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Frank's still on the run from those weird Irish goons from last week, trying to scrounge up money any way he can, until one of his buddies at a Bumfights shoot (in which he is soundly beaten by a crazy cat lady) suggests he fake his own death. The Gallaghers rally around this idea and they put on a whole wake and memorial and the whole thing, and eventually the goons are tricked.
Kev and Veronica are getting a foster child, both for the money and to see what that's like. From the teasers for week, what it's like seems to be Sister Wives.
In other baby news, Sheila is so taken with Liam during their babysitting overnight that she is driven to A) Walk out the front door while connected to the banister with a rope made of every sheet and blanket in the house and B) Toss her birth control right in the toilet.
And then you've got Fiona, edging out the door in similar fashion after Kev advises Steve to take the pressure off Fiona by simply ordering her to take the night off with him in a fancy hotel. They do it in a swimming pool and she acts all cornpone and it's the usual vibe, only this time in a hotel.
Sheila's not the only one with baby fever: Linda's finally installed that camera system she's been talking about, and the first thing she gets to see is her husband getting fucked by a teenage boy. It's fairly amazing, how this goes down, she runs through a bunch of different feelings, punches Ian, tells him he still has a job and that in fact they can continue on just as before -- as long as she gets to be pregnant -- but that frankly she and Ian both could do better.
What neither of the Kash & Grab couple know is that Ian took a crowbar over to Mickey Milkovich's house to get Kash's gun back, and ended up fucking him too. Somehow I don't think Mandy's going to be as cool about her boyfriend screwing her brother as Linda is being about her husband screwing their boxboy. Mostly, it's so awesome that it doesn't really matter what anybody else thinks.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Usually the intro to the Previouslies is Frank being horrible and berating you shamelessly for having missed an episode/needing a refresher, and it's not worth mentioning, but this week it's Fiona on the toilet going, "Jesus, I'm raising five kids and still managed to catch last week," which for some reason is ten times more awesome/acceptable.
Speaking of toilets and Frank and their similarities, those two ridiculous goons from last week currently have one's head inside the other, because they still want their money from when he lost the car they were supposed to blow up. Today, the toilet. Tomorrow, the trash compactor. Put us all out of our misery.
So Fiona comes home from her 2AM job at the bakery just in time to refuse the family their crullers and turnovers ("We want sugar!" moans Debbie) in favor of various loaves of toastable whole grains and what have you. Given the dangers of the American Poverty diet I think it's a good move, and if there were a charity for the war on carbs I would contribute, but still: Nothing is more depressing than a gluten-free vegan semolina breakfast staring you in the eye first thing.
In other news, the toilet is going insane upstairs, causing us to -- in Veronica's words -- squat above the seat "like a Laotian coolie." Girl's a poet. Meanwhile Steve comes downstairs with this great idea about how Fiona needs a night off and will be joining him at a very nice hotel for the evening. He never quits, does he. As a boyfriend of a girl on the verge I can see where he's coming from, but even for this show the metaphor's so focused on Fiona this week that it barely matters what his rationale is.
Lip and Mandy/Ian are running loose on the streets due to yet another half-day ("Good thing public education is broke!") and discussing Ian's new starter jacket, whence Kash, or as Mandy puts it, "Tell Kash I'll take it in the ass if it gets me free stuff!" Then this crummy dick of a truck driver comes running up to them being rude and demanding to use a cell phone to call AAA or whatever, so of course they dick him around endlessly.
Lip's unctuous about how they can't have phones until they're 18 and then sends him to an imaginary bar ten blocks away -- "O'Flaherty's, tell them your family's from County Cork" -- and he promises them five bucks if they keep an eye on his truck. "Thanks, mister!" Ian giggles with hilarious disingenuity, and the second the guy's gone Lip calls for Kev and his crowbar.
