As someone who's been a major fan of many TV shows for years and years, and someone who only got into Lost a few months ago: Lost is the greatest thing to ever have been televised. Seriously. Nothing has ever been so immersive, atmospheric and ambitious as this show. It had me gripped from start to finish, and I was genuinely satisfied by the ending (it's incredibly misunderstood). There has never been a TV series as big as Lost, and there may never be again.
Idk what to do now, i'm dead inside.
If you still hate Skyler and love Walter after this episode... I don't know what to say to you.
I finally got why I love this show so much. Not because of computer stuff and not because of business stuff. I love it because everyone in the show feels real. The dramatic stare and silence for a minute are absent here (well, except for Joe, but that's part of his charm). Characters act fast and natural, their small talk is believable – never once I've seen a show which portrays such things so perfectly. Hell, this is a rare kind of a show where I laugh at the jokes, not at how terrible they are.
And only after that I should mention that, yeah, there's some computer stuff and business stuff which I like too.
THIS SHOW IS FUCKING CRAZY AND MAKES NO SENSE BUT I LOVE IT AND CAN'T STOP WATCHING
Eases you in, then takes you on a ride like no other.
The ending scene cutting between the sheer joy of teens living their lives and the bombing while Dreams is playing is honestly one of the most gut punching scenes I've seen on TV. Like yes this is a comedy but it pulls no punches when it reminds you of just how bleak real life can get
Jimmy has hustle. Mike feels obligated to help his daughter-in-law. And Jimmy loves his brother.
It's so easy to boil these episodes down to a few simple themes, and yet it's the way the show depicts and explores them that makes it superlative.
Take Mike's storyline for instance. It's literally three scenes, each of them fairly short, and yet all of them communicate a great deal about who Mike is and what his motivation and moral calculus is in that brief time. When Mike is on the phone with his daughter-in-law in the tollbooth, we see him not only stand at attention, but wave someone through the gate without bothering to check their stickers. If there's one thing we've seen from Mike in Better Call Saul, it's a devotion to the rules of the parking lot, where he hassles Jimmy and even if it seems dumb, he falls back on the fact that it's just "the rules." And yet he tells his son's wife that he'll drop whatever he's doing, whenever he needs her. We see that dramatized as suddenly those same rules have no purchase with the previously doctrinaire Mr. Ehrmentraut, and it emphasizes the truth of his promise to help her however he can, with the subtext of his guilt for, in his mind, taking her husband away from her.
Then we see the not-so-subtle manipulation from Stacey, who initially asks Mike if it's okay to spend the money that effectively got her husband killed, and after receiving Mike's blessing, seamlessly segues into talking about how hard it is to make ends meet without him. She let's the silence after this statement hang in the air before sneaking a furtive glance at Mike. Mike's a smart guy; he has to know that Stacey is effectively using Mike's guilt to convince him to help them out financially. It's not necessarily craven; as a single mother of a young child, she likely needs a great deal of support. and yet at the same time, it does feel uncomfortable to see her taking advantage of Mike's guilt rather than simply asking him for help. But the look on Mike's face says it all, and speaks to the depth of those feelings of remorse and regret. So when we see him back at the vet's office, looking for "work," we get one step closer to the Mike we know and love Breaking Bad.
Throughout all of this, Mike never once says how important Stacey and her daughter's well-being are to him; we never hear him say how much his guilt over his son's death still drives him; and we never hear him say that's he's dipping into the underworld in order to help support Stacey and clear his conscience for what happened with Matty. And yet all of those things are 100% clear from his actions, from what we know about the character from prior episodes, and from the relationships the show has built so far. It's not even that big a part of the episode! And it still moves Mike's arc forward quite a bit in a very limited amount of screentime because of how much it says without saying anything.
