Tommy’s troubled family lore is finally revealed, and it’s pretty bad. But it at least brings him closer to Ainsley.
Photo: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
At last, the funeral! We’ve been waiting weeks for some more information on Tommy’s mother — and for some follow-up to Tommy’s tense reunion with his father — and at last, we get it. In fact, “Dancing Rainbows” covers quite a lot of emotional ground from start to finish, to the point that I’m awarding it another four stars even though it’s not the most thrilling TV episode ever.
When the Norris family meets up with T.L. before the funeral, we get a glimpse of the charmer he once was. Or maybe that’s just the power of Sam Elliott, whose palpable charisma rubs off on his screen partners. He’s full of praise for Angela, Ainsley, and especially Ariana, with whom he forms a quick kinship based on a shared history of loss. But he’s not willing to extend that warmth to his own son, who still refuses to admit any real feelings of love or grief. Tommy’s attitude about Dorothy makes T.L. angry, even if he understands the root of that anger.
T.L. is much more visibly emotional about Dorothy’s death than Tommy, but he also feels a little distanced from those feelings. After all, he lost the Dottie he knew long ago; it’s finally his time to say goodbye. He’s still not very comfortable talking publicly about how he feels and what their marriage was like, though. He doesn’t speak at the (very brief) funeral, and it takes a question from the openly confused Ariana for him and Tommy to start opening up about Dottie.
As you may have expected, the history is pretty dark. The last time Tommy saw his mother was at 14 years old, when he gave her CPR after finding her facedown in the bathtub. She returned the favor by kicking him in the face and making herself another drink, prompting him to pack his things and take off. T.L. dealt with similar types of emotional and possibly physical abuse, but he was “too weak” to leave her, always holding out hope that she’d return to the happy woman she used to be. Tommy keeps insisting that he came here to celebrate Dottie’s passing rather than mourn it, but I don’t read any satisfaction in Billy Bob Thornton’s performance. He’s mourning the mother he could have had — the joyful woman T.L. talks about, who once spotted a rainbow and made him stop the car just so she could run through the sprinklers.
Later on, the episode finally reveals why exactly Dottie turned to a bitter life of alcohol and drugs: She lost a four-month-old daughter to SIDS. After that, she refused to feel love for anyone, numbing herself and ignoring or abusing her husband and son. T.L. coped by hiding away at offshore drilling sites and sending checks home.
Tommy explains this to Ainsley, whose reactions are actually kind of touching. I don’t love how only women are given the space to grieve openly on Taylor Sheridan shows while all the men are expected to stay stoic — Angela, Ainsley, and even Ariana do so much crying in this episode, and they never even knew Dottie — but Ainsley’s empathy in this scene arguably makes her more tolerable than she has ever been before. Her anger on her dad’s behalf scans for me, too. It’s always strange and sad to learn from a parent about the ways their parents fucked them up.
Angela’s presence is relatively muted in this episode, too. When she and Ainsley get their own storylines, it’s a disaster, but they function fine as supporting characters in Tommy’s larger story. In “Dancing Rainbows,” Angela is the one who pushes Tommy to make real changes in his dynamic with T.L. At her instruction, he goes so far as to invite the man to move in with them, a huge step toward repairing their relationship. And sure, he pulls the typical “I’m here to please my wife” excuse, but Tommy is pretty sincere in extending this second chance. He does want T.L. to get to know his family. And T.L. wants that, too, despite his coldness to Tommy earlier. Seeing him admit that he’s “not sure he deserves this” is affecting.
The funeral also serves as a handy way to bring Cooper and Ariana back together after a very brief breakup. She joins him without second thought after making sure to clarify exactly why it can’t work between them: She doesn’t want to uproot her life and leave her home and family. Cooper still doesn’t really have any counter to this, but Ariana softens toward him anyway after seeing him around his family — not because they’re so close, but because they aren’t. (There’s not a single interaction between Cooper and Ainsley in this episode.) It’s super important to Ariana to stay close to her family, but Cooper doesn’t share that need.
So the two reunite under new terms: Cooper will “ask her everything” from now on, splurging on the occasional gift (like a nice dishwasher) or trip, but otherwise letting Ariana keep living the way she lives. She’ll keep living in the same house and working at the Patch, not because she needs the money (between Cooper’s oil and her own hefty settlement) but because … she wants to, I guess? It makes her feel independent? To tell you the truth, I’m still not totally certain, because Ariana’s one scene at the Patch this week mainly revolves around all the cash she’ll be raking in by just taking two shifts a week. So does she need the money or doesn’t she? I guess the idea is that Ariana has never actually made money for herself before, and that idea is attractive to her.
Rebecca gets her own little love story in this episode, if you could call it that. You can see where it’s going from her very first scene, when she’s placed next to an attractive British man on the small plane. Apparently, her control issues manifest in flight anxiety, especially during turbulence, like on their bumpy ascent. She can’t stop shrieking, and in a classic rom-com move, she grabs onto Charlie’s hand. He reassures her and loads her up with vodka and watermelon juice (at her own insistence), and by the time they’re descending, she’s shit-faced.
From there, we cut to Charlie’s bed, where Rebecca wakes up the next morning. Now, Charlie mentions that he works in the oil fields, so I expect him to show back up. But I do wish there was a bit more substance to this diversion in the episode. What did the two talk about during the flight? What did their flirting look like? We don’t get any real sense of their dynamic outside the next morning’s post-coital mortification.
The bigger plot reason for Rebecca’s flight is another disaster at a rig, depicted once again in the cold open: Some unidentified man in a pickup truck was parked near a well owned by M-Tex, and an M-Tex driver plowed right into him, killing them both. It’s hard to say why this happened or even why it matters, but I expect to see more of that next week, along with more follow-up to Cami’s new alliance with Danny Morrell. Their meeting in this episode goes well, for the most part — he agrees to put up a huge loan to quickly drill an offshore well damaged in a hurricane — but he wants to negotiate the deal with Tommy, not Cami. He wants to keep her clean; after all, she’s not a snake.
Or is she? The scene ends with Danny describing Tommy as a “hawk” he can work with, but we’ve seen that Cami wants to prove herself in this arena too. She can be tough as hell, and I’m not sure she’ll be happy to let Tommy take over all the dirty work. It remains to be seen what all this means: potential tension between Tommy and Cami? A real power struggle? Cami getting in way over her head, or successfully laying down the law? I appreciate that “Dancing Rainbows” slows down the plot again for more character-centric stories, but I’m still curious where this is all going.
• Hopefully Cami listing the house means the show is ready to move on a bit from the endless scenes of her grieving Monty. Her visit to his grave is fine, but it’s also a bit much for an already grief-heavy episode.
• Nate and Dale also attend the funeral, ostensibly for emotional support but really to provide some comic relief on the drive over. Easily the best moment, though, is T.L.’s reaction to their presence: “Who are these fucking clowns?”
• Okay, I know I said Angela’s solo subplots are bad, but her experience with the elderly actually comes in handy in this episode when she convinces Tommy that T.L. is lonely and regretful.
• An update after the H2S leak last week: Jerrell is dealing with severe and potentially irreversible ocular damage. It’s disturbing to see him react to this news, of course — we get a classic “How come I can’t see?” meltdown — but I’m still not totally sure why we’re touching down with Boss’s crew so much. We barely even know Jerrell.
• “I’m sorry I struck oil and got rich. I won’t let it happen again.”
