JD McCoy is officially QB 1 now, but Dillon is just starting to see what kind of a father Mr. McCoy is to his son. JD may be a football phenom, but his life isn’t perfect! His father doesn’t let him have very much fun and that is what teenagers are supposed to do is cut loose. Coach puts Riggins in charge of getting the team to accept JD, so Riggins takes him to a party, but JD gets drunk. “You’re like the coolest,” he says to Riggins. “You’re like the last American dude. You don’t listen to your dad, you don’t listen to my dad, you don’t listen to anybody’s dad.” Admittedly, Taylor Kitsch is Canadian, but he IS the last American dude, and he does NOT listen to anyone’s dad. Meanwhile, some drama is brewing between Tyra and Cash, a girl has auditioned to be the new guitarist for Crucifictorious, Matt and Julie are totally about to get back together, and Jason Street may have bitten off more than he can chew with this house-flipping deal. HUT HUT YIKES!

Lyla’s brother and sister are coming to visit for the weekend. They’ve gone to live with their mother in Northern California. Well, get ready for your wake up call, Mr. Garrity. WAKE UP! Bud is into soccer now, and Debbie Tabitha looks “like a hippie.” There’s hardly any Texas left in these kids! Things only get worse when the family goes camping. Bud says that football is stupid. Debbie Tabitha doesn’t want to eat the prime angus stakes that Mr. Garrity has brought for grilling because her boyfriend stepfather Kevin told her that meat is murder. Her boyfriend Kevin also told her that football was only played in Texas, so he sounds like an idiot. These tree-hugging latte-sipping extreme left LIBERALS are out of control. But then the truth really comes out when Debbie yells “a real father wouldn’t have cheated on mom!” Lyla tells them to stop acting like little brats, but it’s too late. Mr. Garrity has been shamed. Family is hard. How long will he have to pay for the mistakes he has made? Probably forever.

Later, he takes them to the game, and they are so bored. At a PANTHERS game?! But then they’re not as bored because Panther Football Changes People. Afterward they go for sundaes so I guess it’s fine. Family. Those two brats need to just go back to Northern California to work in the batik tote bag factory or whatever.

Meanwhile, things seemed like they were getting pretty out of hand with Mr. McCoy last week, but that was nothing compared to how this monster is behaving this week. He is too hard on JD! During the game, he yells at him from the stands. That’s not productive at all! Even Buddy Garrity is put off by Mr. McCoy’s intensity. EVEN BUDDY GARRITY! It messes JD’s game up. Coach tells Mr. McCoy to back off, because sometimes when it’s time to shape boys into men, you need to let them be boys. I know that might sound paradoxical, but it is through mistakes that we learn, and Coach Taylor knows all about this. He takes JD McCoy into his office during halftime and tells him about his own relationship with his father and how he could never live up to the old man’s expectations. Back out on the field he tells him to call the plays himself and not to look into the stands at his father. “I’ve got all the confidence in the world in you.” It’s just the kind of pep talk that JD McCoy needs, and Coach is just the man to give it to him. Classic Coach Taylor. The Panthers win the game. And yet, Mr. McCoy leaves without saying anything to his son. I tell you, the battle between fathers and sons is as old as the bible!

Street has raised the price on the house, which the Goof Troupe is trying to sell themselves, and everyone is getting nervous that they won’t be able to pull it off, and Street gets in a fight with Herc in the backyard in front of the whole open house! But Street gives an impassioned speech about why he needs the money for his son. Everyone realizes there is a lot at stake in this. After the game, Street gets a call. They’ve got an offer on the house. He was right to hold firm at 295. Texas forever. (Also, he’s going to go to New York and become a sports agent because he ran into another former Panther who introduced him to an agent, and you can see that foreshadowing glimmer in everyone’s eye.)

This episode also features the single least believable scene in FNL history, when Landry talks to Mrs. Taylor about his loneliness and inability to get a girlfriend in the school library. The new girl in Crucifictorious was giving him mixed signals and now she’s a lesbian, and Landry turns that into a stunningly open and earnest outpouring of his deepest emotions to the high school principal during the middle of the day in an open-aired room surrounded by his peers? Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Taylor is a wonderful woman, and what she does for these kids is invaluable, but no. No one does that. A thousand sad nerd monkeys typing on a thousand sad nerd typewriters for a thousand sad nerd years would never tell Mrs. Taylor how lonely and sexually frustrated they were in the high school library. (Nailed it.)

Crucifictorious!

Time Machine Torious! “For our next number, we’d like to literally take you via time machine to KILL HITLER, but then later take you to when 1995-era Flaming Lips was relevant or even remotely believable as a thing that a group of Texas high schoolers would play in their garage and not a tiny indulgence on the part of aging writers nervous by how long it’s been since they themselves were in high school.”

Tim Riggins got a letter of interest from a college, not that he knows it. It was intercepted by Billy, who’s not going to let Tim mess this up. He’s never really seemed like college material, has he, you guys? But it’s that type of thinking that keeps people from reaching their true potential. Jason Street helps Billy put together a highlights reel to show to recruiters. They knock it out of the park!

Sometimes this show just kills you. FULL HEARTS!