That's the beauty of Better Call Saul (or, at least the beauty apart from wonderfully composed and framed shots like the one at the end of this episode). Vince Gilligan and his lieutenants know how to tell you what a character is thinking, what they're feeling, what's pushing them in one direction or another, with the characters rarely having to announce or vocalize these things. In fact, the show's pretty good about having a character declare something about themselves or their intentions while conveying the opposite. It's the epitome of "show, don't tell" storytelling, and it's one of the things that makes the series so engaging despite the fact, or perhaps because, you can boil a given episode's big ideas down to a few short sentences.
In the same vein, no one in "RICO" ever tells us that Jimmy has the utmost admiration and affection for his brother, or that what he lacks in Chuck's brilliance he makes up for in sweat, or that the scales are tipped against him. But it all comes through loud and clear.
The hustle is the easiest to process. The idea that Jimmy worked in the mailroom of his brother's firm, that he used distance learning to make up his remaining credits, that he found a law school that would accept him and managed, after a couple of failed attempts, to pass the bar, shows remarkable commitment and perseverance. And when we see him combing through a dumpster in order to find the shredded documents he needs to make his RICO case against the nursing home, when we see him tirelessly trying to piece together the shredded documents, we see him working harder than his well-heeled colleague on the other side of the case would ever have to. It comes through, and we learn a little more about who he is, what makes him admirable despite a certain shadiness, and what differentiates him from the other folks in his orbit.
But we also see some really cleverness from him. He's obviously not the precedent-spouting legal whiz that Chuck is, but he picks up on the irregularities in the story his wills client is telling him; he figures out a MacGyver-esque plan to write a demand letter and try to stop the spoliation of evidence then and there, and he even has the wherewithal to stake out the nursing home's garbage to collect the evidence (with proper legal support for why it's acceptable!) even if he's not quite clever enough to check the recycle bins first.
And it's also clear that Jimmy both loves and admires his brother. Again, the show never outright says that Jimmy became a lawyer because 1. he wanted to make his brother proud of him and 2. he respects Chuck so much that he thought the best way to make himself respectable would be to emulate his brother, but that subtext (and Chuck's bemused, slightly incredulous, but warm surprise at the news in the flashback), is palpable throughout. There's something aspirational about Jimmy here, and that makes the audience all the more apt to side with him when Hamlin crushes his dreams of working alongside chuck (in a wonderfully effective, dialogue-free scene), or when the nursing home's lawyers try to intimidate and condescend to him.
Jimmy wants to become his brother's equal, to measure up to the man who always stood out as the best a McGill could be in contrast to his good-for-nothing little brother. He loves Chuck, and while Chuck can be a bit patronizing to Jimmy as well, the affection is clearly mutual, as is the pride when Chuck realizes what Jimmy's managed to uncover. And Chuck is revitalized by that. He's quiet and nervous in the negotiation until he speaks up and demands the $20 million like the legal ace we see in the opening flashback.
The series has yet to tell us how Chuck went from being the star partner we see in that flashback to the beleaguered shut-in we meet at the beginning of Better Call Saul, but what we've seen thus far suggests that he's suffered a loss, a setback, that made him not himself, that made him feel less than capable, and that he became convinced of his electromagnetic sensitivity as a way to shield or excuse himself from that. And we see Jimmy putting little breadcrumbs to help bring his brother back to who he was. That's what makes the scene at the end of the episode so flabbergasting, where Chuck is once again in his element, to the point that he doesn't even realize he's stepped outside without any ill-effects. There's still problems on the horizon (Chuck's partnership agreement and the use of his billing code seems like a Chekov's gun for one thing), but the enormity of that moment, and the build to get there, are all expressed with hardly a word, and without ever making those concepts too literal or blunt. It's a thing of beauty, and part of what makes "RICO" such a superlative episode of television, and Better Call Saul a great series right out of the gate.
God bless you Jess, at long last the honest words that needed to be said
It's easy to take Matt Saracen for granted on Friday Night Lights. Zach Gilford is consistently good, but not in a showy way. His performance feels very true to the life of a West Texas teenager, full of mumbles and dryly comic asides and rarely coming with the big speeches or flashy moments that look like Emmy-reel material. In some ways, it's the greatest success an actor can have -- they blend so seamlessly into their role that it ceases to feel like a performance and more like you're just watching a character live and act, to the point that you neglect to notice the effort and skill that goes into producing something so effortless.
