Photo: Cliff Lipson / Showtime
All Hands On Deck, Gallagher-Style
With a social worker's home visit imminent, Lip tries to make everyone behave perfectly, and they do, except for how Fiona tries to excuse her own behaviour and Sammi gives Frank drugs.
Shout-out to Pilot Viruet, the writer you normally find in this space, who's been sidelined by illness this week, forcing me to do something her posts this season have made me want to do: watch Shameless. (I think I grokked what was going on, but I hope you'll forgive any factual errors.)
SO. Fiona's out of jail and waiting to see what will happen to her. Because it's Fiona's first offense, her lawyer gets the DA to agree to a reasonable deal that may still include a token amount of prison time -- sixty to ninety days' worth. Fiona keeps insisting that because Liam's ingestion of cocaine was accidental, Fiona shouldn't be considered guilty at all, to which her lawyer is like, ...yeah, let's see how that goes.
Meanwhile, Lip has taken over keeping the family together -- literally, because now that Liam's out of the hospital, they're due for a home visit from a social worker. He makes the kids' lunches, plans dinner, orders Sammi to handle Frank and make sure he doesn't fuck things up by stinking up the house with his weed smoke, and takes Liam to school with him since he doesn't trust Fiona. It's clear that Lip doesn't want to replace Fiona -- he still attends class and responsibly gets an extension on an assignment -- but if the worst happens, it's just as clear that he could.
Sammi...could not. She's still insecure about her place in the family and can tell Lip and Debbie don't like her (because they don't bother trying to hide it), so she's very susceptible to Frank's combination of recrimination and wheedling, which is how he ends up alleviating his pain with a heroin shot she is kind/dumb enough to bring him. When he passes out in the bathroom having soiled his sweat pants, Lip decides he's had enough -- particularly since Frank can't be in the house in that state when the social worker comes -- and declares that Frank is Sammi's problem now.
In other Gallagher news: Debbie is still pursuing Matt; Carl is worried that Liam's incident may have left him brain-damaged (though an online quiz convinces him otherwise); and Ian may be on the road back to Gallagherhood now that Mickey's tracked him down and fireman-carried him out of the gay club where he's been lapdancing for/on sad old queens.
I'm not the best person to judge how Shameless-y it all is...so let's go to Pilot's foolproof format.
| Shameless-y Element | Present? |
|---|---|
| Fiona hates being happy. | Fiona is at no apparent risk of being happy any time soon, this one doesn't apply. But after fighting it for the better part of the episode, she accepts that she was guilty in the Liam disaster and gives up on the notion of fighting her lawyer's deal (house arrest, parenting classes, NA meetings, and three years' probation) to try her luck in a trial -- so she's evidently decided it's more important to be happy, someday, than to be right. |
| Any character has sex. | No one has sex, though Ian is just about to go home with some old dude he gave a lap dance to in exchange for "party favours" when Mickey intervenes. |
| Frank is selfish or manipulates someone. | Selfishness: defiantly smoking weed in the house when a social worker is coming to investigate the family any minute. Manipulation: whining that Sammi is just as bad as his other kids when she prevents him from smoking more...whereupon she tries to make him love her the most by giving him heroin. GREAT JOB, IDIOT. |
| A Gallagher commits a crime. | Lip steals dinner ingredients from school; Carl head-butts a couple of classmates who've been making fun of Liam. |
| Ian?! | Ian is back in a big way as Mickey goes on a mission to reunite him with his family while they're in crisis (though he...might have other reasons for tracking Ian down) (wanting to bone). |
| Debbie tries to grow up. | Debbie tries to solidify her re-sparked relationship with Matt by weaseling her way into his apartment and cooking him a very adult dinner. When he explains that when he was there for her after Liam's medical crisis as a friend, she takes the tweenager-y approach taken by one of her dumb school friends and cuts herself so she can show Matt and change his mind, though judging by her reaction, she instantly regrets it. |
| A screaming match between Gallaghers. | Lip spends most of the episode avoiding Fiona, but when she tells him about the tentative deal her lawyer's worked out and that she doesn't know if she wants to take a possible ninety days in prison when she could roll the dice with a trial and possibly end up with no prison time if she wins (and as much as five years if she loses), Lip screams at her that she is guilty and that everyone else can't just put their lives on hold to take up her responsibilities if she ends up going away for half a decade. |
| College shenanigans! | Getting an extension on an assignment and walking in on a topless girl is pretty typical college stuff! Taking your baby brother with you to school because you don't trust your sister to look after him properly is not. |
| Sheila has a breakdown. | Sheila is "out of town," but she probably will have a breakdown when she comes back to see that Chucky threw a brick through her front window and that he and Sammi and Frank have been squatting there. |
| The Milkovich siblings pine for their boyfriends. | Mickey spends most of the episode stalking and then trying to rescue Ian from his current job as a lapdancer. If Mandy was present (forgive me, it's my first time!), she was not pining. |
| The return of a past character. | A thousand past characters could have appeared and I wouldn't know it, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case. |
| Well, that was uncomfortable. | Everything about Veronica's pregnancy was revolting, from Kevin offering to loosen her constipation with sex (hey, that's me cleaning up what he actually said) to her references to "mucus coming out of [her] for days" to that whole thing where two of her triplets ate the third. Also awkward: Carl, Lip, and Fiona finding Frank passed out post-heroin, having shat his pants. And then Sammi taking him into Sheila's shower to clean him up. |
| Bombshell cliffhanger. | Another somber ending, as Fiona accepts her fate. Now that she's a felon, I bet voting is what she'll miss the most. (There is still an open question, though: who robbed Kevin and took the keg of rub & tug money?!) |
| 8 / 13 Seems like crisis mode makes the Gallaghers very Gallagher-y. |