By Jacob
The Liam/lesbian storyline comes to an overwrought, tryhard end, but at least it comes to an end. And the twists and turns, with two episodes to go, are pretty interesting: While Liam is Frank's son biologically (see title), Ian is not. Apparently Frank has three brothers and Monica slept with one of them during her time as a PCP user. The only other thing going on with Ian this week is that Mickey is in juvie for trying to rob Kash, which is the story they came up with, and Ian goes to visit Mickey and is skin-crawlingly romantic with him, and it's super-funny and super-weird.
Eventually -- after a bunch of really great awkward and sad interactions with the kids and with Frank -- Monica and Bob take off in their giant truck after this big, emotional scene that is neither that big nor very emotional. It undercuts the stunning work of the cast throughout (once again, Lip outshines everybody but Fiona), which is sad, but honestly it just seems like the last-ditch effort to rescue the vibe with some Explosions-meets-Owl City manipulative bombastic violin-equivalent swelling heartstring-plucking nonsense.
Given the iffy line readings from just about everybody at different points in the episode, and the surprising number of repetitive and redundant scenes that help nothing, it seems likely the episode was just directed by somebody who doesn't understand things like line readings and what makes a big, emotional scene big or emotional. Which is fine, everybody's got a style, and the episode was still pretty awesome, so I'm not really dwelling -- I just really don't enjoy being instructed on how to feel about things.
Anyway, that unpleasantness means no more Monica, which is good because Monica is gross but bad because of the great things that it does to Fiona, which include making her freak out, trust Steve more and more, and also do some powerhouse acting. After hearing about Steve's home purchase, Hot Tony is now getting kind of stalkery toward him, which is a bummer but makes a lot of sense. Of course the well-meaning cop is the bad guy on a show about Gallaghers.
Karen's Purity Ball is easily 50 times more horrific than you could possibly have imagined, but the upshot is fairly great: After an attempt to play along with the Promise Keepers -- by describing her shameful personal narrative, in detail -- goes awry, Eddie calls her a whore in front of everybody and this is what causes Sheila to chase him out of her house, into the street and off in his car, forever. Luckily, Frank is there to witness this act of spontaneous healing, and seems to enjoy the sight of proud and ecstatic Sheila almost as much as we do.
Two episodes left. Seems the whole car-theft thing is going to resume being a big deal, but it's not so clear what else will be going on.
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