But in "The Son," we spend the bulk of our time with Matt Saracen, watching as he processes his father's death in various stages, and suddenly, all that understated realness comes to the fore in a manner that absolutely blows you away. I'm hard-pressed to think of a better depiction of the complicated feelings of grief and resentment that come from a young man losing a father he never quite found common ground with. The episode explores Matt's sorrow, his numbness, his anger, his frustration, and a little bit of peace through this difficult time, and it's the best showcase for a character and actor that we've seen grow quite a bit over the past four and a half seasons.
"The Son" lets you see Matt's detachment at all of this. When everyone shows up for his wake, so many people are trying to comfort him, so many are trying to give him support, and yet he's clearly having a difficult time accepting it, or even feeling it, given his conflicted feelings about his father. Matt describes himself as doing nothing but sitting in a chair for an hour and saying thank you, and it's a great representation of the difficulty of the logistics of grief, of giving yourself time to process death while having to fulfill the duties of the bereaved -- accepting condolences, putting on a brave face where possible (his "are you serious" response to the McCoys showing up was great), and walking through the part as much as possible. There are details to be taken care of that are necessary, but which get in the way of just feeling what's happening.
One of those is making funeral arrangements, and in one of the better non-Matt moments, Tami steps in to stand up to the funeral director after Matt just can't take it anymore. It's a nice moment for Tami, who as Julie delightfully puts it, is "built for crisis," and a reminder that for however much we've seen Matt mature over the years, he is still a young man who is scrambling to find his footing in the world amidst all the responsibilities his father left him with.
Some of the show's best moments have taken place with a handful of players on that football field, drinking beers and showing the camaraderie that has developed among the gladiators of the community. But this time, when Landry and the Riggins Bros. take Matt out to try to take his mind off things, it turns into one of the rawest moments in the history of the series. Matt admits that he hates his dad, that he feels his dad used the army as an excuse to neglect Loraine, drive away Shelby, and leave Matt in the mess of having to put his dreams on hold. With these feelings, Matt is supposed to stand in front of his family and friends and eulogize his father, a father he has unfinished business with, and as Matt laments, he'll never have a chance to work through those feelings with the man who spurred them.
It's also difficult because Matt feels like he doesn't really know his father. When a recruiter talks about how his father was a practical joker, Matt's half convinced that he's talking about the wrong guy. Matt is expected to stand in public and say goodbye to a man he never really knew. He tries to allay his concerns by seeing his father's body, but his reaction to what he sees, his inability to eat and the tears in his eyes that drive home the finality and horror in what he's witnessing, show that he's only rattled further. He comes to the Taylors and in their way, each member of the family is there for him.
And when it comes time to give the eulogy that's been gnawing at Matt for the bulk of the episode, Matt does something to help him get through it -- he tries to understand his dad. He tells a story of a humorous moment in a family shopping trip, and acknowledges that there's a facets of his dad, like his humorous side, that he rarely saw, and others, like his devotion to the army, that he didn't really understand. But despite that, he seems to accept that his dad had his reasons. Matt's life was hard without his father -- Henry's absence made things much more difficult for him in many areas of his life -- but his father saw it as a calling and an important mission, and even if Matt doesn't get how that could be more important than their family, he at least seems to find some peace with it.
There's other events going on at the margins of "The Son." Vince feels himself pulled between his potential as a car thief and his potential as a role model giving speeches to little kids. Luke turns away from the now cartoonishly sniveling J.D. McCoy and company. Riggins is impacted by seeing what Matt's going through, but it comes out in more nonsense with annoying Becky. Lyla makes a brief appearance at Matt's funeral (Why would she fly in it for it? Have we ever seen her have a single conversation with Matt?) And in a sweet scene, Julie and Coach share a tearful embrace that illustrates how this experience has made her realize the fragility of life too.
