‘Landman’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: “Almost A Home”

While the people living at the top will always extract whatever they require to stay balling, the working person clocks in for another day just hoping to survive. Episode 3 of Landman Season 2 (“Almost a Home”) has Angela on Tommy’s FaceTime as she tours the finest gilded toilets in Fort Worth. It’s got Cami Miller hunting down where her late husband hid M-Tex’s money. And it finally brings Andy Garcia back in as Gallino, the drug cartel jefe who has pivoted from taunting Tommy in the darkness to openly courting the oil and gas elite of West Texas.

But as the wealthy trade veiled threats and down pricey drinks in hoity-toity private clubs, out at the site of a rusted well taken over by M-Tex, roughnecks like Dale and Boss (Mustafa Speaks) gotta leap into scramble mode when their wearable hydrogen sulfide monitors suddenly start to scream. The wind has caught the invisible toxic fumes. The angel of death is upon them. All these guys wanted was to earn a wage doing what was asked. Instead they’re getting hauled to safety in a MEDEVAC chopper. So they can cheat death, punch in again, and keep the wells humming for someone else’s bottom line. 

(TC 23:12-22: [Dale in hazmat gear; injured worker in rescue harness])

When he was living, Monty kept the oil wells humming – straight into his personal holding company. But according to what Cami has uncovered, the funds coming in weren’t paying down the loans going out. M-Tex operations were instead floated across a bundle of high-profile credit lines, all with their own links to shell companies and other innocuous financial hovels. Cami is not naive. As she tells Tommy, she knew Monty had secrets. But sorting through the M-Tex paperwork with Rebecca and Nathan, she worries now about her husband’s legacy. Did he have a plan not seated in dishonesty? Unlike your average oil worker, perpetually at risk from a variety of on-the-job terrors, Cami Miller and their daughters have stocked financial trusts to fall back on. But even if the M-Tex coffers are dry, if burns Cami that Monty might have been just another wildcatter who got caught without a chair, once the music stopped along with his heart.

Seeking answers, the M-Tex owner and president accost Monty’s personal lawyer at downtown Fort Worth’s historic Cattlemen’s Club. (In real life, Taylor Sheridan has purchased this exclusive steakhouse-bar, proving the Sheridan-O-Verse is not just a small screen phenomenon.) The attorney who was ducking Cami’s calls has time for a leisurely weekday lunch? Alright. She throws not one but two drinks in this guy’s face, and demands to know about her company’s cashflow. But because this is Landman, there is no resolution until Tommy steps in, who breaks a bottle over the lawyer’s head and lectures the club’s manager about how he’s allowed. Maybe that’s because Billy Bob Thornton knows the Cattlemen’s owner. 

(TC 36:30: [Cami] “I don’t need you understand – I need you to do it.”)

“I don’t need you to understand – I need you to do it.” Since Episode 1 of this season, we’ve been enjoying Demi Moore’s larger role as Cami, and she does get the last word with Monty’s sniveling attorney. But like Tommy’s bit with the bottle, M-Tex’s route to financial solvency might still flow through Cami’s company president. Watching their confrontation with the lawyer from a corner of Cattlemen’s is Gallino, who during a testy earlier meeting told Tommy his mercy still has a price. At his sleek, bougie office digs, Gallino bragged how he invested in Cooper Norris’s drilling operation when Tommy wouldn’t. He said he considered himself in business with both father and son, which Tommy tossed right back. “You bet on him to fail, so he’d owe you and I’d owe you.” The first hit’s always free – isn’t that how drug dealers work?

(TC 20:12: [Gallino] “I spared you, Thomas.”)

The harsh words in Gallino’s office were enough to peel the paint off his modern art originals. But everybody’s happier in the plush leather booths at Cattlemen’s. Tommy introduces Gallino to Cami Miller, and when Angela arrives fresh from surveying Forth Worth’s most choice mansions, she’s quite taken with Bella (Stefania Spampinato), Gallino’s cosmopolitan, Italian-born wife. There are rounds of cocktails and the conversation turns to relationships. Their stability, and their fragility. “Most people, when they get to know their partner, they fall out of love.”   

It’s an interesting, freewheeling scene. Garcia and Spampinato establish Gallino and Bella as the city’s newest big money players. Tommy’s love-as-combat union with Angela dominates. (Cami on Angela: “Oh, if you could sell that exuberance!”) Cami herself acts as the widow whose love for her husband is separate from the continuance of her wealth and status. And through social graces and his own obvious stature – it is suggested he is the new fictional owner of Cattlemen’s – Gallino locks down his latest targets. “I’m learning the scope of your thing as you learn the scope of mine,” he says, and Cami tells him she might need an investor.         

For now anyway, it really feels like Gallino and his cartel-fueled riches will put Tommy Norris in a bind two ways. Once on the Cooper side of things, once more with M-Tex, and removing the means of escape, financial or otherwise. Tommy told Cami the single goal of the oil business, which is to get out. If you don’t get out when you can, it will bleed you dry. Which financially is better than dying. But Tommy should be wearing his own N2S monitor around Gallino, because these transactions at the top could be just as deadly toxic.

Landmania for Landman Season 2 Episode 3 (“Almost a Home”):

• The Patch Cafe might not be real, but it’s certainly a spot to make great tips, and having kicked Cooper to the curb, Ariana is filling out an application. Wildcats and landmen alike populate the Patch, and Ariana provides this episode’s second instance of drink-throwing during her first shift behind the bar. “We’re just gonna throw you to the wolves” accounts for the Patch Cafe training program.

• We’re looking forward to Ainsley Norris starting her freshman year at TCU, because Landman seems at a loss with where Michelle Randolph’s character is going. “I’m BORED!” Ainsley whines to her parents on the phone, as she’s stuck in a feedback loop of cheerleading moves. Isn’t saying you’re bored as boring as insisting you are?  

(TC 26:59: [Tommy] “Only 10 hours left in this fucking day.”)

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.