In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
Hi, everyone. My name is Djb, and I'm what you call a "recapper from The Past." I'm excited to sub in for Kim on a show I'm fairly certain I'd love if I'd seen it more frequently than twice in my life. Please be patient. Sometimes Lou is Ken and Ken is Lou. It's confusing, y'all. So Franco punches Garrity out, like, a lot. Since Garrity has started to involve himself in Franco's relationship with Laura, Franco finds his whole life on the downswing. Luckily, it's a problem he has no problem punching his way out of. What else? What else? Tommy has a hot wife who loves him. But it's not real, because she's taking antidepressants. Jealous of the love she feels for him and wishing he could feel some of that love for himself, Tommy breaks into her stash of HappyFlex SP (the off-brand of Zoloft) and starts feeling pretty well himself. I guess he's avoided the extra vaginal wetness warned of in the side effects. You know what does go wrong, though? Tommy falls through a floor at a fire and seems to hurt himself real, real bad. Luckily, a long and cushy commercial break provides an opportunity for his convalescence. Elsewhere, Lou grows closer with Candy, whose real name isn't actually Candy. Which isn't too big an infraction, considering I don't think Lou's name is actually Lou. Why is this show trying so hard to fuck with me? Oh, and everyone thinks Mike is a homo. But everyone but Mike spends this entire episode writing love poetry, so I kind of think everyone but him is a homo. It's fun to talk in fireman language! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Hi, everyone. My name is Djb, and I'm what you call "a recapper from The Past." In my day, three networks ruled the airwaves, reality television was nothing more than a passing fad, Your Show of Shows was the biggest thing going on the Dumont Network, recappers had to take frequent hiatuses due to the ravages of polio, and a young strapping newscaster named Walter Cronkite...actually, I wrote my last recap four months ago. It just feels like a lifetime away from you nice people. Anyway, I'm excited to sub in for Kim on a show I'm fairly certain I'd love if I'd seen it more frequently than twice in my life. Please be patient. Sometimes Lou is Ken and Ken is Lou. But at least now I understand why.
Previously on Rescue Me: last week's episode aired, and everyone was exceedingly entertained.
The park by day. The birds tweet and the breeze blows and innocent denizens of New York City relax in the sun, blissfully unaware of the possible troubles brought about by Denis Leary's somewhat butt-shaped hairdo. Tommy looks at his reemergent family adoringly and throws a Frisbee in an indeterminate direction, but when he looks back a shot later, he finds that they have all disappeared. Dream sequence? Continuity error? Is he playing Frisbee with Jesus? I have learned quickly that nothing on this show is out of the realm of possibility. Tommy wanders around the park aimlessly, calling out the names of his family members as numerous jerky tracking shots indicate that the camera operator is about to be heard off-camera being all, "Sorry, buddy. Wish I could help you out, but we're kind of lost too, here." Luckily for Tommy, just past a nearby knoll, he stumbles upon his wife and kids. They're petting a large dog of some kind while said dog's owner holds the dog on a leash. Tommy's son, who I'll call "Red" for easy reference, begs Tommy for a dog and promises Tommy that he'll take care of him and everything. Tommy promises nothing, responding only, "We'll talk about it."
Garrity puts on a shirt and gets punched in the face. Standing by his locker, his dressing ritual (they must have left out the numerous attempts to put on the shirt that led to him repeatedly trying to stick his head through one of the arm holes) is quickly interrupted by a suddenly-appearing Franco, who just plain clocks the hell out of him. Garrity recovers quickly because his brain is apparently not formed fully enough to register pain, and Franco asks the strictly rhetorical, "Are you retarded?" Garrity tries vainly to explain: "I was going to the NA meetings and I got caught up the whole 'making amends' thingy." Franco, fanning the flames of a blaze that's just popped up in New York's famed Overacting District, gestures and points, shouting back, "It's not a thingy, Sean, it's a step. And you're supposed to make amends for your own personal bullshit, not mine." Y'know, it's true, and also...oh, wait, he's not done: "Telling Laura I was banging the nurse, while stupid, was one thing. Telling the entire crew that I was banging Laura...Sean, that's like a whole new level of retardation." And just as Garrity seems poised to accidentally take that as a compliment, puff up with misguided pride, and be all, "A new level of something? Thank you!" Franco gets in a last lick: "That's like the Special Olympics of substance abuse." Garrity tries the defense that he was drunk, which inspires Franco to take his fist right into the locker before he storms out of the room. Don't worry, Sean. The fist will once again toll for thee.
