Friday Night Lights Review: The Almost Redemption of Julie Taylor

This week in East Dillon, Buddy Garrity Jr. (Jeff Rosick) suffers a fracture during a training exercise led by Billy Riggins (Derek Phillips), which is pretty much all we see of that titular plotline. Instead, the focus lies on Julie Taylor’s (Aimee Teegarden) road to redemption and the many untruths of Vince Howard.

At the start of the episode, Vince’s (Micahel B. Jordan) family and friends, including Ornette (Cress Williams) and the too-good-for-him girlfriend Jess (Jurnee Smollett), gather to watch his first televised interview. To no one’s shock (okay, maybe just no viewers’ shock), he fails to thank the team or the coach, not even acknowledging them for any of the Lions’ success this season. This doesn’t play well with Jess, who’s starting to wise up to the kind of man he’s turning into, but he tells her it’s just the way it was edited. Being the smart girl we know and love, she tells him it was one shot and there’s no editing in that.

Vince’s interview doesn’t go over well with the rest of the team either. The next day at practice, Luke (Matt Lauria) and Hastings (Grey Damon) mock him and laugh about it, teasing Jess a little too. Vince comes in and again lies, telling them the reporter cut out where he mentions them, and it’s not his fault. Hastings observes it just seems like the Vince and not the team is getting all the airtime these days.

Ornette takes Vince out of school for an unofficial recruiting visit in Oklahoma.  They  say they don’t want to violate any NCAA rules, but that turns out to be a very thin, gray line on the trip. At the end of the trip Vince and his father attend a practice and listen to the recruiter and coach discuss the fact their decision is between Vince and one other player right in front of them. The first one to give them a verbal commitment will be who they choose. Vince, this isn’t going to end well and everyone sadly knows it but you.

Back at practice, Coach asks Jess where Vince is and she lies, telling him Vince isn’t feeling well. She confronts Vince about it, and he confides in her about the offer. She knows it’s an illegal move, but he doesn’t care and just wants her to be excited. The next day, Coach confronts Vince and he lies again, this time coming up with some line about his mom slipping up and not feeling well. Later though, it all catches up with him when pictures get out of him in Oklahoma. Coach tells Vince he’s knocking on the wrong doors and not to lie anymore. He also confronts Ornette, and tells him Vince misses another practice he’s benched. Ornette, surprisingly, seems to know about Coach Taylor’s college coaching offers.

Things don’t really start to go south until the other players learn Vince missed practice for the trip. Luke and Vince come to blows, needing to be separated by Hastings and an unmotivated, not unified group of Lions barely holds it together marching out into the pep rally.

Becky (Madison Burge) FINALLY has some alone time with the Luke. His parents are out for the day, but she can’t bring herself to have sex with him again. Later, while Mindy (Stacey Oristano) and some of the Landing Strip girls are enjoying some day drinking, Becky tells them she wants to enter a beauty pageantwith the grand prize being a car. She has to blow off a football party and a date with Luke, which he’s not happy about, in order to compete. The Landing Strip girls all come to support her at the Miss Young Texas pageant, where Becky places second runner up. At least it’s keeping her off the pole for another week. Taking Luke up on his offer, Becky leaves a note in his windshield, asking if they can start over.

The big revelation this week was Julie’s TA Derek (Gil McKinney) knocking on the Taylor house door. Julie answered and tried to get rid of him, but Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) ended up chasing him out and smashing his car tail light. In a desperate attempt to get someone to hear his case, Derek goes to see Tami (Connie Britton) at work. He tells her he’s quit his job and wants to convince Julie to go back to school. When Julie ultimately meets with him, he gives her his family’s address in Tennessee.

The next morning, Julie tells her parents she’s sorry for her actions of late, and that she wants to go back to college. She calls Derek on her drive back and asks if he really came back to get her to go back to school. He says he came back to get her to be with him. She pulls a sharp U-turn that had me ready to throw the remote. Come on Julie Taylor, you are so close to being likable again!

Fret not because in the episode’s last seconds, she knocks on a door and, who should answer but Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford). Thank Jason Katims, because if she had made it to Tennessee to see her soon-to-be-divorced ex-lover, Julie Taylor would be dead to me.

My favorite moment of the week: Becky getting relationship advice from the ladies of the Landing Strip. One dancer tells her to sneak into Luke’s room after she wins wearing nothing but her crown. Her surrogate mother Mindy agrees with an excited “Hell yeah!”

She finally breaks down and lets them know that she and Luke already had sex, that she got pregnant and decided not to keep the baby. It’s clear she likes Luke and how much she wants it to work, but can’t move on from that decision. Mindy, proving she is still strangely the role model in this situation, tells her the past will always be there, but she can’t let it rule her future.

How can there only be five episodes left in this extremely underrated series? What started out as Eric Taylor’s perfect final season seems to be spiraling out of control and really, can we blame anyone other than Ornette Howard? In a relevatory moment at the close of the episode, the principal thanks Coach Taylor for teaching everyone how to have pride in East Dillon again. If only Vince remembered a little bit of that.

Season 5, Episode 8: “Fracture” (original air date June 3, 2011)

Friday Night Lights airs Fridays at 8 on NBC.

Images courtesy of Bill Records and NBC.