Spoilers for tonight’s Friday Night Lights coming up:
Last week gave us some devastatingly emotional scenes in Friday Night Lights‘ “The Son,” a high-water mark for the season to this point, if not for the whole series. The followup, “Stay,” gave us a set of stories that were about aftermath: the aftermath of Matt’s father’s death, and the aftermath of Tim and Lyla’s relationship, resurrected by her brief appearance back in Dillon.
Both for thematic reasons (it’s a show about high school in a small town, and people move on) and practical ones (FNL can only afford so many old stars in its arrangement with DirecTV), FNL has had to be a show about transitions in these past couple of seasons. And episodes like “Stay” show what a good job season four has done with servicing, and doing right by, longtime characters and storylines, while making the new characters and environment compelling.
It may be because I’m not much of a Riggins-Lyla ‘shipper to begin with, for instance, but I like him with Becky at least as much as I do with his old flame. But “Stay” both gave tribute to how much that relationship meant to him (despite his protestations of being “a moment to moment kind of guy”), while also affording a sweet moment with the persistent Becky. (Even his final “Shut up” was as tender as it was wounded.)
Meanwhile, Matt and Julie’s troubled getaway provided some strong moment’s for Aimee Teegarden after Zach Gilford’s stunning performance last week. Her desperation and confusion as she makes this grand gesture, to deal with her guilt over keeping Matt in Dillon, are heartbreaking, as is Matt’s effort to first correct her, then (as the boy who’s always had to try to make things right for others) comfort her. Even before we see Matt taking a long drive, we can see that their repeated declarations of love for each other are genuine, but—as they both suspect—not enough.
A quick hail of bullets:
* The game: I liked that we didn’t see the Lions pull out a last-minute win or tie in their underdog performance on TV; Vince gets sacked on the last play, but the important thing, as Coach Taylor emphasizes, is that they proved they are not a joke: “Every single person out here respects you. .. You need to respect yourselves.”
* Nice product placement: Your friendly Sears electronics staff will kick some jerk’s ass if necessary!
* It should probably go without saying, but again Connie Britton does a fantastic job showing the multiple, simultaneous emotions of a parent dealing with an infuriating teen, whom she worries about both physically and emotionally. Forget Gossip Girl: no TV show does as fantastic a job of dreading my children’s teen years as Friday Night Lights. Nice job, Tami.