Chief stands outside the firehouse smoking a big, fat stogie, which puts him much more in league with his approaching visitor than he ever could have imagined. Wow. That was really homophobic. Talking in fireman language is fun! Aaaaaaanyway, a very, very, very gentle man who I am SO GLAD is not Carson Kressley in a guest-starring turn (I thought it was for a second and was appropriately horrified enough for us all...you're welcome) sashays up to the front of the firehouse and asks Chief if Mike is "around and about." Chief gives him that patented are-they-taking- over-the-whole- damn-city-or-what look I recognize from every time I walked outside the year I lived in Bensonhurst, and answers bemusedly, "Around and about? No. You two familiar?" Not-Carson-Thank-God responds that they "sure are," and asks Chief to tell "Little Mikey" that "Harry Johns stopped by." "Harry Johns"? What is that, his porn name? I mean, it's a layer more nuanced than "Harry Balzac," but not by much. Chief sneers that he'll tell "Little Mikey," and this most awkward of banter refuses to die, as Harry makes Chief promise not to forget, and then practically skips off with a wave of the hand and a cry of "Toodles." God, he's gay, we get it. Ten more seconds of this and Harry would have told Chief that he's not surprised Little Mikey is a firefighter, seeing as he's so [licks tip of pointer finger and then puts it up in the air with an accompanying "tssssss" sound] smokin'!
Tommy and Janet and the three kids (Kid One, Kid Two, and, as discussed, Red) stand awkwardly near one another in the lobby of Tommy's dad's building. They are eating ice cream and lollipops and things of a happy, prettily-colored nature. Tommy has time to quip about an approaching woman's outfit and the gay-seeming nature of a passing man (sorry, but I've already seen just about as much gay-bashing as I'm able to stomach, even though 99% of it was from me) before an elevator door opens and spits out Pa Gavin and his friend, who a girl in my office just told me is Tommy's uncle. Correct? He's the big guy. He'd probably refer to himself as "the big fella." I'm pretty sure his name is Teddy. You know who I mean. Tommy sends his kids on the way for a fun-filled day with those two grumpy old men, and as soon as they're out of sight, Tommy leans in for a quick kiss from Janet, one which she continues on with for some time. That girl is effing foxy, people. She makes me rethink my inherent desire to tell people, "Toodles."
Credits. Fires are stylish!
Firehouse. Garrity approaches Laura -- oh, dude, she was on Roswell! -- and she asks him sassily (she does quite a bit of sassing, I'm here to guess) if he's still hung over. Garrity reminds her that a week has passed before copping to the fact that, yes, he is still kind of hung over. Heh. But that's not what's brought him to this corner of the firehouse today. Instead, it's that he wants to explain something, but a snippy Laura won't have any of it, cutting him off abruptly after he gets in only "I was wrong." Laura clarifies: "You were wrong? Franco didn't sleep with the nurse." Garrity's sense of comic timing does not leave him as he's all, "No, of course he slept with the nurse..." before Laura cuts him off again and says she doesn't want to hear it. But undeterred by the reason that would make a smarter man realize when his voice has become a nuisance, Garrity stumbles on that he was jealous -- yeah, jealous -- because he and Laura had once had that "thingy." Laura, translating into English, is again forced to clarify: "We were going to go on a date and we didn't? How is that a thing?" Uh, Laura, it's not a "thing," it's a "thingy." Sometimes it's like the two of you never even knew one another at all. They banter like a screwball comedy performed by a junior improv class for a second until Garrity finds a way to refocus the argument, noting, "The point is the nurse was just about getting the pills. It was about the pills." Laura seems convinced, and even starts to worry that she was being insensitive and that she overreacted. But she doesn't keep herself affixed to the cross for long, as Garrity quickly finds a way to stuff his foot and the whole big-ass fireman boot that covers it right into his mouth: "I mean the nurse, she was totally meaningless. It was like nothing. It was nothing like the waitress. The nurse didn't even have his home phone number." Ha! Good line. Laura freezes. Awkward. She chokes out, "What waitress?" and Garrity is caught with the best possible response: "Huh?" He tries to argue that he didn't mean to say waitress (he's damn right he didn't), and she bears down on him for an immediate answer. He asks with obvious futility, "Can we talk about something else?" Laura storms off, and I'm kind of surprised she did so without first clocking him, too.
"Big fat dead guy in a bathtub," Lou announces to Chief as Lou and Tommy walk out of a brick building. Chief asks him how fat, and Lou volleys, "Kirstie Alley in Fat Actress fat." Awww, they shot this a while ago. Not so much buzz on that show after all, fellas. Tommy adds that Fat Dead Guy has been dead since yesterday afternoon and that he left the water running. So they turned the water off and told the building superintendent to call the cops, Lou editorializing, "They want to run point on the terrorist attack, let 'em start with the big fat dead guy." Was that scene really just set up for the final scene of this episode, arguably the only other pointless scene in this episode?
Over by the truck, Garrity gets clocked in the face by Franco again. Franco recaps (hey, leave it to the professionals, buddy), "You told Laura about the waitress?" Garrity denies it and then cops to it in one delicious sentence filled with two nos and a yes. Franco then has to act out the exact same scene he did in the cold open, this time gracing us with the additional information "I'm in love with her. You ever hear me say that about a woman before?" Garrity spits out, like, a tooth as Franco offers the stinger, "You keep your foolish face outta my goddamn business," and storms off in a huff. Garrity buttons the scene with the coyly observed "Wow. Love hurts." He then fully gets the import of his own joke and repeats it, chortling. Awesome.