But the star of the show is Matt. At its best, Friday Night Lights succeeds by balancing its cheesier plot side with its fly-on-the-wall realism, and nowhere is that better realized here. Zach Gilford gives an incredible performance, with tears, frustration, hurt, and comfort that create as stunning a recreation of a young man experiencing the loss of his father as one could imagine. This is a series that thrives on emotional truth, a genuineness to the characters and their reactions to these events. The death of Henry Saracen, a complicated man who leaves a complicated legacy for his only son, is a pretty massive event, and Matt Saracen (and Zach Gilford) respond with an incredible realness to the severity and complexity of it. As Matt shovels the dirt onto his father's grave, we understand the tumult within this young man, who has been so good and so put upon for so long, moving on and making peace with it all. That's a big beat to play, but it works, and offers the best and most affecting episode of the series so far.
This might possibly be my favourite TV Drama ever. Coach Taylor might just be the most upstanding man to ever appear on our TV screen.
9.1/10. There's a central question that permeates "Texas Whatever" -- is Dillon worth keeping? Is it worth sticking around in this Devil Town or is it better to go seek your fortunes in greener pastures?
That's the query everyone is grappling with in one way or another as everything in Dillon is up in the air once more. Coach and Tami have as cold a war as we've ever seen between the two of them over whether to see what comes next after [spoiler]the school district eliminates East Dillon's football team[/spoiler] or to move to Philadelphia so that Tami can take the job at Braemore. Tim Riggins has to decide whether to keep squatting in a trailer that isn't his or to run away to Alaska. So many people in the episode are trying to figure out their futures: Billy and Mindy with [spoiler]their soon to be twins[/spoiler], Julie and {spoiler]Tyra[/spoiler] as they find themselves inexorably drawn home once more, Luke as he contemplates what his life will be after graduation, and Vince and Jess trying to pick up the pieces and imagine what life will be like without the team that's given each of them a purpose.
Each of these people has been shaped, and in some ways battered by Dillon. Coach once again finds himself stripped of his team. Tim's been incarcerated there. Julie and Tyra at one point wanted nothing more than to escape. But everyone finds themselves pulled back to it, like moths to the flame, by something or someone, no matter how many times they get knocked down by it.
It's hard not to read a certain amount of meta-commentary into the major plot developments here. Coach being dethroned from the Panthers and sent to go rebuild with fewer resources at East Dillon lines up suspiciously well with FNL itself being soft-pedaled off of network television by NBC and banished to DirecTV, with presumably smaller budgets and a dimmer spotlight. Now, as the show rounds out its final few episode, with the end clearly near, the East Dillon Lions, like Friday Night Lights, has effectively been canceled, despite pleas from ardent fans over how much it's meant to them. While I'm sketchy on the behind the scenes details, it's difficult to believe the show's precarious situation wasn't on the writers' minds when they were writing these storylines.
But the way it connects to the in-universe happenings of Dillon is that the deck is stacked. It doesn't matter that East Dillon has had such success on the field; West Dillon has the history and the resources and the town's movers and shakers on its side, to where an upstart program like the Lions never really stood a chance. Coach Taylor can take his team to the state championship game, and twice have it taken away from him because of forces beyond his control. There is a certain unfairness in Dillon, always has been, and Coach Taylor can stand there with his finger in the dyke trying to stem the tide; he can try to do what he loves, or he can leave this mess behind, and move on.
He doesn't want to leave though, and it creates an incredibly meaningful conflict between him and Tami. I wrote a fair amount about this last week, but I appreciate that the show is turning the tables here, having Tami point out that she's been the dutiful Coach's wife for eighteen years and that if he really supports her as much as she supports him, he'll seriously consider moving to Pennsylvania so that she can follow her dream. That creates a real schism between them, a bone of contention, of a real fundamental issue the likes of which we haven't really seen before. Sure, they've faced big decisions, but for the most part they've been on the same page. This, however, is as serious a disagreement as they've had, to where Coach doesn't even want Tami at the meeting to announce which program survives since he feels like she's rooting against him.
