Friday Night Lights was all about separations this week. Let us list ’em, shall we?
• Tami and Eric (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler) had a difficult time putting baby Gracie in daycare.
• Matt’s live-in nurse/love, Carlotta (Daniella Alonso), said she had to scram back to Guatemala: “My family needs me,” she said. No explanation.
• Smash (Gaius Charles) and his family had dinner with his girlfriend, Noelle (Jana Kramer) and her family. Racial tension arose when her parents said they wished Smash would stop dating their daughter, and those tensions further separated the couple after Smash got into a fight with a racist white boy while on a movie date.
• Ex-con Santiago (Benny Ciaramello), who’s been living with Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland), felt an emotional pull away from his new middle-class, football-dominated existence when a pal fresh out of the slammer tried to pull him back into his old life.
• And Lyla (Minka Kelly) has found a new hobby — hosting a Christian call-in radio show with a new character (Gilmore Girls’ Matt Czuchry), a charmer who looks as though he’s going to keep her from dealing with any lingering affection she has for our man of constant sorrow, Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), just as Tim was about to pledge his sincere love to her.

This episode was all over the place, quality-wise, and you know I’m writing this from the place of Friday Night Lights Is The Show We Love To Love, right?

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Boy, they sure crammed a lotta stories into Friday Night Lights this week, didn’t they? It was as though, anticipating the writers’ strike, the producers mapped out an episode that tied up some plot-lines, made sure just about every major character got significant screen-time, and now hope to leave us happy and wanting more when the show comes back, as the NBC announcer said, “in the new year.”

And for the most part, I was indeed pretty happy with the results. The initially jarring let’s-get-baby-Gracie-baptized-this-weekend subplot resulted in a fine series of scenes in which Julie (Aimee Teegarden) tried to triangulate between her parents, first hoping to win some sympathy from her father (Kyle Chandler) by confiding her trumped-up woes to him—oh, those teenagers are wily narcissists, aren’t they?—and then getting into an expertly played, not-quite-quiet-voice shouting match with her mom (Connie Britton). Plus, in between, we got a truly excellent brief moment between Coach Eric and Tami, in which Tami pointed out with her usual slicing asperity the family-dynamic subtext that Eric was too dense—too male—to understand: i.e., that he was being manipulated by Daddy’s little girl. These are the kinds of moments, so deceptively simple yet emotionally subtle, that Friday Night Lights does with unique understatement.

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This week’s Friday Night Lights contained a series of scenes, each of which was beautifully acted and sometimes quite moving. (You’d have to have a heart of stone not to have both cried and laughed during Tim Riggins’ abject yet hilarious series of on-field apologies to his teammates in a last-ditch attempt to get back on the team; this may have been Taylor Kitsch’s finest moment onscreen yet.)

At the same time, as lovingly crafted and executed as each individual scene was, there was a lot about this episode that just didn’t make dramatic sense in the way the Friday Night Lights we love always used to make sense.

For example: Tami (Connie Britton) had that terrific moment when she blasted the new English teacher for being “inappropriate” with her daughter Julie—not just for being touchy-feely, but also for recommending she read The World According to Garp. That was a perfect FNL touch, reminding us that, as intelligent as Tami is, there’s still an element of small-town small-mindedness to her. (And don’t start writing to me about slagging off small towns—I’m not. I’m just saying, some people in rural areas, as there are those in big cities, can exhibit a narrow outlook on some things, especially when it comes to culture.) Tami’s rage at the teacher provoked another marvelous scene in which daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden), let Mom know just how embarrassed and betrayed she felt.

We also got a very good Coach-and-Tami scene in which Tami explained to her husband (Kyle Chandler) that she really needed “a night out.” But it wasn’t the night of hoochie-coochie that Coach Eric had hoped for—nope, Tami wanted to whoop it up with some teacher-pals playing Bunco.

As I say, all very good scenes. But they didn’t add up as plot: There is just no way someone as sensitive as Tami wouldn’t have told Coach about her big confrontation with the English teacher, and their daughter’s reaction, before sailing off to Bunco-ville. This lapse is typical of FNL this season when it’s not playing at top-tier level.

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This week’s Friday Night Lights split down the middle for me: some very good stuff, some pretty lame stuff. I’ll get the lame out of the way first.

• There was the moment we all saw coming weeks ago: Matt’s smooch with caregiver Carlotta (Daniella Alonso). Plus a scene where she teaches white-boy to dance by having him put his hands on her hips to feel the Latina rhythm. This was so corny I can’t even muster true annoyance about stereotypes.

• The Julie subplot. New teacher in town—why, it’s John from Cincinnati! No, I know, it was Noah from a Milwaukee newspaper, but for the 99% of you who didn’t watch the HBO series I’m referring to, actor Austin Nichols played the title role in John From Cincinnati. Anyway, Julie (Aimee Teegarden) suddenly developed a case of motor-mouth this week—hasn’t she spent the preceding month being moodily monosyllabic?—and gushed about her life to a complete, if cute, stranger/authority figure, and it was groaningly obvious that she was going to have an insta-crush on the guy. The only thing that will make this subplot worthwhile is the fierce tongue-lashing her mom (the reliably superb Connie Britton) is going to give this guy to stay away from her daughter.

• Now, this next point is not so much about lameness, but rather about having writers and producers who should trust their characters more. It’s great that Smash (the glowing Gaius Charles) is getting a lot more screen-time, but I thought the pressure his mother (the marvelously controlled Liz Mikel) put on him to seriously consider the black college recruiter’s pitch was unworthy of this fine woman. She’s obviously intelligent enough to understand why Smash isn’t interested in going to a school with a losing football team. Why couldn’t those scenes have been more subtly written (like, oh, the entire last season of Friday Night Lights!), to allow her to express both disappointment and understanding, and for Smash to be more than just a Porsche-lusting stubborn kid?

Okay, those are my reservations. Now, here’s what I liked about the episode.

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