No More 'Gus And Fiona': Say Hello To Pfionder!

I'd love to chalk up the impulsive, short-sighted decisionmaking on display all over this episode to the effects of a hot, sticky Chicago summer cooking everyone's brains, but as we all know, this is just typical Gallaghering. Though a couple manage to turn lemons into lemonade -- Deb turns a rescue from a fist fight into a new passion, while Lip kills it on a trip to visit Amanda and the parents who've already paid him to stay away from her -- both Frank and Carl make themselves object lessons on why kids should say no to drugs. At least Fiona's big crazy move is the (somewhat) logical progression of big crazy love.

All things considered, how's everyone doing this week? Let's rank them from who's having the best week to who's having the worst.

1. Lip
   There are so many ways Lip's visit to Amanda's parents' house in Miami could have gone awry. Said parents could have demanded their $10,000 bribe back (which, okay, Amanda's dad does before she and her mom tell him to drop it); it somehow could have come out that Lip slept with Mandy. Instead, literally everything goes Lip's way, from Amanda's announcement that she's ready to stop being an "everything but" virgin to Lip's bonding with Amanda's father over their shared passion for engineering. This guy even offers to set Lip up with a job, which would be great if it spares Lip further potentially disabling construction work, but will probably be terrible when Lip Gallaghers up the opportunity in the future.
2. Deb
   Considering her one true love told her last week that he no longer wanted anything to do with her given that she raped him...Deb bounces back pretty quickly. Accused by one of the local mean girls of the aforementioned sexual assault, Deb starts a brawl that a passing cute boy named Derek has to break up. Deb being Deb, she instantly falls in love with her savior and follows the logo on the back of his shirt to a boxing gym. Just like that, she's "in training." I'm not sure it's a great idea for someone with this much aggression to be able to back it up with legitimate skills, but at least she's happy for the moment.
3. Fiona
   Oh boy. Well, when Gus tells Fiona he's falling in love with her, she pushes through her initial knee-jerk fear (though she does manage a "...Thank you!") to reciprocate, and a marathon of sex (with brief respites for snacks and old ERs) ensues.

   (With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, no man is so tall as when he stoops to "help" a lady.)

   One thing leads to another and before you know it they're having a same-day courthouse wedding, which is maybe a good thing because it's not until they're filling out their marriage-license applications that she even finds out his last name is Pfender, with a silent "P." The euphoria from this insanity carries her through her dinner shift -- where the way Sean finds out is when the rest of Gus's band shows up to play "Here Comes The Bride" for the whole restaurant; like a grownup, Sean gruffly rolls with it -- but when Deb calls to see when Fiona's going to be home, reality intrudes.

   

   Fiona comes to the verge of telling Deb what she just did, but then can't. And when she and Gus go back to his place for the night, they both seem like they're not sure what happens next. Is infatuation going to be enough to help them figure it out? Let's see!

4. Carl
   Well, Carl's been recruited to work for a drug dealer. He's even been handed a clean-cut costume -- chinos are involved -- to make him an appropriate CSR for the dealer's white -- excuse me, "cracker" -- clientele. Unfortunately, math must have been one of the subjects he especially needs to improve on when he repeats the sixth grade, because he almost immediately screws up and hands over way more product than the customer has paid for, and ends the episode quizzing himself on dealer jargon for various fractions of weight. Hey, he can apply himself!
5. Kevin & Vee
   Guys, Vee hates those babies. Not only doesn't she want to nurse them, she doesn't want to spend any time with them; when Kevin's all "Say goodbye to Mommy!" as she's hauling ass out the door to get away from them, she can barely manage an extremely fake smile at them. And she's so lonely for Kevin that a basically innocent club dance with some strange guy leads her to orgasm-by-frottage, which she tells Kevin as proof that he needs to pay her more attention. I don't disagree, but she could also be a little sensitive to the fact that his attention is kind of dominated by their children now that her lack of interest/neglect of them have forced Kevin into single parenthood.
6. Mickey & Ian
   After a week off, Ian's mental-illness symptoms have returned. When Mickey pulls a scam involving claiming lost luggage from the airport, Ian jumps on board.
   

   ...And then takes it too far, filling Mickey's whole house with suitcases and strangers' mostly worthless crap.

   

   After shrugging off Fiona's warnings in the season premiere, it seems like Mickey's starting to get what she was talking about.

7. Frank
   I really like this show, but if anything were ever to force me to stop watching, it would be how very, very much Frank stresses me out. We join Frank this week as a cop is waking him up from the stone steps under a statue where Frank had fallen asleep/passed out and gotten shat upon by very many pigeons. As he comes to, he realizes what a great day it is: his insurance settlement of more than $120,000 is coming in! He heads straight to his lawyer's house to track it down, only to find out that they already did this yesterday, the actual day the cheque arrived. As it dawns on Frank that he has blacked out on his activities of the entire windfall day, he has to retrace his steps through each terrible decision, starting with his having withdrawn his whole jackpot in hundreds through an illegal casino above a Chinese restaurant and finally to the charity to which he donated almost his entire settlement amount, and which turned around and immediately spent it on prosthetic limbs for homeless children. Because this is Shameless, Frank tries to weasel out of his gift, and when that doesn't work, snatches one of the limbs -- which he's told is worth $60K -- and abscond with it, only to end up in a physical altercation with several of the kids he's unwittingly helped. This is maybe a slapstick bridge too far. As the day and episode end, Frank has lost everything -- even the used Porsche he impulse-bought and almost immediately ruined by running down a hotel valet with it. I'm not sure how much lower a homeless and completely penniless Frank can sink now that we've just watched him trying to steal artificial legs from needy children, but I'm confident that he'll find an even lower bottom to hit.