While Fiona tries to politely blow off Steve's hotel plan, Frank's at a pawn shop desperately trying to come up with cash for the goons, stealing from blind people, whatever. There's a very long, very racist conversation that's pretty boilerplate Frank -- Palestinian stereotypes, Jewish stereotypes, references to Pontius Pilate and circumcision and repeated "Jew me down" -- but as usual, if you think that's the funny thing about this show we're not ever going to be friends so I don't see why I should recap it. Showtime has this White Humor thing where they have jackasses say racist shit and so you're allowed to both laugh at the racist shit and also feel superior about the racist shit, and it's just dumb and gross, because really the only person who ever knows how ironic you're being is: You.
Inside the truck is a bunch of meat. Outside the truck, minutes later, is a very confused asshole of a trucker. I'd like to think that the show put in just enough thought that the guy was only robbable because he was such a fuckwad to Lip and the kids, but I think that's only true about this show during some episodes. Sometimes Lip has the ethics, like Ian, and other times he's an anarchic thug who knocks kids unconscious and steals their bikes. It's one of the things they didn't nail down yet, so every writer of each episode can go different places with it. I think it's likely that by the end they'll make Lip a vigilante type, so that's what we're going with here.
Ian comes running into Kash & Grab and immediately notices the fact that Kash's face looks like stolen hamburger, because the Mickey Beatings have become a regular occurrence, because Kash is, um, begging for it. "I don't think he detached my retina this time," he mumbles, and Ian's all about once again replacing the stolen merchandise, but it turns out that this time, Mickey also took the gun. Just relieved Kash of his firearm. I mean, Kash's point -- how could I actually shoot Mickey Milkovich, a child -- is valid, but still. Kash also admits that he hates the store and always wanted to be a landscaper.
More logistics of cutting up and storing the billion pounds of beef they stole, more arguments about the hotel plan. Fiona runs off to take care of the toilet and her 99 other problems, and Kev finally calls Steve out for embarrassing himself. "Fiona's a hood girl, not a debutante from Glencoe. It's painful, man! You always asking her on 'lunches'? Taking a 'getaway'? What's , coed bikini waxes and a spa day? When she says Fuck you it means I like you. It's hood-girl speak. Learn the language."
Which, I guess so, I guess that makes sense Kev, and even the thing -- "All day, all she does is make decisions. Five kids? Fuckin' Frank? Stop asking her what she needs, fucking tell her" -- makes sense technically, but there are a couple of steps missing here that only make sense in the fullness of the episode, which has to do with the ongoing parallel between Sheila -- stuck in hell and too afraid to leave it -- and Fiona -- same deal -- so the advice does make sense. But in any other situation, "Don't let Fiona get away with thinking she knows what she's doing or that she's a rational adult" would be a shortcut to Crazytown. And also gross.
Ian shows up at Mickey's with a crowbar, and Mandy still thinks maybe they might turn their cover relationship into a real relationship, so she's confused when he takes his crowbar into Mickey's room and starts tossing the entire place. Luckily, Mickey is not around -- he's picking up Milkovich pére from prison, where I'm sure his involvement with white supremacy was a boon, so Mandy finally gets Ian out of there and cleans up the mess before Mickey goes crazy on everybody.
This old lady at the ATM immediately recognizes Frank under his sheer panty-hose fake -- and if you thought Frank was disgusting before, something about that sad desperate face all mushed up in pantyhose is so gross I actually formed fists -- and he pretends he has a gun and she's like, "What are you doing to do with that 'gun,' jack off with it? Go home." It's fairly funny, robbery of old ladies is not usually funny and the stupid fucking Betty White Old-Lady-Pottymouth thing has been dead on the vine for years at this point, but put together it's got enough of an edge that it becomes funny again.
So: Steve has dropped Liam off with Sheila, and it went like this: "Look after Liam? I'd love to! I can keep him in my room until Karen goes to college!" Steve's eyes bug out as he reacquaints himself with how crazy Sheila actually is, and then she puts on oven mitts so she can hold Liam, and it's sad and scary and crazy and hilarious as usual whenever Sheila is onscreen, and now Fiona's pissed at Steve.
