The AV Club Reviews 4.13 Thanksgiving

I did a little math toward the end of the game at the center of tonight’s episode—a sequence with some of the best football action this series has seen—and figured out both the numbers and the dramatic arc of this particular contest would put the outcome on Landry’s shoulders. It wasn’t that hard to call, really. For as much as Friday Night Lights is rooted in the conflicts and dilemmas of some beautifully crafted three-dimensional characters and drawn from the details of life in a particular part of the world, it’s still a TV show and has to do a TV show’s work. There are certain rules that even the least clichéd shows must follow. The game wasn’t going to end as a one-sided blow-out or give the deciding play to some third-stringer with whom we’d spent no time.

But I honestly had no whether that football would stay true, fall short, or go veering off in one direction or another. It’s the sort of show where any outcome would make sense. More importantly, I really cared where it would land. That the game of football means too much to Dillon, a town that emphasizes the sport over virtually any other aspect of life at times, has been a recurring theme since the first episode. But so has the game’s ability to reflect life. Landry’s field goal—45 or 72 yards, depending on who’s doing the telling—allowed him to grab some victory while still dealing with the personal defeat of losing Jess to Vince. It’s just a game, but that moment mattered, both in itself and as a symbol for finding hope in the midst of a lot of apparent hopelessness.

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SOURCE: AVClub.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 2:56 pm and is filed under FNL, Season 4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.