?  I haven’t been a big fan of Vince’s mom’s character — she went from barely coherent crackhead to sounding like she had an English degree in entirely too few episodes — but she nailed awkward banter.  I also think the character may have been high, but the script wasn’t entirely clear on that point.

Q6:  They aren’t going to turn Luke Cafferty into an opiate addict, are they?

I hope not.  Smash’s steroid use was the weakest plotline of Season 1, and I don’t need a repeat here.  For me, Luke’s finding a doctor, through Tim, that will give him unlimited Oxycodone illustrated a broader point about football in Dillon; a strung-out Luke storyline would take the point too far, and, frankly, I don’t think Luke’s character needs an addiction to make him interesting, either.

So that’s it for this episode.  Oh — I forgot to mention that Dillon won the Toilet Bowl! So, they’ve got one win, at least.

See you next week!

Season 4, Episode 8: Toilet Bowl (aired June 25, 2010)

For more on Friday Night Lights, click here.

Fridays at 8/7c on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Bill Records.