Lone Star “One in Every Family” 

Bob’s gonna need some hip waders. Most of this week’s episode concentrates on the Midland wife and the Houston business. Bob and Lindsay arrive home from their Las Vegas elopement in time for Bob to be jumped at the airport by a guy he bilked of $25K. He feigns mistaken ID (after hilariously addressing the guy by name), the cops break it up, and Bob and Lindsay resume their honeymoon in the backseat of the limo on the way home. Once Bob realizes how disappointed her parents are about the elopement, he sets her on the path of planning a real wedding. The genius of this is that he’s selling her on it while we’re watching footage of his wedding to Cat.

Back home in Houston, we find out that he has not only a wife in Cat but also a stepdaughter, Grace. On the business front, he conspires with John to back out of the wind farm deal (on paper) after confessing the investment to Clint, with the idea that Clint will see how valuable the deal really is and bring him back in. It works, and he and Drew kick off the deal in earnest at an up-and-running wind farm (that Bob actually has nothing to do with). Unfortunately, John and Clint come face to face at the meeting and a pissing contest ensues about the merits of the investment. Clint agrees to back it, and Jon gets a cubicle at the Houston office (and an uppity, dismissive speech from Trammel). On an elevator ride upstairs, Clint relays to John that Bob is a hell of a kid, but that he’s had no guidance, and once he gets it, he’ll be a dangerous businessmen (in a good way?).

John plays along and asks about Bob’s dad; Clint tells him Bob’s dad was a deadbeat who abandoned him and his mother. John loses sight of “this is a back story to reel in the mark” and goes off on Bob about it. Bob gives John both barrels about what a deadbeat dad he actually was, setting him on this life of grifting and running and John essentially throws him out of his hotel room. Later, John takes matters into his own hands, wooing Drew with drinks and chatter and palming his executive suite access card so he can get onto the executive floor for a peek at the bank statements. As the episode closes, John is on the phone with an unseen partner, proposing a huge multi-million dollar takedown (of the Thatchers) that Bob won’t be on in (but will surely be a victim of).

This was another strong episode. We saw a little more of exactly how much fast-pedaling Bob does. He has a minor freakout when he loses his Houston phone, and very smoothly sweet talks past it when it falls into the hands of Lindsay’s ne’er do well sister Gretchen, who’s been summoned home for the wedding but instead seems hell bent on finding a thread to pull loose in Lindsay’s happiness. She confronts Bob about the man who answered the phone when she hit redial (John)—saying he addressed Bob as “son.” He tells her it’s a Texas thing (which seemed odd to me because I assumed her to have been raised in Texas with Lindsay, but whatever).

Separately, Lindsay has been snooping through Bob’s things looking for people to seat on his side of the wedding. His high school has no record of him, so he sits down and shows Lindsay that he was in the yearbook—the only time he was ever captured on film during his 12 years of public school. She moves from suspicious of him to guilty that she doubted him.

I didn’t care very much for Gretchen; she seemed an unnecessary distraction too early on. The deck’s stacked high enough with antagonists without her. The one strength of the characters is that she pushes Lindsay’s buttons in such a way that she completely alters the personality of who we’ve seen Lindsay to be up to now—her whole physicality changed and the lights went out (kudos to Eloise Mumford!). And, of course, Gretchen makes the case that there’s somebody like her in every family (like John is for Bob), but I didn’t feel like she was completely genuine, even when she tried to be.

There was barely enough Cat this week—when Drew is popped for a DUI, she sweet talks the captain at a (nonexistent) Houston precinct by rattling off all the things her family does for HPD, and then is shamefaced when the deputy assigned with actually dismissing the charges from the books is a guy she rebuffed (four times) in high school.

WATCH THIS SHOW, Y’ALL. Enough said.