Season 2, Episode 4 — Dancing Rainbows

The title promises something ephemeral and beautiful: rainbows created by sprinklers on a sunny afternoon, a seventeen-year-old girl dancing in refracted light. But the image is immediately qualified by memory, by what came after, by the demons that T.L. tells us run faster than rainbows. Dancing Rainbows is an episode about the moments of beauty that cannot save us, the memories that become evidence of loss rather than comfort.

If the previous episodes excavated business corruption and cartel entanglements, Episode 4 digs into older ground: the family trauma that made Tommy Norris who he is. This is Landman at its most intimate and most merciless, trading oil field explosions for the slower detonations of childhood wounds reopened at a funeral.

The Opening Crash: Violence as Introduction

The episode opens with catastrophic collision. An M-TEX driver crashes into a pickup truck where a man is dying from gas poisoning, the vehicles colliding in instant, fiery death. Sheridan does not linger on carnage, the crash happens and the episode moves on, but the image establishes the episode's thesis: some impacts are immediate and obvious, others are slow poisonings that kill just as surely.

The crash is thematic mirror for what follows. Tommy's childhood was its own kind of collision, his mother's addiction and his father's inability to stop it creating damage that looks survivable until you understand the internal injuries.

The Funeral as Excavation Site

Sheridan understands that funerals are where family secrets surface because the dead cannot object anymore. Dottie's funeral becomes the site where Tommy finally speaks his truth, not as accusation but as testimony. He tells the story clinically, almost detached: finding his mother face-down in the bathtub at fourteen, following 911 instructions to perform CPR, bringing her back from death, only to be kicked in the head as she went to pour another drink.

The telling is devastating not because Tommy performs emotion but because he does not need to. The facts are sufficient horror. Billy Bob Thornton plays the scene with restraint that makes every word land harder, a man who has told himself this story so many times it has become narrative rather than memory, the only way to make it bearable.

T.L.'s Memory: The Rainbow That Could Not Last

Sam Elliott's performance as T.L. reaches its peak in the restaurant scene where he shares his memory of Dottie at seventeen, making him stop the car so she could dance in the rainbows created by lawn sprinklers. It is the episode's only moment of pure beauty, and T.L. frames it immediately in loss: "Demons run faster than rainbows, and hers caught up to her."

What makes the scene remarkable is Elliott's delivery, which contains both the memory of love and the knowledge of its futility. He is not romanticizing Dottie or claiming the good times outweighed the bad. He is simply acknowledging that she was once a girl who danced in rainbows, before the death of her infant daughter broke something in her that never healed.

SIDS as the Breaking Point

The revelation that Tommy had a sister who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome at four months old recontextualizes everything. Dottie's addiction was not character flaw but response to unbearable loss. This does not excuse the damage she inflicted on Tommy, but it complicates the narrative, adds dimension to what could have been simple addiction story.

Sheridan's insight is that trauma cascades through generations. The sister's death broke Dottie. Dottie's breakdown broke Tommy. Tommy's wounds now shape how he fathers his own children, the patterns repeating with variations. The episode does not offer solutions because there are none, only the ongoing work of living with damage.

The Masterclass Scene: Thornton and Elliott

The restaurant scene between Tommy and T.L. has been widely praised as masterclass in acting, and the praise is deserved. Sheridan films it simply: two men at a table, shot mostly in two-shot or close-ups, no dramatic camera movements or score swells. The performances carry everything.

What makes the scene work is the actors' understanding that these men are not performing emotion for each other but managing it, trying to speak truth without being destroyed by it. The pauses matter as much as the words. The moments where they look away. The way Tommy's voice stays level even as he describes unspeakable things.

Jerrell's Injury: The Cost of Oil Work

In parallel to the funeral narrative, the episode tracks Jerrell in the hospital, his eyes damaged by gas exposure from the previous episode's leak. The injury may be permanent. Sheridan does not need to belabor the point: this is what the oil business costs. Not just exploded wells and cartel entanglements, but bodies damaged, workers made whole into men who cannot see.

The injury also serves as visual metaphor for the episode's larger themes. Sometimes damage is obvious, visible, treatable. Sometimes it is internal, invisible, permanent. Tommy looks fine. T.L. looks like a disabled old man but his real disability is emotional, the inability to have protected his wife or son from trauma.

Ariana Meets the Family

Cooper brings Ariana to the funeral, and her presence shifts the family dynamic subtly. She is witness to Norris family history, and her witnessing matters because it means Cooper can no longer compartmentalize, can no longer keep his family's dysfunction separate from his relationship. Ariana now knows what he comes from, which means she knows more about what he might become.

The Title's Resonance: Beauty as Evidence of Loss

Dancing Rainbows is perfect title for this episode because it contains both beauty and its destruction. The image is lovely, but it exists only in memory, and the memory now serves as evidence of what was lost. T.L. cannot remember Dottie dancing without remembering what she became. The rainbow is inseparable from the demons that outran it.

This is the episode's thesis about trauma: the good memories do not cancel the bad ones, they coexist, making each other more painful. Tommy saved his mother's life, which means he has to live knowing she chose to keep dying anyway. T.L. saw Dottie at her most alive, which means he has to carry that image alongside everything that came after.

Visual Language: Restraint as Power

Sheridan's direction in this episode is notable for its restraint. The key scenes are filmed simply, allowing performances to do the work. No dramatic lighting, no swelling score, no camera tricks. Just actors in rooms, speaking truth.

This restraint is aesthetic choice that serves the material. Trauma does not need embellishment. The facts are sufficient. Sheridan trusts Thornton and Elliott to carry the weight, and they do.

Small Moments, Large Implications

The episode is full of small details that land with cumulative weight. The way T.L.'s wheelchair is positioned slightly apart from the rest of the family at the funeral. The pause before Tommy begins his story, the moment where he decides to speak. The way other family members react to revelations that are clearly not new to them but have never been spoken aloud before.

Stray Observations

• The opening crash happens in daylight, unusual for Landman's typically night-set accidents. Suggests there is no time of day safe from violence.
• Rebecca's drunk hookup subplot feels deliberately minor, a reminder that life continues in its messy way even as major dramas unfold.
• Cooper's truck appears again, still pristine. Contrast with the vehicles destroyed in opening crash.
• The restaurant scene is notably the only extended dialogue between Tommy and T.L. where they are facing each other rather than positioned defensively.
• Dottie never appears in flashback. She exists only in stories, which makes her simultaneously more and less real.

Verdict

Dancing Rainbows is Landman's most emotionally devastating episode, and one of its finest. It is proof that Sheridan's strengths are not limited to oil field politics and cartel intrigue, that he can direct intimate family drama with the same command he brings to larger-scale set pieces.

The episode works because it understands that trauma is not something that can be resolved or overcome, only lived with. Tommy cannot undo his childhood. T.L. cannot bring Dottie back to the girl who danced in rainbows. The sister who died of SIDS will never grow up. These are permanent conditions, and the episode's power comes from watching characters try to speak them aloud without being destroyed by the speaking.

Billy Bob Thornton and Sam Elliott deliver career-defining performances, and Sheridan has the wisdom to film them simply, trusting the material and the actors to carry everything. The result is an hour of television that feels like watching something you should not be allowed to see, private pain made public in service of larger truths about family, addiction, and the memories that cannot save us but remain anyway, beautiful and terrible in equal measure.

The title's promise is a lie, but it is a necessary lie. We need the image of the rainbow dancer even knowing the demons outran her, because without that image there is only the addiction and the death. The rainbow did not save Dottie, but it existed. That has to count for something. The episode leaves us with that ambiguity, which is the only honest ending possible.