He takes her out on the back steps to ask the meat-packaging Gallagher children if they will die without her, and they all give her permission to leave. Debbie's like, "Nooo!" and then giggles and it's all very cute, but then later we learn that he has paid them to say this, which is frankly unnecessary and sucks the charm out of this conversation entirely, so it's a wash. "So you're chained to this house?" She swears she's not a Labrador, chained to the house; she likes it here, and he's like, Okay, but you'll be like forty before Liam leaves.
He tells her the truth of this episode, which is this: Life is actually much better than this. That movie You Me & Everyone We Know, it has a lot going for it, but my favorite thing in the whole movie is when the shoe salesman sits this lady down and explains that most of us are walking around in shoes that don't fit, but we get used to it, callused and back-pained, because we think that's just how it is. That our pain makes us soldiers and heroes and our problems are no more important or painful than anybody else's problems.
But what nobody ever remembers to tell you is, life is actually much better than that. There's not like a 50/50 balance of suckiness and awesomeness that everybody has to deal with. Things could -- always, actually -- be better. Life is much, much better than that. Find the problem, eliminate the problem. Some of us choose pain because we're lazy, or have complicating factors, or think we deserve it, but the even sadder truth is that most of us choose pain just because this truth is something we forgot.
It's a symptom of our borderline age and culture right now that we think there always has to be a winner and a loser. If somebody is happy, that takes away from our happiness. If somebody has money, that makes our poorness worse. If one person is a victim, that person is also a hero, even if they're just as unhappy and fucked-up as their bully (which inevitably they are) which is not actually admirable at all. This is the secret to the popularity of The Real Housewives, but it's also a reason everybody feels slightly queasy about Eat Pray Love, and it's all bullshit: Stop comparing, start fixing, remember that you're never trapped.
But which part, Fiona asks, is unnecessary here? "The part where my mom splits? Or the part where my dad's a raging alcoholic narcissist?" No, the part where you're addicted to control and think the world will end if you steps outside the house. The part where the solution -- raise five kids -- became the problem, because you let it define you. Because you made other people's problems your only problem, which is now the problem:
"You know when a plane starts going down, and they tell you to put your mask on before helping anyone else? Put your mask on, Fiona!"
Because the answer became the question, because that's how it always works: The answer is only the answer until you find it, at which point it starts rotting. We were designed that way, so we'd keep moving and getting better.
Because Sheila started out compensating to deal with her abusive relationship, which now keeps her locked up inside her house, but also prepared her like a bride on her wedding night for what is turning out to be a fairly healthy relationship with Frank. And now you've got these two women learning to let these men into their lives, edging out onto the ledge, tethered by bedsheets and broomsticks and boxer shorts and jungle vines and whatever they can hold onto so the world doesn't slide out from under them.
There's this song where the girl says the secret to life is that she's okay when everything is not okay. And in high school, I only understood this line as accepting the fact that you need a certain amount of chaos in order to function, that it was a sort of rueful admission of complicity and guilt and the usual crazy-writer, crazy-girl, crazy-artist thing. I'm okay ONLY when everything is not okay.
I knew that I was a grownup the day I heard that song and it flipped over and I realized I'd been hearing that song wrong my entire life: You are okay. You are okay, EVEN when everything is not okay, because "everything" is never going to be okay. That's the day the world ends, when everything is perfect; this is the secret to life.
Or tell me this: When you see the word Shameless, what does it make you think about? Connotes flagrant behavior, right? Excess, breaking the rules, upsetting the authorities, getting in trouble, being too stupid to care.
But look again, because: What the fuck is wrong with leaving behind the concept of shame?
Shame-free is not shame-less, but the difference is the same as between being a child and being an adult: Fixed is not the same as unbroken, it's way better.
