DALLAS
2014, Warner Horizon Television

SPOILER ALERT: This blog post contains many plot elements from the first episode of the third season and the season finale of the second season of Dallas on TNT.

I know this is a blog about “Energy at the Movies,” but I can’t resist a quick update from the “Energy on the Small Screen” genre: Season Three of TNT’s reboot of Dallas premiered last night with as much drama as energy. Last season, Cliff Barnes’s short-lived Ewing takeover ended with an even more convoluted merger of Barnes Global and the newly created Ewing Energies. Big Oil is growing faster than big hair in Dallas, as John Ross and Emma Ryland are teaming up under the table to vertically integrate newly created Ewing Global. In addition to extraction, Ewing Energies is turning to tankers, pipelines, and icebreakers to expand the family empire. John Ross predicts, “Ewing Global is going to be bigger than BP and ExxonMobil combined.”

He is referring to a multi-faceted diversification strategy soon to be employed to expand the conglomerate. In addition to petroleum resources obtained by vertical and horizontal drilling and fracking shale deposits, Ewing Global retains control over the technology to effectively extract and produce energy from methane hydrates. With the added ability of Ryland’s icebreakers, Ewing Global is poised to take on controversial Arctic offshore leases.

In addition to expanding the global perspective of Texas energy beyond gushing geysers of the first half of the 20^th century, the reboot of Dallas excels where the first run failed. Women take the driver’s seat and are poised to take an even larger role this season. Now that she’s off the bottle, Sue Ellen helps steer Ewing Global into the twenty-first century. She suggested John Ross frack the shale under Southfork to acquire the capital for the Arctic leases. Pamela Barnes Ewing threw her own father in jail to pull his company into the Ewing Global fold. Emma Ryland did the same to become CEO of Ryland Trasportation, and Elena Ramos has turned to the cartels to redefine her role on Southfork.

In one hour, Dallas oscillated between horizontal drilling, methane hydrates, hydraulic fracturing, vertical integration, women in energy, the Texas oilman stereotype, and a petroleum cliché, the cartel. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the season holds.

EDITED: While hastily printed as Christopher predicting massive growth of Ewing Oil through vertical integration, the speaker is actually John Ross.  The author corrected the post February 26, 2014 after a second viewing of the program.