Putting out the fire was less of a task and more of a hobby, leaving Tommy and Lou plenty of time to meander over to the truck and talk about the day's other happenings. Tommy tells Lou that Janet was "cold as ice" when she first rolled back into town, but that recently she's been "laughing at [his] jokes." This was supposed to be the first item on a list of many characteristics that make up Janet's new, aberrant, husband-liking behavior, but Lou stops him dead: "She's laughing at jokes?" Tommy says that she is. "You know what?" Lou instantly surmises, "Either she's the world's greatest actress or she's on drugs." Tommy asks, "What, I can't be funny?" and Lou nails it home: "Not to her." Lou guesses it might be a tumor, which Tommy shoots down, leaving Lou with the only reasonable conclusion: "Goofballs." Goofballs? "Pills. They got pills for everything now. Stop smoking, pay attention, don't worry, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." The only thing they don't have a pill for is premature ejaculation...but I hear that's coming quickly. Whee! I just stole a joke from 1982. Lou's final medical opinion: "I'd bet my right nut she's on one of those brand new 'I-hate-my-husband, I-hate-my-life, my-vagina-hurts, please-just-take-it-all-away' kind of thing." I guess that vagina pain fits into the miscellaneous blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah category Lou mentioned above.
And there's the truck on its way back to the firehouse, just happening upon Little Mikey and his effeminate friend from earlier. Mike walks in between two obviously flaming men, Lou noting, "Queer Eye For The Supposedly Straight Fireman!" Someone's gotta update Lou's TiVo, people. Are his television references intentionally so six-months-to-a-year-ago? They watch Mike gay down the street for a minute, Laura finally offering, "I like the shoes the blond guy's wearing." Yeah, so do I.
So this is Teddy. We're in Pa Gavin's apartment, Teddy asking where the kids are. Pa notes that Janet took them out for ice cream, and Teddy thinks that Tommy is going to kill them. He goes racing for the front door in a sequence I'll just cop to totally not understanding, but just at that moment, Janet walks in with the little girl and Red. She hands Teddy a pint of ice cream she got for him, too, and then kisses him on the side of the head because goofballs.
"So what do we do?" Garrity asks Lou and Tommy as they arrive back at the firehouse. Lou's got it all taken care of: "We wait. We don't prejudge, we don't guesstimate, we don't come to any easy assumptions. We wait until he gets into the house week." Garrity, stone-faced, continues, "And then?" Lou knows that that's when they're "just all over his gay dago ass."
We time-cut these three players into -- are we calling this the kitchen? -- where they sit together at the table, Franco bemoaning his shitty, shitty life. "I wanna, like, write something to her, y'know? Put my innermost feelings and thoughts on paper." Franco reminds Lou that he wrote some poems after 9/11 (which brings a healthy chuckle from Tommy) and asks, "Can you help me?" Tommy jumps in now to note that Lou can only write stuff that rhymes -- an affront to his poetic soul, I guess, that Lou vigorously denies. Tommy thinks that Lou is afraid to take on this challenge, and Franco quickly tires of their arguing and stands up to go, saying that he'll just buy Laura some flowers. But Lou calls him back, gesturing to Tommy for a pad and a pen and explaining to Franco that women want to hear "what's going on inside you." Heart-wise. They ask him what he sees deep down, and Franco comes up with "blackness and acrimony." Check out the big words on Franco! Tommy, by way of solution, notes, "We gotta go with tits." Excuse me? "Chicks love to hear you talk about how great they look, so you gotta tell her how great her eyes are, how great her lips are. You know what I mean?" Franco is intrigued, responding that he loves Laura's ass and wonders whether or not they can talk about that. Oh god. Best poem ever.
Loving you was never hard
To win your honor, I'd punch the face of a tard
Twice!
Something something something high-class
Something something, I love your ass
That's really all I have so far.
But Tommy counsels Franco to stay away from the ass in love poetry (were he only around to counsel Shakespeare before he wrote that rare misfire, the sonnet "I Like Big Butts, 'Tis Not A Falsity." Iambic pentameter and everything!), seeing as all women think their asses are fat. Tommy: "We like the ass. We think it's a festival of fun." Ew. But, heh. "To them, the ass is death. It's gravity and death and hard goddamn times. Stay away from the ass." Instead? "Go with the tits. Tits, eyelashes, eyes." Lou regards him in a horrified fashion, responding that if Franco gives Laura a poem about her tits, she's going to rip it up and shove it down his throat. Instead, they want "remorse" and "I'm sorry," and they want to hear about it "out the goddamn yin-yang." Can Franco write about Laura's ass if he calls it her yin-yang? Tommy says there's room for that as long as he shoehorns in something about the tits, and this argument culminates in the patter-y exchange that launched a thousand forum quotes this week, when...eh, screw it. Here's the whole thing:
Lou: Emotions.