Anyway, halfway through the season it's appropriate that we be looking at these themes, because whatever this US version turns out to be about really, it's not about the same thing as the UK show at all, because that show was an ensemble as written, and this is only an ensemble as performed: This, centrally, is the story of two women who are not as broken as they think they are.
A funny-faced fellow name of Kermit shows up with several bags of Frank's mail, which he's been receiving for what seems like years. Kermit's girlfriend Cynthia (and I really can't stress enough how crazy-looking this Kermit actually is) has decreed that he can't get Frank's mail anymore, and gotten rid of both his 19th-century erotica ("That was hard") and Atari cartridges ("That was harder"), and Kermit is learning to compromise. "She's my last chance at happiness, and that's more important than video games and masturbation, right?"
(Nobody is your last chance at happiness, although the line should give us pause w/r/t Sheila, considering how horrible Frank actually is.) Anyway, among the mail are several billion bills -- liquor, strip clubs, a replacement flatscreen for the Alibi, bunch of coke -- and of course, the cards he used for all this are in the names of the Gallagher children. Fiona heads over to Kev's to yell about that, and when she gets there Frank is considering going out for Bumfights. The lesbian barmaid is like, "Um, yeah, I do think you could pass for homeless, dude," and then Fiona comes in screaming. Long pointless Teabagger speech about the usual shit, racism and Obama and immigration and tax dollars, and she tries to take a stand in the middle of this but it goes nowhere.
Linda is right up Kash's ass about the gun and the stealing, so at least he came clean about that, but notes that Mickey is a sociopath and that shooting him would not really have offended the neighborhood. Ian comes in wearing that jacket and she accuses him of stealing the money for it, and points out the cc cameras she's finally installed, and she's very creepy and hairy-eyebally and paranoid. To be, of course, she has every right.
Sheila plays with all of Karen's old toys, pulling out box after box and presenting them to Liam. The best part here, thanks to Cusack, is when she pulls out a baby doll and a Bratz doll and then babytalks him about "Which one do you like better? The baby? Or the whore?" He picks the whore; she switches to Karen's Easy-Bake Oven. In a bit, he's rocking on this horse and she gets super creepy for a second about whether or not she's allowed to touch him, and finally strips off her oven mitts and strokes his face, and it's so sweet and sad and she's so amazing and brittle that you can hear Jaws music already.
Veronica and Kev have decided to get a foster child, starting week, because they're thinking about kids and also because it's $384 a month. Fiona complains about the credit wreckage of this latest Frank thing and finally Veronica is like, "Steve is not wrong that you are about to blow your stack. Go to the hotel." Fiona heads into her usual speech and Veronica finally just shakes her head: "You are being stupid. You do actually have choices. You are choosing the wrong choice, right now, by saying you have no choices." And if it were anybody but V, that would probably make it worse, but you actually do have to consider it when she says stuff.
Bumfights. Before his match, Frank talks to a hobo who was around the corner getting a smoothie when a man flew a plane into his office building, and he was presumed dead, so he vanished into the streets and became homeless. Which, I live in Austin and it's a little soon to be joking around about that, but whatever, the point is that the man advises Frank to fake his own death so the goons will go back to Bavmorda's castle or whatever the fuck they're supposed to be from and leave him alone.
Sheila takes a fair amount of time to figure out that she and Liam are not playing hide and seek, but that's to be expected: Her world is the house, it's going to take a minute to think past that to the outside... Which is where he is.
"Wedding was called off, but the room was already charged to their credit card. Apparently the bride saw her fiancé on To Catch a Predator."
Fiona takes a fair amount of time to accept the fact that she and Steve are about to infiltrate the Honeymoon Suite of this hotel, that nothing's going to go wrong, that she doesn't need to call every five seconds, but that's to be expected: Her world is the house, it's going to take a minute to think past that to the outside. Which is where she is.
