"The Sting of Second Chances" aired on December 1, 2024, and at 43 minutes it is one of the shortest episodes of the season. Stephen Kay directed it, from a script by Taylor Sheridan. It has three lines of action. Rebecca takes over a deposition and ends TTP's claim against M-Tex, Cooper is pushed onto a derrick after a crewman is crushed and helps bring a well in, and Angela decides she isn't going home. In between, Tommy explains over drinks how a boomtown works to the company's new lawyer.
The deposition
The lawyers for TTP, the trucking company whose driver was on the road when the plane came down, question Tommy under oath. Their first point is the missing report: "Why didn't you report the theft of the King Air?" Tommy answers that he did, and Nathan produces a copy of the FAA report. When Tommy adds that he doesn't own or manage the plane and "it could've been chartered or leased out," the room turns into a fight over procedure, with one lawyer telling the other, "this is a deposition," and that the witness "is testifying under oath to questions you ask."
The turn comes in the conference room. The opposing lawyer tells Rebecca that they were "playing the pissed-off litigator while you were still being bathed by your daddy." Her answer is that her father died before she was born, that the remark was made in front of six lawyers, and that she is wondering what the court reporter could say about "late-night discovery sessions." Then she works the case. She asks Tommy whether he gave TTP permission to use M-Tex's cutoff to Highway 285. He says he did, when 302 was closed for night construction, and that they never asked to extend it. She turns that into a position. TTP "had restricted permission, which had expired," and the plane "was reported stolen and was in possession of the thieves at the time of the accident." She tells them she charges "$900 an hour," threatens a defamation suit, and has the settlement drafted on the spot, "withdrawn with prejudice." When she is asked if she wants to negotiate the language: "We're not negotiating language. This is a surrender."
Afterward Rebecca asks Tommy whether he wants a drink. He asks if it's to discuss the next eight-figure lawsuit, and she says that isn't her doing: as the fall guy, "That makes them about you." When he asks what she wants to talk about, she says she doesn't know, "You know, about you, the weather." Tommy suggests she start with her father, the Army Ranger, and she admits her father is an investment banker in Chicago and she made the Ranger up. Tommy says he didn't give her enough credit. "Nobody does."
What Tommy knows about boomtowns
At the Patch Café a young woman soliciting at the bar sets Tommy off. The bartender says he can't throw her out because she has an open tab. When Rebecca suggests she may not have had a choice, Tommy says she did, "and she chose the shortcut, which is always the longest road." He compares Midland to Tombstone, Dodge City and San Francisco: "First comes the dreamers, then the bankers, then the salesmen, then the sharks, then the desperate, and then the thieves." He puts a number on the sweet spot: "You want oil to live above 60 but below 90." At $78 a barrel, "that's about perfect," enough profit to keep exploring without hurting at the pump. He describes 2020, when "a barrel of oil was worthless" and the place "became a ghost town," with kids quitting college, trucks repossessed and people skipping the doctor. "The smart ones, they pay cash for everything and then sock away enough to ride out the troughs, but there ain't that many smart ones."
The smart one, he says, was Monty. He tells Rebecca that Monty bought 30,000 acres at $900 an acre in 2011, then sold 10,000 of them in 2019 for $70,000 an acre, which comes to $700 million in a single deal. In 2020 he bought it all back "at ten cents on the dollar," paying the sellers with their own money. Monty grew up in a trailer park in Pennsylvania and got a football scholarship to Tech, and he knew football "wasn't really a business, it was more of a dream." When Rebecca reminds Tommy that he said dreamers come to this place, he answers, "it can be the dream, but you got to have a plan." Monty always had one. "I think he made more money during the busts than he did the booms."
Angela and Ainsley at the table
Angela and Ainsley turn up at the same restaurant. "We wanted a drink." Tommy introduces Rebecca as "an attorney representing the company," and Angela makes it a dinner. At the table she tells the story of a George Strait birthday. Tommy told her they were flying to Cancún, and after twenty minutes the plane landed in Lubbock. There was a black sequin gown on the bed of a hotel suite, and downstairs a private event where they two-stepped while George Strait played. "Three weeks later, the markets crashed and oil dropped to 30." She stops there. "We lost everything."
Tommy doesn't like to talk about the bust, and Ainsley doesn't accept her mother's version of it. That night she tells him her mother is a quitter who left when the market crashed and "Finds the richest man who will have her." Tommy defends Angela. "It's hard to describe what it means to lose everything," and "I was no picnic. I hid in a bottle and didn't come out till she left me." He says the marriage would have ended anyway. "We're just oil and water." Ainsley tells him, "I'll never quit you. No matter what the market does." He answers, "I know you won't, baby girl."
Angela has her own warning for Rebecca. "Tommy needs calamities. You know, he needs blowouts. He needs to control things that can't be controlled to feel like a man." Later she and Tommy end up talking in bed. He says, "We had a terrible marriage, interrupted by brief moments of joy," and that they had great sex and he made her laugh, and that was it. Her reply is that she has lived the alternative and would take great sex and a laugh any day. She tells him she is going to leave Victor. By morning the kitchen is full of people and Angela is telling Ainsley they are moving to Midland for good. Tommy says he must be out of his mind.
