By: L.J. “Flywheel” Pascolini
Cultural critic
A TV critic’s review sketched between thunderous applause and involuntary eye-twitching
I like Landman. I like root canals too, but only one of these is meant to hurt. The acting is electric, the dialogue juicy, the scenery huge. Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t perform monologues – he consumes them, which is fine. Someone has to pay for my Saturday-night subscriptions.
But the fossil-friendly framing? That’s not plot lubrication. That’s Hydro-Cope-Aesthetics: rigs shot at sunset with ideological Spanx cinching the truth waistline.
And the cameo you mention? The billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys turning up playing humble like it’s an artisanal craft. Let’s call that ‘humblesplaining’ – when a man lights a macro-problem with a welding torch and sells it as mood lighting. It begs the question: did his Drilluminati fingerprints ghostwrite the tone as well as the budget?
Because the show keeps telling you who controls oil prices (certain countries) while refusing to mention the USA – the largest producer in the room holding the biggest whiteboard marker. That’s Permian Parallax: if you zoom out far enough, you see the whole chessboard. The script prefers you zoom in on boots.
Depletion Drama Without the Mitigation Season
The season’s closer loves a dramatic drumroll of scarcity:
“Oil’s running out soon!”
Which is Depletion Denouement Dodged – a scarcity speech used like narrative methadone for wrongdoing, without the inconvenient after-credits scene. If you’re going to invoke a finite fuel cliffhanger, the only rational next scene is The Flywheel Futurist Flip: retraining workers and plugging their talent into electrons that don’t require narrative forgiveness forms signed in triplicate.
Instead, we’re treated to:
Scarcity invoked ✔
Transition planning ❌
Mitigation spoilers sold separately
A classic case of a Scar-City Script Arc: declare scarcity dramatically, then smother the mitigation conversation with scenery, speeches, and rigs that could double as narrative comfort blankets for any audience still clinging to combustion like a Blockbuster membership card.
Glossary of Things the Script Keeps ‘Accidentally’ Losing in the Sofa Cushions
Because grown-up energy conversations should never be consigned to the B-plot, let’s weave in these lexical land mines:
Drilluminati: The real antagonist is the worldview urging you to back more extraction because scarcity – without answering what inherits the royalties.
Drill Skills Bridge (Not Shrine): Rigs are a prop. Skills are the point.
Fracklash Laugh Track: When groundwater, methane migration and air toxins are dismissed with a smirk rather than acknowledged like the existential plot beat they are.
Hydro-hagiography: Transforming hydrocarbons into folk-hero narratives edited for ideological shelf-life and bourbon monologues.
Belt Buckle of Narrative Protection: Symbolic armour donned to deflect nuance while declaring personal ruggedness and national allegiance.
Hydro-Cope-Aesthetics: When you buff rigs at sunset to distract from unpriced climate and health externalities.
Permian Parallax: Insisting domestic influence is invisible because foreign antagonists sell clean narrative lines.
Hydro-Rug Pull: Setting scenes in universal-care nations (fictional or real) while removing universality from the mechanics so the audience never googles the alternative royalty structures.
Scar-City Script Arc: Confessing scarcity but ghosting transition, editing mitigation out of the season finale.
The show isn’t lying. It’s editing what comes next out of narrative gravity.
Drug Cartel Comparison (Season 1, Episode 10–15 Years Out Edition)
Let’s talk cartels – accurately, scathingly, theatrically:
In the show, the Mexican drug cartel boss wants to diversify into oil, which is apparently the career pivot equivalent of trading a tiger for a tiger that wears Texan cologne.
Both oil and narco cartels are:
immensely wealthy,
brutally territorial,
and fluent in bending lawmakers and law enforcement through strategic corruption.
Yet the narrative paints one addiction as “necessary” and the other as senseless villainy. That’s Belt Buckle Bias so large it could crack a Tim Tam under narrative pressure alone.
They co-legitimise coexistence because open warfare means destroying profits, logistics, investors, lawmakers, and rivals alike. Their coexistence isn’t market forces. It’s cartel forces doing market cosplay.
To put a tribute bow on it:
“When a cartel diversifies into oil, that’s not diversification. That’s vertical integration. Just with better sunglasses.”
Sexism and Misogyny: The Detour We Never Needed
Here’s the trope we still need to call out.
The sexism is narratively fossil-grade and twice as old. Female characters are often scripted like emotional cautionary tales, where competence is a side-quest, ambition is framed like an oil spill, and authority comes bundled with a sigh track.
Let’s be fair, human, and direct in critic voice:
We hope the creators aren’t endorsing these views. But we also hope the writers contracting sexism for narrative convenience don’t get invited back for Season 2.
It’s possible to critique a trope without accusing intent. So we’ll do it like this instead:
“Fictional energy cartels can coexist. Misogynistic tropes shouldn’t. Deletion pivot required.”
The Third Act the Show Refuses to Film
No economy survives long on fuels that run out. The only actual hedge against volatility and collapse is transition into building the things that scale today: solar, wind, storage, grid, recycling chains, and infrastructure that doesn’t audition for stranded-asset defects.
But the fossil lobby is allergic to transition before scarcity bites, so the show’s economics refuses to resolve the arc.
Lurkers aren’t dummies. They get it. Which is why framing mitigation tech like uncertainty while scripting more extraction like destiny is such a Depletion Red-Herring Rodeo.
Final Critic Stinger
“Brilliant craft. Unnecessary spin. Intentional mitigation gap. The only thing running out soon should be narrative permission for finite fuels without a funded transition scene.”
✍️ Attribution
By: L.J. “Flywheel” Pascolini
Cultural critic, glossary-smuggler, and patron saint of sentences that actually finish their own logic.
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