Tommy: Tits.
Lou: Remorse.
Tommy: Melons.
Lou: I'm sorry.
Tommy: Gazungas.
Lou: I love you!
Tommy: Double peaches of pleasure. That's for a chick with really small tits.
I think Franco is gonna just go with the flowers.
Lou and his Lady Whore (hello, spin-off title!) walk down the street, Candy picking her teeth with a toothpick and observing, "That was far and away the best barbecue I've ever had." Lou wanted tonight to be special because it's the first date they've gone on in which they weren't committing a crime. She reminds him that "it isn't illegal to pay for someone's company when there's no sex involved." He asks her if she didn't think the whole thing felt kind of wrong, and she defends her whole self by telling him that this is how she pays her rent, her bills, her tuition, and so on. Lou just wishes it were "less like a business transaction." Because this is a serious moment of dialogue, they spontaneously stage-direct themselves to stop walking. Lou/Ken listens as Candy/Not-Actually-Named-Candy takes him to school. Whore School! "I really like you, Ken. I wanna keep seeing you, but I can't keep explaining this to you every time we get together." But just at that moment, an off-camera voice calls, "April?" and the world's most evil Bob Balaban, fourth Multiplicity photocopy clone skulks into the frame, telling this "April" that he's been calling her and she hasn't been returning the calls. She tells him to go away and grabs Lou's arm to depart, but this "Gary" -- I call him this because this is apparently his name -- shouts after Candy/April/Not-Actually- Named-Candy- or-April, "Don't walk away from me, bitch." Lou turns back to this Gary and tells her to learn how to talk to "the lady," but Gary pipes up with the rejoinder, "That's not a lady, pal, that's a whore." At which Lou takes it upon himself to smash this Gary's face right up against the side of a conveniently-located truck, twist his head toward her, and tells him that she sure looks like a lady to him and that this Gary would keep eating the side of the truck if he failed to recognize it. He lets go and a whimpering Gary takes off while Candy/April/Not-Actually- Named-Candy- or-April stares confusedly at the man who has just achieved the feats of strength usually reserved for much, much, much taller men.
See, wait, where are we now? What is this weird rec room-looking room with a flag? Everyone's having coffee. Oh, duh. This is totally an AA meeting, isn't it? My name is Djb, and I'm an idiot. Hi, Djb! Anyway, Mick confides quietly to Tommy that he's done some checking up on Father Murphy. Tommy sighs deeply and counsels Mick to "give it up," but Mick continues that "the kid is by his side all goddamn day and most of the night. In the rectory." And knowing what the press has told me about the Catholic church in the past few years, that can't be a good thing. Not to mention the fact that the word "rectory" is just kind of dirty on its own, y'know? Mick continues that the kid has been through some hard times and that his home life is a mess, which inspires Tommy to quip, "Yeah, we're from Disneyland."
Candy and Lou (not their real names, which always nice to have in common) finish their NYC walkabout and end up at what I guess is the front door of her apartment building. She thanks him for walking her home and then invites him up, but he begs off with no real destination. She tries again, offering to brew some tea, and Lou looks around at the cartoon heat lines rising off the New York streets and informs her, "It's like eighty-five degrees out." Dude, "tea" means "free hooker sex." Have you never been on a date before? She offers him iced tea instead (translation: "iced free hooker sex," I guess), which he accepts and follows her in for a little iced free hooker afternoon delight.
Tommy gets into his car and discovers Jimmy sitting in the passenger seat. "I asked you," he starts. "Asked you to keep on banging my wife, didn't I? I gave you permission to sleep with my wife." Tommy nods that this is so, but Ghosty keeps on him: "Instead...you turn her into a full-blown lesbian. How the goddamn hell does that happen?" Tommy purses his lips and tosses back his answer, a casual "Well, you said she wanted a girl, right?" Ha! Oh, that is so by far my favorite line of this episode. Even Ghost Cousin has to laugh, until, that is, he hauls off and clocks Tommy square in the jaw. Tommy recovers quickly, noting, "I'd like nothing better than to get into a big, ghosty walking dead man brawl with you right now, but..." I'm not sure he actually says "ghosty." He might say "ghostin'." Either way, funny. Ghost Cousin threatens, "But what?" but when Tommy looks back to respond, Ghost Cousin is gone. The old "punch and run" is really becoming a popular method of communication in this episode.
Dinner with the whole darn Gavin clan. Tommy sits across the table from Janet, who takes this opportunity to lift her foot up and place it in Tommy's crotch. So much for the homey dinner that the whole family can enjoy. She remains casual, explaining to everyone, "So, I started looking at apartments for all of us." The foot moves slightly, and Tommy replies, "That's good" in a very there's-a-foot-in-my-crotch kind of way. Tommy stands abruptly and says he's going to run to the bathroom, and I'll just bet he is.