Outside, her yard is a cacophony of screaming, panting, sirens and monsters; the only surprising part is that she eventually gives up, slamming the door behind her and holding onto the banister post, crying with self-hatred, eyes rolling in fear. She stares out toward the house, wondering if Carl's burned it to the ground yet, and Steve produces his special room service: A roast beef sandwich from her favorite place, and fries, which she picks up, grinning, "I won't look like a lady," and she eases out onto the porch, tied to the banister with every sheet and blanket, toward the edge, with a dog barking at her.
Straining at the leash.
Frank comes to the younger Gallaghers and they put together a plan to fake his death which, like every Frank storyline, really only exists to keep this from being a drama, to give it a skeleton to wrap the actual story around and give the rest of the cast something to do. Deb gets a suit for the body from a drycleaner lady with pitbulls; Lip and Kev go cracking hearses looking for an empty coffin to steal while discussing the positive influence they can have on a foster kid presuming she's not more fucked up than they are; V and Frank meet with an adorable drug dealer to find Frank some kind of mortal drugs as such that Mantua's law is death to any he that utters them.
Kash and Ian adjust the four cc cameras so that there's a Bermuda Triangle part of the store, and then they go to that part of the store and fuck, I guess so vigorously that one of the cameras slips back into place and catches them at it. I guess in terms of the Black Snake Moan metaphor we should talk about Kash: Edging out onto the ledge of his sexuality by taking literally the least threatening possible option, something specifically within the confines of his prison, and pretending it's a real relationship.
But Linda's more interesting than he is and will end up just as screwed as he is by this situation, so maybe it'll flip around and be about her. And besides, the whole Mandy beard scenario has already made Kash and Linda functions of Ian's story anyway. (And Ian's move radicalizes everything anyway. I guess everybody's edging out the door this week, in one way or another.) Any case, the only person weighed down by the same pointless weight of shame -- and therefore in need of relief, regardless of whether he deserves it -- is Kash. Linda and Ian both know exactly who they are.
When Fiona wakes up in his arms, it's clear Steve's been watching TV on mute the whole time. He kids her about how she was talking in her sleep -- "You really opened up, thanked me for taking you away, kept on saying, You were right, Steve, you're the perfect guy for me, I don't know what I would do without you. And something about my penis being enormous and all-powerful." -- and then the guy comes to remind them they have to be out by ten, so Steve takes Fiona down to the hotel pool and they fuck for like one million years.
It's nice because there's no better metaphor for letting go, the water like that, and Sheila's just about got her arms around Liam and she's free, and Ian is about to redefine every relationship at once, which is a nice feeling, but: TV is such a goddamn lie. Swimming pools make everything feel like rawhide, especially guy parts. It's the worst sex place on earth, besides the beach.
What's the best? Well, Ian heads back over to the Milkovich's house for Kash's gun, having once again received that hit of orgasm-related oxytocin that fools him into thinking Kash is a suitable boyfriend, and gets his crowbar on for about five seconds before he and Mickey start tossing each other around the room like a couple of muscly ragdolls -- Nazi Dad still snoring on the couch -- and then finally they are on the bed and Mickey is looking down at Ian like about to break his face in or choke him out, and Ian's looking back up at him wondering if this is how he is going to die and whether Kash will appreciate it and then, something behind both sets of eyes goes click, and then boom, and the clothes are coming off all over the place and they barely even have time to giggle before they're rocking the whole shack: Just a couple of age-appropriate, gun- and crowbar-wielding, black eye-nursing teenage boys, fucking their brains out like God intended.
Well done. Fiona and Steve meanwhile make it back to Sheila's, and while she is realistic enough to know the whole escape/rescue thing is barely an interesting story she can't quite keep the crazy need and love of Liam off her face as they slowly get him into their arms and don't really notice how callous they're being when they casually tell her she can see him again soon, because nobody ever really notices other people's cages even when they're in the same cage as we are, so why would they even think about how Liam saved Sheila's life today, or care that she saved him right back?
