Lip Meets The Parents

With Fiona sidelined for most of the episode -- the payoff of last week's bombshell cliffhanger is that she has to serve ninety days for violating her parole, at a correctional center alongside offenders who did things like, just for instance, stabbing her boyfriend's new girlfriend in the stomach because she was sure the girlfriend wasn't actually pregnant like she'd said she was but whoops she actually was -- Lip takes center stage, and he has a lot of balls to keep in the air. While waiting for his quarter grades to be posted online so he can see if he did well enough to keep his scholarship, he still has to work in/steal food from the cafeteria, look after Liam, and fulfill his agreement with Amanda to freak out her parents with his unsuitability. When he can't make their appointed dinner, he comes up with an even better way to look worse: why doesn't she bring her parents to the Gallagher manse? Little does he know that it's going to be even more chaotic than usual: Carl's invited Bonnie and all her siblings to stay there so that they don't have to spend winter sleeping in a van. But when a woman shows up at the door, she's not Amanda's mother: she's a social worker from DCFS doing a surprise inspection. And there's a lot to inspect.

But moments after telling the kids to shut up, Amanda arrives with her parents (who are Yada Yada from Seinfeld and some dude I've seen a thousand times before), so Lip reverses himself and orders them to be as noisy as they want. He makes a bad enough impression that as soon as Amanda's stepped away, her dad offers Lip $10,000 cash to stop seeing her. He tells her in front of them; she guesses he took it; he confirms that he did; and she leaves, in horror, sadly saying she was just starting to like him. But then, of course, as we all saw coming, she returns a few hours later, because the whole thing was a set-up. The perfect crime!

Elsewhere, it's time for Mickey's baby to be christened, which Mickey seems to regard as his very last obligation to his old life before enjoying total bliss with Ian. So...he doesn't want Ian to go, and put a spotlight on their relationship with all the family friends and relatives he assumes are as homophobic as his father, who's getting out of jail just in time for the celebration. At the after-party at The Alibi, Svetlana gets pissed when Ian shows up uninvited, and when Mickey tries to kick him out, Ian calls Mickey out for being too afraid to be himself. He's in the doorway about to leave when Mickey turns the music off to announce that he's gay, and the reaction is...no reaction. Until Terry throws the table aside and comes at him. Ian jumps into the fray, and soon enough the cops are there, arresting and driving Terry off (though not before Mickey can spitefully tell him exactly what he and Ian do -- apparently Ian gives it to Mickey hard, and Mickey loves it!); once he's gone, Lenny, the cop who has Mickey cuffed up against the hood of his car, tells him he's actually free to go because Lenny doesn't want to do the paperwork BUT I THINK WE ALL KNOW WHAT IT REALLY MEANS. And none of the rest of Terry's friends seem to care that Mickey's gay. Good job, buddy!

As for Frank: he seems to be recovering well enough from his kidney transplant, other than some confusion once he finally wakes up: he thinks that Sheila is his mother (and when she kisses him in a wifely way, there's some weird talk that seems to suggest that his actual mother may have interfered with him when he was younger), Sammi his father, and a little girl awaiting a heart transplant in the next bed Fiona. He and fake Fiona have a nice moment where she goes along with his false impression because she's just as happy to pretend to have a dad, so of course the moment is ruined when she dies before getting her donor heart.

It's a gritty, bloody episode, but how Shameless is it?