CandyLand. Up in hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold's apartment, Candy and Lou sit on a sofa and she asks what he's thinking about. He opts for the most mood-killing responds humanly available: "Honestly? My wife." Candy's sorry she asked. Quick! Offer him some more iced tea! He explains that she pops into his head now and again, "like a ten-second nightmare." Lou is soon to grow awkward, telling Candy, "I should get back to the house." She tells him not to leave and then offers that he can sleep on the couch (the "iced" in "iced tea," I guess), telling him that it'll be fun and that they can watch movies and play games. Y'all add a PS2 and I'm totally coming over. "You like Cranium?" she asks. I do! Lou reminds her that you need four people to play, and she stands and laughs, responding, "We'll figure something out." As she nears a door that, I guess, leads to the kitchen, she looks back at him and plot-develops, "I only have one name. It's Danielle." Lou calls her "Dani," which is not her name and would, in fact, make me kill if someone used that as my nickname. She seems more pleased about it than I would. Ditto about sleeping with Lou.
Back with Tommy, he's done with the bathroom (thank you, helpful flush sound effect!) and running into the bedroom to a nearby computer. But first he stops at Janet's purse and grabs out a vial of pills. Sitting down at the desktop, he calls up the world's largest font-ed Google screen ever (it's more TV-friendly that way, which the owner of the computer must have just inherently known) and types in the name of the drug: Selectra. And up it pops, the homepage of Selectra XL. It's a perfect reproduction of a homepage for an antidepressant, with a logo and some fun facts and a woman smiling and putting in her earrings and just generally able to cope with her life, man. Tommy reads aloud, stopping to make some choice editorial comments: "Selectra XL. Safe and effective antidepressant. Mmmm-hmmm. Reduces anxiety. Stop fretting, enjoy living fully. Improved sex drive...nice! Possible side effects: oily anal discharge...small price to pay. Dry mouth. Increased vaginal lubrication." Wow. Nearly six years writing for this site and there were at least five words I'd never before had occasion to write. Nicely turned, Rescue Me! Tommy thanks God and science for this miracle drug. Then he pops open the bottle and downs one himself, which I would not have been expecting, save for the fact that "Tommy starts taking Janet's antidepressants" was the first sentence in the TV Guide blurb for this episode. Booooo, TV Guide. Boooooooooooo. Tommy puts the pills back in Janet's bag and makes haste out of the room. The con is on! I'll bet this ends totally awesomely for everyone involved.
There's Tommy and Janet and the whole family at breakfast, so I guess that means it's the ...one week later? Did we just get a chyron tell us it's one week later? Lazy, lazy, lazy. It's not as egregious as the "Two Thousand Years Later" subtitle that officially solidifies A.I. as the worst movie of all time, but it's still a pretty substantial time lapse at this point in the episode. I guess that's how long it takes the Selectra XL to kick in, because Tommy greets Janet with a big smooch on the lips and banters with Janet about some flatware, which I'm guessing he wouldn't be that interested in under other, non-pill-stealing circumstances. As Tommy grabs some coffee, Janet confides, "Last night was great." They kiss again, as the kids now look on with some advanced level of horror. Tommy happily bids the kids goodbye, and as soon as he's out of frame, Kid #1 asks, "Is there something wrong with Dad?" Janet volunteers, "Yeah," and Kid #2 continues the adorable patter, "Is he sick?" Janet thinks on it before telling her, "Kind of. He's in love." And then the inevitable pause, before Red pipes up with the question we're all mouthing right along with him: "With who?" Janet indicates herself. Isn't it the best when your kids talk in age order so you always know who to be ready to respond to? And if this scene isn't ever-living proof that they really do say the darndest things.
And here's Laura, being confronted on the street outside of her apartment by Garrity, whom she tells to, basically, quit talking while he's ahead. He tells her he's been "concentrating, like, really hard on what I wanted to tell you." Awwww. So, so wonderfully dumb. Laura checks her watch and warns, "Okay. You have sixty seconds." This type of time pressure doesn't work for Garrity -- he's always seems like the untimed-SAT type anyway -- and he bumbles through trying to say anything at all, getting out, "Franco is..." before Laura busts in with an update: "Fifty-five." All Garrity can do is notice how nice Laura's watch is, which luckily turns out to be a plot development all of its own. She tells him that Franco gave it to her, and he tells her it's really nice, asking her if it's a Rolex. "No," she responds, "it's a Fossil." Garrity asks if that means it's really old (which is funny, but are we overplaying the dumb card this week? Y'all know better than I do), and she tells him that it means he now has ten seconds to just freakin' say what it is he came to say. Garrity tells her that this watch a testament to their love, in comparison to the aforementioned waitress, seeing as all he ever gave said waitress "was a stupid necklace." Well, now he's done it for the forty-seventh time. He tries to back out of having just admitted what he admitted, asking Laura how many more seconds he has. But she responds that she doesn't know, as she removes the watch and throws it on the ground, stamping on it and screaming, "I don't know! Because I! Broke! My! Watch!" With which she storms off in a huff, leaving Garrity behind, asking her, "Well, whose fault is that?" Man. This recap writes itself.
