Jumping on the wave of theories about how Landman’s second season might end!

What if nothing in Landman is random? What if what the second season presents as downfall, administrative conflict, and personal rupture is, in fact, the delayed execution of a plan set in motion back at the end of the first? The theory is simple, yet unsettling: Galino never “saved” Tommy Norris out of loyalty, impulse, or coincidence. He saved him because he already wanted him.

In the world of Landman, favors do not exist. Investments do. No one moves a piece that large without expecting a return. Tommy’s rescue at the close of season one was not a human gesture—it was an acquisition. Galino did not protect a man; he bought an asset. An operator who knows the back rooms, the leaks, the dirty deals, the blackmail, the invisible risks. Tommy is not merely someone who solves problems. He is the one who solves the problems no one else can touch.

If that key is correct, Tommy’s firing in season two stops looking like an accident of circumstance or a by-product of power struggles and starts to read as engineering. Poisoning Cami’s ear, tightening decisions, pushing the protagonist out of the system that sustained him—not to destroy him, but to remove his alternatives. As Galino expands his influence as an investor, he isolates Tommy. Closes doors. Shrinks the board. Forces the choice.

The central question, then, is not whether Tommy could end up working for Galino. It is why he would accept it.

He would accept it because Tommy does not exist outside this kind of world. He is not a man of the “after.” He operates in the “during”: crisis, urgency, violence, money, and morally compromised decisions. Outside that ecosystem, he has no narrative identity. The fall may feel like relief, but it also exposes him to a void he does not know how to inhabit. Working for Galino is not comfort—it is continuity.

He would accept it because the series has already shown that he does not know how to leave the game. He does not build another life; he moves from one center of power to another. He does not change the logic—he changes the owner. And because the debt already exists. The rescue in season one creates a silent asymmetry: in Landman, favors are not forgotten—they are collected when the target has nowhere else to go.

There is also a more tragic element, and perhaps the one most faithful to the character: by accepting Galino, Tommy would not see himself as subordinate. He would see himself as necessary. It does not matter who commands, as long as he is the one who “fixes” everything. Even captured, he preserves the illusion of control. It is the same belief that has always sustained him: that the one who executes, in the end, governs the chaos.

If this reading is correct, Landman would be saying something even harsher about its own universe: the system does not punish men like Tommy—it reallocates them. Cami represents visible, institutional, corporate capital. Galino embodies power without a façade. Tommy’s “fall” is neither moral nor redemptive. It is merely a transfer of ownership.

In this design, there is no classical tragedy, no redemption. There is a revelation. Tommy was never the man who solved everything because he was exceptional. He solved everything because the system needed someone like him. And when a system needs you, it does not let you go. It simply changes whose name is on the checks.

If this is the arc hidden beneath the surface of the series, Landman is not telling the story of a man who falls. It is telling the story of a man who discovers, too late, for whom he had been working all along.