Landman season 2 episode 1 just foreshadowed a big fan prediction for Tommy and Cooper's relationship

Warning: Contains spoilers for Landman season 2 episode 1.

Taylor Sheridan is a busy man. When he’s not playing with his cowboy kingdom in the Yellowstone TV franchise, he's still crafting enthralling, soap opera-style drama series like Landman, where greed, power plays, and twists and turns remain the order of the day.

Fans turned out in their droves for the first season of the show, making it the most-watched original series on Paramount. A whopping 35 million viewers tuned into the premiere, and the season 1 finale was record-breaking, too.

So, when the Landman season 2 release date was finally announced, it’s not surprising that ardent fans were cooking up theories as to how the next 10 episodes would shape both Tommy Norris and his relationship with his son, Cooper.

In season 1, we saw Cooper go his own way after the fallout of the M-Tex explosion, acquiring small patches of land that he hoped would make him a pretty penny. His eventual goal is to keep buying and selling oil-rich land to earn enough money to purchase the coveted Wolfcamp oil shale.

What felt like a pipe dream is quickly becoming a reality, though.

In the season 2 premiere, we see Cooper’s well strike gold, making him a very rich man in the process. With an estimated 6,200 units of oil flowing through his land, Cooper claims this well will “pay for itself within two months”.

In fact, it’s so lucrative that he can earn $29,000 a day, or $880,000 a month. That’s a whopping $10 million a year, and this is only the first of many wells he plans to drill.

And this is where episode 1 plants the seed for a major clash between Tommy and Cooper, with his newfound wealth putting him on a direct collision course with M-Tex, and by extension, his father.

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Over on Reddit, Landman fans have been trying to predict what will happen in season 2, and a popular theory is that Cooper and Tommy will end up as business rivals. One fan wrote: “I feel like Cooper and Tommy will eventually be competing since they will likely be using the same methods of drilling.”

Another added: “M-Tex won't have the money to buy up Cooper’s growing land, so Cooper sells to the top competitor,” while a third user thinks we’ll see a “Cooper vs. Tommy oil king battle” play out this season.

And episode 1 does appear to back this theory up...

It not only shows Cooper stepping into the big leagues, he's also doing so without the help of M-Tex or his father, who he's clearly not shy about going up against.

Of course, it could be that Tommy and M-Tex do manage to buy Cooper out and the Norris family will become even richer and live happily ever after. It would be far more interesting for Cooper to turn to M-Tex’s big competitors, TTP instead, though.

He’s already got a grudge against M-Tex after the way they treated the victims of the explosion at the start of season 1, so it figures he would be keen to spite his former employers now. It might start an epic oil war in Midland, but that’s exactly the kind of drama Taylor Sheridan lives for.

Landman season 2 is streaming on Paramount+ with new episodes arriving on Sundays. Season 1 is available to stream now. Get a seven day free Paramount Plus trial at Amazon Prime Video.

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