"It's a drug called Selectra, doc. I think it'll help me get over the hump." From what we've seen of its effects so far, it also seems like it'll help a great deal with the hump, har har har. Tommy walks the streets, talking on his cell phone to his doctor. In a split screen, because this is suddenly "The Telephone Hour" with Tommy in the role of Harvey Johnson, Tommy's doctor responds that he knows the drug, prescribes it often, and rarely finds any deleterious side effects. Tommy then assumes that doc can hook him up, but Tommy has another chemically-imbalanced think coming: "Not a chance. The last time you were here, you told me to kiss your white Irish ass." Oooh, that's the kind of shit you don't want showing up in your chart. Tommy's call ends with his doctor hanging up on him, which I have to say is pretty raw. But it proved a timely opportunity for Tommy to stare around after the call is terminated and see a kid staring at him. A kid who the "on" tease at the end of this episode tells us is a very important kid. So, fans of foreshadowing, you have been warned.
Tommy stops by a confessional booth (which on this show doesn't mean anything close to what it means on most of the other shows I've recapped) and asks the father to bless him for sinning. The priest -- that's not Father Murphy, so WHO IS THAT? -- recognizes Tommy immediately, and Tommy launches into a speech about how he has to atone for the sins of his last five, ten, fifteen years. The father asks him, "Like what?" Which, if you ask me, is his own funeral, really. Here are some: "The cursing and the, a lot of the, uh, jerking -- I'm sorry, masturbating. Once DVD came in with the porn..." The priest registers a slightly confused look, which...awesome. Tommy digs a bit deeper now, mentioning "the carousing, the cheating, the lying." Which, turn black and fall off as it now doubtlessly will, I have to say that the carousing, cheating, and lying seems a bit closer to the creamy nougat center of confession. The priest orders him to "say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers." Tommy wishes he would prescribe some Selectra XL instead.
Out in the pews now, Tommy kneels in front of a giant golden Jesus on the cross and gets up to the "on earth as it is in heaven" part of the Lord's Prayer before forgetting what comes and giving up. Don't you hate it when you can't remember the words to your favorite penance? He stands up and looks at the back of the church, where he sees Foreshadowing Kid again. Foreshadowing Kid takes off and Tommy gives chase, but when he gets out on the street, the kid is gone. Tommy wishes the kid were made of Selectra XL instead.
Garrity. Franco. Punch. Got it.
Mike walks into the firehouse carrying a pastry and coffee in an Aramark cup, and bids hello to Chief and Lou. Chief asks, deadpan, "Where'd you get the faggy coffee?" Lou piles on, "And the faggy but I'm sure very tasty-looking croissant?" Predictable questions, utterly beguiling answer: "Tommy." Chief and Lou exchange manifold confused looks, and Lou asks, excitedly, "Where is he?" Mike once more stuns the crowd, answering, "Polishing the rig." That's slang for what he told the priest about, right? Turns out not so much, as Chief and Lou discover when they walk into the room to find Tommy...well, polishing the rig. He welcomes them, all chipper, and tells him that he bought a chocolate specialty coffee that is, and I quote, "like you're drinking coffee but you live in an ice cream world." He apologizes for not bringing it into the kitchen, but recaps that he ran into Mike and started talking about the whole is-he-gay thing and he got distracted, as you do. Anyway, "he's not gay." Mike explains to Chief that hot chicks that hang out with gay guys -- and here Lou hilariously butts in to tell them, "fag hags." -- are looking for a straight guy who can hang with the gay dudes. "So," Chief clarifies, "you're a fag hag." Yup. Mike adds that to truly sell this routine, he also had to learn a few dance moves (this part is really more of a gray area of the fag-hag universe, but I'll go with it), and Tommy instructs, "Show 'em." At which Mike starts beatboxing and doing what seems to be some kind of breakdance-air-punching thing that seems to be several rungs down the movement ladder from what you and I think of conventionally as "dance." Tommy jumps in, saying that he'll "ride passenger," at which Mike starts mime driving a car with his left arm over the imaginary steering wheel, while Tommy squats to him, pretending to roll down a window. Like in most cases with physical comedy, it's not watching the physical part that's funny but instead watching the people watching the physical part that's funny. And Chief and Lou deliver, Lou finally asking Chief to slap him across the face. Chief obliges and they take off, as Garrity enters and can't seem to quite figure out what he's looking at. Tommy offers him a croissant, and Garrity backs out of the room like he's trying to escape a madman. Which he is. Tommy shrugs and assumes Garrity just isn't hungry, because apparently one of the side effects of this drug is that you completely lose all rational touch with reality and are a clueless vessel of happy fun. Just this once, I'm kind of starting to side with the Scientologists on this one.