That said, you know he's going to agree to move to Philly. You know he might even apologize. This show is too good-natured for there to be any other result. But despite that basically foregone conclusion, the story still has meaning because we buy the conflict at the center and the performances that anchor it. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton make the most convincing married couple on television, capturing the love, the disagreements, and the partnership through everyday life that make them feel like real people and give a moment like the end of the episode stakes even if we know what the likely result is.
Tim's story was, again, more of a mixed bag, if for no other reason than because Taylor Kitsch is still a mixed bag as an actor. He can do really subtle moments like his understated smile when he realizes Tyra's come to see him, and he can do his silly mumbled retort to various comments that make him feel like the same stolid character we met in the pilot. That said, I like the idea that Tyra is what helps snap Tim out of his funk, to see the brighter side, or at least the light at the end of the tunnel, after all that he's been through. I don't know that I really needed the two of them to sleep together -- it felt like both of them had moved past that, to be frank -- but I like their friendship and understanding of one another coming to the fore, even if Kitsch isn't as good as Adrianne Palicki at selling every part of it.
But at the end of the day, Friday Night Lights isn't a show about plotlines or even about character; it's a show about moments, and "Texas Whatever" is full of great ones. For all of TIm's unevenness as he turns subtext into text with Tyra, his speech to hesitant Luke about playing State like it's the last game of his life is a moving one, buoyed by the understanding that Tim himself has grasped for the football life after high school and come up short. It's given weight by what we've seen the character go through, and the parallel choices the two characters have made.
But that's just one of many beautiful, heartrending and heartwarming moments in this episode. We have Billy comforting a sobbing Mindy who wonders what kind of life their family will have with two more mouths on the way. We have Vince and Jess telling the head of the district what the East Dillon Lions have meant to them. We have Tyra and Julie getting together one more time and remarking on where they've come from and where they've headed. We have withering, hurt looks exchanged between Eric and Tami. We have Matt coming home with a Christmas tree, to surprise his dementia-ridden grandmother and tell her he loves her. We have Buddy giving his sales pitch for a Dillon Panthers superteam, while Coach in equal measure laments that he could never come back to the school and calls Buddy a son of a bitch for his ability to persuade. We have Becky, acting skills still a bit lacking, pouring her heart out to Luke and being rebuffed in brutal fashion. We have Jess lamenting that the end of the Lions may end her shot at breaking the glass ceiling atop the gridiron and becoming a coach. We have what is likely to be the final instances of all the named football players pal-ing around together on the football field and imagining their futures. We have Tinker cutting a patch of grass out of the dirt to preserve his blood, sweat, and tears. We have an emotional exchange between Coach and his star player after it's announced that their team will be dissolved after the season. And we have, in one of the most touching, meaningful moments ever on the show, Vince hugging Eric, not as his Coach, not as a mentor, but as a friend who helped change his life.
Tyra said it best - Dillon is like a drug. When you're apart from it, you can see its rougher edges and the things that made you want to get out, but when you're in it, you can't imagine anything else. The same goes for Friday Night Lights. Stepping back from the show, you notice the way it can rush through convenient plot twists, the way its younger actors wax and wane in their talents, the way characters appear and disappear as needed, sometimes without explanation. But when you're in the middle of the show, seeing that rush of moments, you feel the show in a way that transcends its faults and foibles. Friday Night Lights, like Dillon, is far from perfect, but it has enough of those little things, and some of those big things, that affect you, that move you, and that feel like home, to where you wonder how you could ever leave.
It's so hard to nail the landing, to give everyone a satisfying note to end on, to wrap up and sum up in the same sixty-minute time frame, to do justice to all the themes you were trying to express over the course of five seasons, to service characters new and old, to deliver something with depth and feeling and meaning and force in the way the best of television can muster.
And Friday Night Lights absolutely nails it.
Can I nitpick? Sure. A number of the newer characters take a backseat to the returning ones. I wish we'd gotten one more moment with Smash. And pretty much everyone gets a happy ending, which feels good as a viewer who's been invested in these characters, but which reflects a certain lack of bravery on the part of Jason Katims and the folks behind the show.
But you know what? Forget about all of that. It's all just too good to care, from the big sweeping moments of awe that this show knows how to pull off, to the smaller, quieter, even funnier moments that don't loom nearly so large but are often even more affecting and poignant.
Let's focus on the awe, though. The State Championship game is absolutely the peak of this show's cinematography. While FNL has never really gotten the (mostly small, occasionally large) details of football right, its directors and DPs have always known how to shoot the game to make it seem equal parts a war and a chess match. But this was something else. It was a departure from the show's usual style in depicting a battle on the gridiron and it paid tremendous dividends.
Gone was the speed. Gone were the thuds. Gone (well, mostly) was the commentary. Gone (also mostly) was the score. Normally FNL gives us football as storytelling -- the triumph of an individual player or the team battling back or the change in strategy that saves the day. Instead, "Always" gave us football as art.
Everything is shot in slow motion, to show us the beauty of the game. The blend of red and orange on the field stands out amid the magic hues of dusk. These young men, fighting with everything in them, diving, leaping, running, blocking, are turned into part of a glorious ballet. The crowd roars, swelling and waning with each play. And suddenly the players on the field, the coaches on the sidelines, the fans in the stands each ceases to be individuals and instead blend into this living, breathing organism. Everyone is a part of this thing, as the visuals depict a world moving like gorgeous clockwork emerging from the chaos. In its place is a team, is a city, is a whole.
That is, perhaps, the thesis of Friday Night Lights. The show has certainly explored the darker side of the game, the people who find themselves removed from its allure and see it as something ugly, the handshake deals and honor among thieves that drives boosters and educators alike, the cottage industry of those living off the largess in some way shape or form. And yet, FNL is optimistic about this game, and what it means to a community. It posits that, for good and for ill, in towns like Dillon what these young men do on the field, and what the people who stand behind them do to guide them, touches an entire town, and in the best of times, unites it. When Vince Howard throws that last pass in the air, and we see images of almost every character bound up in the outcome of this game and this series, we see people whose lives have each, in one way or another been made better by this game, who have grown and loved and been more that they might otherwise have been from being in its orbit.
But we don't see the outcome of that pass. Instead, we jump to the future, and see glimpses of these people's lives eight months after that momentous event. It's a sharp, clever move on the part of the show, creating a great visual continuity and transition, and embracing more grace than glory in the show's final moments. Seeing the ring on Vince's finger is the right, subtle way to let the audience know the outcome of that breathtaking moment, and lead us into the outcomes of almost everyone we've come to care about in Dillon and beyond.
First, however, the show has to set up hurdles for everyone, the kinds of conflicts that make TV interesting. Chief among these is the continuing disagreement between Coach and Tami over where their future should be. As I mentioned previously, I always believed that Coach would come around to Tami's side eventually; that's just what this show is. But "Always" still manages to make that meaningful by plumbing the depths of the Eric-Tami relationship, and stretching it to its limit before we reached that point. Again, the two loving spouses have never felt so divided, so upset with one another, even as they're on the precipice of this huge moment in both of their lives. The actors really sell the divide between them, so when Coach bridges the gap, and not only agrees but asks Tami if she'll take him to Philadelphia with him, that moment feels tremendous and earned despite our knowledge of the likely destination.
They're not the only members of the Taylor family to make a big decision though. In an absolutely adorable, heartwarming scene, Matt proposes to Julie in front of the Alamo Freeze (which is, as Tyra points out, the most romantic spot imaginable.) It's a little convenient, and out of nowhere, but as with most of the stories between these two characters, you're just too invested in their joint happiness to be bothered by that fact. What's more, it leads to all kinds of great comedy and character moments when Matt has to go back and ask Coach for his retroactive blessing, and Eric and Tami are understandably reluctant to give it. Much of Matt's arc on this show has been about moving beyond his natural sheepishness and taking charge, and him standing up to Coach, declaring that he is going to marry Julie no matter what and this is only a courtesy, is the peak of that. And much of Julie's journey this season, clumsy as it's been, has been about finding where she belongs, and with the support of someone she loves and who loves her, hopefully she'll be able to find her place in the world and make the next step. And what's more, Tami and Eric contemplating their daughter's engagement creates a nice way for them to reflect upon their own marriage and help build their conflict and resolution.
(Plus, that story is just filled with so many great moments, from Loraine telling Julie that she'll have to start calling her grandma, to Matt practicing his speech to Coach with Landry(!), to Coach laughing and then getting very serious, to the scene with Tami and Julie where Tami is both so worried and so happy for her daughter. It's just a winner all around.)
We also have Tim finding a reason to stay in Dillon. I don't know what it is about Tim, but the show loves to pair him up with something cute and let him go, whether it's his neighbor kid Beau, or Skeeter the dog, or little baby Stevie. As Tim makes his way around town, reconnecting with his family of all stripes and Tyra to boot, he begins to defrost from prison, to relax and want to be a part of this community again. So much of finales is neatly pairing up all the remaining characters, and what I like about Tim and Tyra's story in "Always" is that it shows the two of them finding solace in one another, but not tearing up their lives to get back together (which, as much as I liked it, is arguably a flaw in the Matt-Julie storyline.) The two of them expressing affection for one another, but simply hoping that their paths will cross again rather than making any drastic moves, is the perfect bit of understatement to make their little arc here work.
And while Tim is finding reasons to stay, Becky has to leave. With her mom coming back, she's leaving the Riggins household, and for a character I've always been lukewarm on (no pun intended), the moment where Mindy, who is trying to put up a tough front, has to say goodbye and breaks down in tears, was incredibly touching. The blended family between Miss Sproles and the Riggins has been an unexpected treat this season, and it was nice to see it get a little grace not here.
The show ends with a montage of sweet moments like that after the events of that final catch. Coach put in a good word for Jess in Dallas, and she gets to continue her trajectory toward becoming a coach as she moves to Dallas to be with her dad. Billy and Tinker, despite their concerns, get to keep playing and coaching with the Panthers. Julie and Matt have moved to Chicago together and share one more kiss. Luke and Becky have reconciled, and Luke, who always wanted to move on from Dillon himself, joins the army, in a move that makes sense with this polite, dutiful young man who wanted to see the world. Buddy finally gets to see his son become a Panther. Vince, whose estranged father came to see his once in a lifetime moment, is a decorated champion as he takes snaps for this "superteam." Tami is all smiles as she waves to the students at Braemore. Tim is building that house on his land that he always talked about, and if the image we see is any indication, is close to forgiving his brother. And finally there's Coach, leading a team again, molding something from the ground up again, and getting ready to enjoy the journey.
That journey, that FNL and its audience have been on for five seasons, is what makes all those lovely final beats so moving and so worthwhile. Everyone on this show has struggled to some degree or another, whether it be with conniving boosters or underfunded schools or absent fathers or the other myriad personal and community-wide setbacks that have stymied our heroes in places. And yet, they have found ways to go on, to seek out their happiness, both through this beautiful game and outside of it. The images of the State Championship show this sport and this competition as an oasis in a tumultuous world, and the show has depicted is a source of conflict, of difficulty, and pain, but also one of growth, of strength, and of greatness. As we see with Coach, once again starting from the bottom, it's that journey, and the beauty and love and awe that have come from it, which made those struggles and this sport, and this series, such an amazing, wonderful thing.
So boring. Either I'm an idiot who wants to find any reason to dislike this show or nothing happened in this episode. This episode was pretty much pointless. The writers could've scrapped this entire episode and it wouldn't have mattered on the show as a whole.