Cooper on the derrick
While Tommy is at dinner a crewman is crushed on the rig. Boss and Manuel have to get Antonio down from the derrick, and Cooper is told to help: "Get on the blocks, worm." "What?" "Hold on tight." Dale drives Antonio to the hospital, and before he goes he gives Boss an order: "You get that rig running! We need this well on line in the morning!" When Manuel says they are a man down, Dale answers, "I didn't ask you for a problem. I asked you for a solution. Find one!" The solution is Cooper. Manuel checks that he knows what a derrickhand does. "Yeah, f-feeds the pipe."
Tommy arrives at the rig and is told, "You just got one floor hand. I had to send one up the derrick." By the end of the episode the well is in. "She'll pump over 250 a day. We're in a good pocket." Tommy says he doesn't like gambling, but "it paid off this time." When he asks how Cooper did, the answer is that he "Stepped up when we needed him most" and worked the derrick "like he'd been doing it all winter." Tommy then calls his son and tells him to come see his mother. Cooper asks if she's still there. She is, Tommy says, and they are going to give it another shot. "Why would you do that?" Tommy says it's because he's that stupid.
Does Monty's land math work?
Tommy's account of how Monty got rich is the most checkable thing in the episode, and it survives checking better than you would expect.
The claim is that Monty bought 30,000 acres at $900 an acre in 2011, sold 10,000 of them in 2019 at $70,000 an acre, and bought the lot back in 2020 "at ten cents on the dollar." The arithmetic holds: 10,000 acres at $70,000 is $700 million, from a position that cost $27 million. The market history holds too. Permian leasing in 2010 and 2011 really was running in the high hundreds of dollars per acre, with one Texas General Land Office auction averaging about $906 an acre before a 2011 sale jumped to several thousand. And by 2018, top-tier Permian acreage really did change hands at around $70,000 an acre, with a New Mexico tract reported near $95,000. Whoever wrote the scene was reading the same trade press the landmen were.
The 2020 buyback is where drama takes over from arithmetic. The collapse was real and extreme. WTI went negative for the first time in history on April 20, 2020, settling at minus $37.63 a barrel, a storage crisis rather than a price anyone actually paid for long. Distressed Permian acreage did trade at heavy discounts that year. Buying back the same tract at a tenth of what you sold it for, from the people you sold it to, is a screenwriter's tidy circle rather than a documented transaction. "Paid 'em with their own money," as Rebecca puts it, is the line the scene exists for.
Angela's story at dinner has the same shape. She sets it on her birthday, with oil "over a hundred a barrel," and Tommy corrects her: "Hundred and forty-three." WTI's all-time high is $147.27, on July 11, 2008, so she is close. Where the show compresses is the fall. "Three weeks later, the markets crashed and oil dropped to 30." In reality the slide from that July peak into the $30s took about five months, through the September collapse and into December. The compression is dramatic licence, and it does not change what the scene is about, which is how fast a life built on the strip can come apart.
Tommy's price band in the same conversation is the season's most useful single idea. "You want oil to live above 60 but below 90," with $78 "about perfect." Monty gives a tighter version of it in episode 5, "between $76 and $88 a barrel." Below the band nobody drills; above it, as Tommy says, gas "gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch," and at a hundred "every product in America has to readjust its price." That band is why boom towns exist and why they empty out, which is the subject of our guides to oil prices and markets and what booms do to a town.
Things the episode slips past you
- The lawyer who runs the deposition is Arty Roberts, played by Gareth Williams. He is the one who tells Rebecca they were "playing the pissed-off litigator while you were still being bathed by your daddy," and she takes the deposition away from him within a page.
- Angela's George Strait story names a real hotel, the Overton in Lubbock, and ends on the line the whole scene is built for: "I lied to you, baby. We're not going to Mexico."
- Nathan calls the twerking in the living room "a liability cluster bomb" and asks Tommy to get Angela and Ainsley out of the house. Tommy says he's working on it.
- At the country club, the manager addresses Angela as "Mrs. Norris." She says, "Oh, I'm Mrs. Russo now." The club is closed that night for a private event.
- Tommy tells Rebecca he "divorced whiskey about nine years ago," the same week he divorced Angela. His drink at the Patch Café is nonalcoholic "if you're an alcoholic."
- Nathan is working out settlements for the Medina families. One of them says he is getting ahead of a lawsuit, the other says to do the right thing, and the reply is "those are two different things."
- The captions name three Turnpike Troubadours songs: "Gin, Smoke, Lies," "Wrecked," and "Empty as a Drum."
The last shot
The last scene is a phone call. Ariana rings Cooper and asks to see him: "I need to see you. Can you do that for me?" He says yes. Episode 5 picks up from there.