By Jacob
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.When Kev and Veronica decide to call off the wedding, her mom tells them about a mysterious sum V's dad left her for her wedding day, so of course it's back on. Since they can't legally get married without Kevin taking the hit for being a bigamist, the trick is to fake the perfect wedding and then just never file the certificate. Fiona's big idea is to get ordained so she can perform the ceremony, but mom's got other ideas; Lip comes to the rescue as usual, by putting Carl in the snatches of a pedo long enough to get some blackmailable offenses -- and the priest brained with a censer, awesomely -- on record.
Kash's wife takes the boys on a Scouting trip, so Kash invites Ian home for a weekend of fake domesticity -- but being surrounded by all of the stuff that comes from being married with kids makes Kash's marriage real in a way Ian wasn't expecting, and he sort of loses some marbles about that. Luckily his beard Mandy Milkovich is more than willing to cheer him up.
Sheila makes the dress, and matching outfits for herself and Frank to wear to the wedding (which is at Kev's bar), but of course she ends up once again unable to leave, and once again it is totally sad. But you also see a bit more of Eddie's part in all that, because boy does he love how fucked up Sheila is. Meanwhile Frank's got a third testicle which, it turns out, is a benign growth. So if you ever wanted to hear William H. Macy say the word testicle like a million times, let me tell you you're in luck.
Fiona once again gets pushed into some kind of contrived Tony/Steve thing like she has to choose, which only flies because of the acting and not because of how balls-out shallow that whole storyline is. Tony has become in the last week, if possible, even dreamier; Steve continues to be adorable, and even gives Fiona a taste of his illegal lifestyle with some very sexy Bonnie & Clyde shenanigans.
After a bunch of bachelor night fun -- all in "we're adorable" snapshot mode -- the groups gather for the wedding. But what's this? Veronica's bipolar firebug brother Marty, who has Tourette's, a hatred of women and a penchant for setting everything ablaze. A touching scene between V and Marty almost seems out of character for the show, until Fiona jumps out of nowhere and tranquilizes him. Marty eventually gets free, and we end the episode with him hiding out in the bar bathroom, draped in toilet paper like a mummy, lighting a match. Boom!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Fiona and Veronica, they're both dressed up like sexy spies so they can go to a public bathroom and take the paper towel dispensers apart and steal paper products. Also the seat covers, for some reason, even though Gallaghers don't even wash their hands after.
(God love Emmy but Fiona's always troubled accent gets a real workout here. She talks like Eliza Duskhu on Buffy sometimes, for the same lack of any reason for doing so: "My character talks like a streetwise gum-cracker from Povertytown. It's right between Boston and Philadelphia." But your show is set in Chicago. "You talkin' to me?")
So V is admitting that she was not even thinking about marriage until Kev's drunken -- she compares it to Hasslehoff's hamburger -- proposal, and since Fiona's the only one who knows his secret she's like, "Is that really the story you want to tell your grandkids? The people of tomorrow's tomorrow?" No, but before they can get into it a lady in the stall tells about how great her proposal was -- Sears Tower, champagne, roses -- but in six months he was fucking her sister. V asks why she's telling them this story, what is the moral of this story, and the awesome lady shrugs: "My sister's a bitch."
Fiona succeeds in putting enough of the doubt in V's brain -- "other than the presents and the booze, give me three good reasons" and "the way things are between you and Kevin right now seems perfect" -- that she's being a good friend. I mean, the actual Kev issue is not her business and there's not really another way to get them talking. It's not entirely fake but it does sort of take the long way around, morally speaking, to clue Veronica in on the entire story. Because while a drunk proposal is questionable, what's going on right now is practically cheating: She thinks she's been talked into marriage, and he's holding very tight to the entire secret. Which has a time limit on it.
Frank's at the free clinic for his disability checkup, and of course he's harassing everybody about their disabilities and assuming they're all gross liars like him. He laughs in the face of one neck-braced guy because they get the same amount of benefits and all Frank has to do is claim he gets migraines. (Which, part of the joke on this show is that they all have different jobs every week and all that, but how do you get migraines from a chicken carcass to the abdomen? Is he pulling multiple disability checks? Yeah, probably.) Anyway, nobody enjoys his company because he is the worst, and never moreso than when he's feeling chipper and friendly. Even in the sad free clinic, surrounded by social security people, he's still just a total downer.