Don’t get me wrong, I love Friday Night Lights and I’m completely absorbed in the way Coach Eric is grappling with the challenge of building the Lions up from the ground. But this week’s episode gathered some of my least favorite subplots and really ran with them, with varying degrees of success.

Luke’s dependence on painkillers reached a crisis point, reducing him to visiting a neighborhood where he assumed he’d find drug dealers — it just happens to be the park where his teammates Vince and Tinker hang out — and I kept wondering yet again, Why is he not telling either his parents or Coach about this injury again? I get it that he doesn’t want to be sidelined for a long period, but, well, that’s what ended up happening anyway, right?

via ‘Friday Night Lights’ recap: ‘Injury List’ with lots of pain all around | EW.com.

“When I picked you up in that bar I had no idea what a good guy you were,” Becky’s mom Cheryl tells Tim Riggins. The spirit of the compliment is nice, but it’s the sort of praise/come-on that could only come from someone who’s learned to live with some pretty low expectations. She’s right. Tim is a good guy, but for reasons beyond those she mentions. She’s giving him points simply for hanging around, pitching in, and not being an asshole when really his sojourn in their backyard trailer has helped him turn into the giving, responsible person he could never quite become as Tim Riggins, Dillon Panthers star. Old Tim probably would have slept with Becky and Cheryl and charmed them out of whatever beer they had in the refrigerator in the process. Sure, he might have felt bad about it, but not bad enough to stop simply going with the flow of being Tim.

Which isn’t to say that New Tim’s stopped making stupid mistakes. There’s still the Riggins chop shop, which he effectively shut down, but not before using some ill-gotten funds to buy the future site of the Tim Riggins homestead, a choice I suspect will catch up with him before season’s end. But he has grown up remarkably from the live-for-the-moment hedonist of season one whose regretful, downcast expression didn’t necessarily speak to the feelings beneath. Once he was the sort of guy Cheryl’s used to bringing home. Now he’s someone better.

via “Injury List” | Friday Night Lights | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club.

A review of tonight’s “Friday Night Lights” which, for a few more weeks, debuts Wednesdays at 9 on DirecTV’s 101 Network coming up just as soon as I walk into some hit-or-miss cooking…

“You’re not a loser. And you’re not nothing. You’re kind, and you’re good, and you’re strong.” -Becky

The end of these 13-episode seasons can really sneak up on you. It wasn’t until after I had watched and written about last week’s “I Can’t” that it occurred to me that we only had three episodes left to go. But with the East vs. West Dillon game coming up, and all the big, unsettling developments of “Injury List,” it’s impossible to not realize that the end of the season is barreling towards all our characters like a freight train.

Throughout “Injury List,” we see characters suffering the consequences of their own selflessness. Tami’s career is in jeopardy because she chose to be a sympathetic ear to Becky about her pregnancy, even though she’s absolutely right that she never once told Becky to get an abortion or what to do at all. Luke kept his hip injury secret for the sake of the team and allowed it to get worse as a result, ending his season prematurely and drastically reducing the Lions’ chances of a morale-boosting upset over the Panthers. Vince, having gotten back into business with Calvin and Kennard to pay for his mother’s rehab, has to witness Calvin’s murder in the course of a debt-collection run gone awry. And Riggins, who has been a good friend and mentor to Becky while resisting any temptation to give in to her obvious feelings for him, and who has also been a good and helpful tenant to Cheryl, winds up tossed out by a jealous Cheryl when she misinterprets an innocent viewing of “Thelma & Louise” in her bedroom.

via Friday Night Lights, “Injury List”: Self-sacrifice | Alan Sepinwall on TV – - NJ.com.