Elsewhere, Laura finds Franco, and she once again looks primed for a rumble. When Franco waves her off with a defeated "I'm not in the mood," Laura proves quickly that she is in the mood...for love. She kisses him for kind of a long time, then opens up a folded piece of paper and reads a poem. Can I not transcribe the whole thing? It's gooey love poetry that needs more tits. Will that do? I'll be your best friend. Laura smiles and tells him, "Any man that could write this has to be in love." With the healing power of Selectra XL, I'm guessing.
"Is Tommy Gavin gay now?" Sort of. He does have Harry Johns's almost identical hairstyle, after all. So asks Chief, as Garrity stares out a little window into the room and announces, "They're dancing again." Looking forlorn, Lou pipes up, "I knew Tommy Gavin, sir. Tommy Gavin was a friend of mine. And that man out there is no Tommy Gavin." Ah, one of my very favorite cultural references of all time. How have I not been watching this show every week? Chief supposes that maybe Tommy has a disease of some kind, and Garrity asks in all seriousness if there's a type of cancer that makes you dance. And though you can hear Chief's reply coming, sirens affixed to the top of it, motoring down a wide boulevard and skipping through all of the red lights, it doesn't make it any less funny when it does come: "Dancing cancer." Goddamn. Just then, Franco bursts through the door, pointing and gesturing, "YOU." Garrity thinks he's heading right for him, but he races past Garrity and gives Lou a giant hug, announcing, "You...are my hero!" He thanks Lou profusely for writing the poem and sticking it into Laura's locker, yells a jubilant "Yes!," and takes off. Lou stands, shellshocked, until Chief approaches and asks if Lou wrote a poem. Lou shakes his head: "No." He didn't write it. He didn't put it in any locker. Not him. Then who did? Cue a whistling, fresh-faced Tommy Gavin, wiping down the rig with a rag. And whistling, whistling, whistling. Side effects may include naming that tune.
Siren! It's fire time, and the trucks go a-squealing down the city streets. They arrive at an abandoned warehouse by the water, and as they approach the front door, Lou pulls Tommy aside and asks if he wrote a poem and put it in Laura's locker. In fact, he did. Lou asks if he's even going to try and lie about it, and Tommy just reports, "Nope" because Truth Serum XL has no side effects other than not behaving at all like an actual antidepressant.
Up the uniformed gentleman go into an upper floor of the abandoned loft, where they find...no fire, apparently. Lou finds a newspaper on the ground, and asks if the rest of the guys remember the "broad" (their word, not mine, but I like it enough to start using it immediately) on the cover. They talk about her being on life support for fifteen years, and Tommy adds that he saw her pictures on CNN. Because this is not Six Feet Under, I have to uncondition myself to expect this tangent to result in a swift non sequitur sucker-punch to the politics of the Bush administration. Not that I mind it, of course, but this is where it would usually come. Lou jokes that if she'd have woken up the first thing she would have said is, "Does my ass look fat in this bed?" Tommy laughs and laughs. That is, of course, until the floor suddenly caves in under him and, in one of the weirdest CGI displays ever, he goes plummeting down to the basement in spinning slow motion, landing on a pile of debris. At the moment he lands, his body double is being played by a burlap sacks filled with t-shirts. Better make this commercial break extra long so that FX can make enough money to pull off this effect successfully time.
A cushy long commercial break ensues, the adequate length required for Tommy to heal completely from his wounds. Franco, from above, stares down the several floors and screams, "He's not movin'!" Oh, he's fine. And really, he is, as we cut to a tight shot on Tommy's face and discover he is, in fact, movin'. First his eyes. Then his head. Then all of him. Totally fine. He makes it to the kneeling position, just as...aw, heck, it's Jesus. He asks Tommy, "Do you believe in my father now, Tommy?" Hell no, but I sure as heck believe in those pills. Jesus -- looking a bit worse for the wear, I have to say -- tells Tommy to stand up and then does that totally pendantic Jesus lecture thing: "Faith, Tommy. You must have faith. Without it there's no hope. Without hope, you cannot live." All together now: aaaaaaaaaaaaa-meeeeeeeeeeeen! Anyway, the rest of the guys make it to the bottom floor. Franco observes that Tommy's being fine is "impossible," and Lou brushes some dust off him and demands, "Whatever the hell it is you're on, I want double the dose." Too late...Janet is already wondering why she only has half. Or she would be, if this subplot made any sense.
Sunday at church. Everyone sings psalms, Janet screeching her part out in a merry, grating soprano. Kid #1 stares on in horror. Foreshadowing Kid stands in the shadows, staring at Tommy accusingly. Or maybe he just wants Janet to pipe down already like the rest of the congregation does.