And, for good or ill, the last thing Sheila does in this episode is head upstairs and pop her birth control into the toilet, first a pill at a time and then in a flood, which is okay by me only because she's managed to build a family around her that will keep the child from catching Rapunzel syndrome from her. I mean, look how awesome Karen is, and those kids will have the entire Gallagher army behind them. A bridge between the houses, which is necessary to the narrative but would also give Fiona and Sheila both another reason to leave when they need to.
Mandy brings home eggs to cook her father his first breakfast -- "Stop being such a prick, I'll even make you sausage" -- and he heads through Mickey's bedroom to piss, the two boys staring up from under the sheets through a few minutes of suspense and urination before the dad stops, turns around to tell them breakfast is coming, double-takes, and then keeps walking: "Put some clothes on, you two look like a couple of fags." Excellent scene. Nothing's funnier than an averted apocalypse, that's like most comedy right there.
The droogs come to Kev's, and he does a much better job of lying to them about how Frank killed himself last night, so they head over to the house for an over-the-top wake, everybody screaming and hairshirting and being hilarious, and then a bunch of complicated Gallagher machinery to convince them it's real, and they think about cutting off Frank's toes or fingers for proof, think about selling Debbie into the sex trade if she were prettier, and get them back to the bar for the funeral proper, which is itself concentrated on a coffin full of rank beef from the truck haul, and everybody drinking and everybody yelling and the ultimate disappearance of the droogs. And then Frank, drunkenly breaking the Alibi's TV again and replacing it this time with a credit card in Liam's name.
It's all very busy and very funny, but the episode isn't really about Frank because it never is, so mostly it's just the busywork of constructing a show around some simple ideas and jacking up a bunch of Frank Gallagher on top of it. So meanwhile, a few other things are also happening:
Linda summons Kash to the cc screens, to ask him if he thought he saw one of the cameras move, and he stiffens right up and says it's nothing, nothing was stolen today. "You're right. I should probably shut it off. But then I'd miss the part where you take it up the ass from a teenage boy... Here it is: Billy Elliott, cornholing the father of my children. Must be big, judging from the grimace on your face..." Kash turns away, about ready to barf, and she nearly laughs: "What? We were just getting to the climax. Literally!"
Ian walks in at just that moment, having dressed without looking at Mickey, without looking at all until he heard the thump and saw Kash's gun, lying on the bed, an apology of sorts, and a sort of contract. And when he tried to kiss Mickey goodbye, he threatened to cut out Ian's tongue.
And then he saw the message from Linda, and came running to the store, and the first thing Linda did was slap him across the mouth. "That's for screwing my husband." Ian nodded, Ian was already halfway out the door and into this new mess, tethered to the banister, straining at the leash, and Kash asked if he was free to go. What she would tell the kids, what they'd do about his mother. Linda was not impressed; she struck out again, and reminded Kash that neither of them are free to go. Chained up like Labradors.
"Where does that leave me, starting over? I'm a white Muslim," she nearly screamed, and both Kash and Ian saw her point. They grew to love her more in that moment, not less. She wanted another baby. A fresh start inside the prison. "I get what I want, and you can have what you want. Behind closed doors. I don't want to be the laughing stock of the mosque. But no touching the Forbidden Fruit until I'm knocked up, we clear?"
Ian apologized, eloquently, and returned the gun, and turned to go, but Linda nearly smiled at him. "You're not fired. My opinion? You could do better."
He went to the bar then, for his father's funeral, and he could still taste the blood from Linda's fist and he was still bruised from the fight, and when he got there it was Fiona demanding to know what happened and Veronica calling for ice and bandages and vitamin K and Lip and Kev and Steve, hoping for a fight. The complicated Gallagher machinery jumped into action, hauling him along the chain one link at a time, back to the safety of home.
But he can still taste Mickey, too, and he doesn't have the words to explain why it's different this time, what exactly he left with Linda: When he says it's no big deal, he's not being a soldier, he's not accepting the pain of another scrape and another big fight for Kash's honor or the burden of being who and what he is. This time, when he says it's nothing it won't be bravery, it'll simply be the truth: