Serial Watcher – Friday Night Lights – 2-03

Shows

The Israeli singer Aviv Geffen has a song called the “The Wimp Song”. One of the first lines of that song is “When you cheat on him, he says he’s sorry”. Seeing Matt go up to Eric at the top of the episode and apologize for how things ended with Julie reminded me of that song. Julie dumps Matt for the Swede, even though the Swede is taken, and Matt apologizes? I believe the expression “WTF?!” was created for this occasion.

But Matt isn’t a total wimp. He’s only like that around Julie. He takes all the anger and emotions that build up inside of him and directs it at the worst possible target Smash. This is where Matt would have benefited from anger management class. If he just told Julie she’s a spoiled bitch when she dumped him instead of bottling all this emotions, things would have been better for him. But on the other hand, He got Carlotta to touch him, so perhaps he’s doing all right.

I liked that Coach McGregor’s game management secured a victory for the Panthers. With the way he’s made too look like the Anti-Taylor in terms of personality and team management, it must have been very tempting to have him lose the first game of the season, which would make it easy to get rid of him in the near future. The fact that he won the game with a unique move is going to make Buddy’s campaign harder.

Yes, Buddy Garrity. He’s on a mission to save the Panthers and the Taylors. It would have been easy to dismiss his actions as payback for being banished by the new coach, but seeing how the Panthers are the only thing left for him, he really wants to save what he sees as a team on the verge of collapse. After his drunken display last week, Buddy looks like he’s getting his act together. It’s going to be interesting to see him and Eric work together in order to oust McGregor and get Eric reinstated as the Panthers’ head coach. And with Eric back in Dillon, I sure hope Tami will do better, Glen will go away and Julie will get the rebellious thing over with (I thought it was over last year) and both Riggins and Jason will be back wearing Panthers colors.

The Riggins/Street relationship was probably the highlight of the episode for me. Last year their story was one of the main drivers of the show. Until this week they didn’t interact much, which was a shame. Street really wanted to help Riggins get better both personally and on the field, but when Riggins shut him out and then the coach made him realize he’s not taken seriously, Street was really starting to lose it. His idea about Mexico can’t end well, but as the episode ended and he confronted Riggins, which prompted him to join this little trip, we know that at least we’ll get a nice little travel story out of it.

The sign of a good episode is that when it ends, it leaves the home viewer wishing it hadn’t. As the two “buddy couples” came together at the end Jason & Tim on their road-trip and Buddy & Eric on their quest to fix the team and the Taylor household, I wanted these stories to go on. I really can’t wait the extra week to see how these things continue. That’s how good this show is.