Firehouse. Lou talks to Franco: "She didn't like the line about 'my heart beats full for you, my tears like the rain pit-pat upon...'" Franco, in a word: "No." Apparently, Lou took a turn at his own poem, and it didn't so much work out, I'm guessing. Tommy walks in with even further unhinged words about how he wants to get some flower arrangements for the house, but he is quickly headed off by Franco, who explains that Laura loved Tommy's (well, "Franco's") poem so much that she asked for a second one. So Lou took a crack and, according to Lou, Laura "hated it." Franco clarifies that she just liked the first one better than the second, and that this sophomore slump necessitates that Franco deliver with a kick-ass third poem, by the end of this week if possible.
Franco takes off, and Tommy starts to ask a perfectly innocent question (probably: "Azaleas or hydrangeas?"), but Lou cuts him off caustically: "Y'know, where the hell do you get the nerve to start writing poetry?" Lou goes on to explain that the house is run "like The Godfather," in which the Corleones control everything. Sort of still on topic, he elaborates: "Around here, we got the Probie. He controls all the homo crap, okay? Garrity controls all the stupid retard bullshit. Franco is our pussy man. You control the drinking and all the fire hero worship crap, okay? Poetry is my territory. You're muscling on my turf!" And this Character Archetype Refresher Course, right here, is why I was able to write this recap having only seeing this show twice. Tommy counsels Lou to take "a chill pill," which is really one of the great lost '80s expressions (and the very reason, incidentally, why Tommy feels so "totally tubular" lately), but Lou only shouts louder, "Where are the tits?" Lou recaps that Tommy has been talking about the tits all week long (but with the time elapse? And then the not-fire? And the falling through the floor? How much time has gone by since that first conversation?), and that when the actual poem hit the streets, it was "fourteen goddamn lines, not one tit." Tommy shoots back, "It was implied." Lou, shouting now, says that the Tommy Gavin he knows wouldn't have written that poem, even to seduce his own piece of ass. Between this and the fall and the singing and the dancing, Lou needs to know: "What are you on?" So Tommy cops to the goofballs, and reports that they seem to be working. He loves everybody. "Hey," he tells Lou, "I love you." With which he gets up, kisses Lou on the cheek, and takes off. This is the gayest firehouse in the history of New York City. But not before Tommy demands, "time you feel like kissing me like that, dinner and a movie first." Tommy laughs because he loves everyone.
Lou, Garrity, Chief, and Franco sit in the stands of a hockey game, Lou plot-developing (pretty late in the game for that, no?) that he wishes he hadn't bet $500, seeing as the NYPD looks like it has a pretty good team. Chief reminds the other guys that, considering Tommy's miraculous recovery from his fall, he's obviously in some kind of zone. He predicts, "This thing is a lock." Slam dunk, baby.
Back in the locker room, the suited-up guys sit as Tommy stands up and says he'd like to say a couple of things. First off, he wants everybody "to give 110% out there tonight." He then has everyone hold hands and offers a prayer to God asking for them to pretty please play a great game tonight. Confused looks abound.
Out on the ice, Tommy refers to the center of the other team by his first name, inspiring this Todd to surmise, "Oh, you're gonna play Mr. Nice Guy now?" Todd offers, "Win or lose today, we win." When another FDNY player asks what that means, Todd responds, "You'll see." And so the puck is dropped and the hockey montage begins. NYPD goes up 1-0. And then 2-0. And then 3-0. And then Tommy gives one of his own players a penalty for fighting. Garrity bemoans that he's going to lose $25 because of this, which causes Lou to set Garrity's leg on fire. Awesome. Even more awesome is that the NYPD's victory is currently happening off the ice, where a fleet of tow trucks pull into the lot and start towing the FDNY's cars. Back inside, the game has drawn to a close, the final score being NYPD: a million, FDNY: a truckload of stolen happy pills. Give or take a few goals. The players line up to offer each other a perfunctory chorus of "good game," the other players telling Tommy to shut the hell up every time he congratulates the opposing team. Back in the locker room, the prayers continue because antidepressants also make you love the Lord.
Out in the parking lot, the FDNY guys stare at their lack of cars with some confusion. They spy a tow truck leaving with the last of them, and Garrity goes chasing after his, screaming, "That's my car." Except that it probably isn't. The opposing player -- "Todd" -- rides up in the shotgun seat of a red automobile of some kind, and he tells Tommy that they got him. Tommy tells him that this is a great gag, adding, "Really, this is one of the best gags I've ever seen." Todd gets pissed off and drives away.
Ending montage! Back at the Tommy's place, the kids sleep soundly, and Janet and Tommy lovingly put them to bed. Then Tommy has sex with his doped-up wife. Then Laura reads a poem and has sex with Franco. Then Danielle and Ken (for these, finally, are their real names) play cards because sex is for whores. Then Mike walks with a girl because gay dudes are like catnip. Then Tommy and Janet have sex on a floor somewhere because another unlikely side effect of this weird-ass miracle drug is that you lose your bed and discover a fireman's nightmare's worth of mood-setting candles.