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Well, Karen's not really dealing so well with last week's whole shame spiral: She's blacked out and started hacking away at her hair pretty much randomly, she's got one of those nostril/earlobe Jane Child chain things that are so popular with the youth these days, and she's started the eponymous video diary. Things start getting dark right around the time Lip stupidly points out that, judgment-freely speaking, she always was kind of a whore... So by the time Frank stumbles home full of Oxy, that's just one more reason for her to get stoned and fuck him on video, for the whole world to see.
Frank's worker's comp thing has been cancelled, so his whole object in this episode is to get a dangerous but not fatal job that will take him out of the workforce once again. For a Frank storyline it's not even really that annoying, and his final choice -- some kind of furniture finishing off-gassing nightmare -- even gives us a fairly fun round of whimsical coworker bingo before he nails himself to a cabinet in order to get out of there.
Fiona's confusing new friend, Amy Smart, kisses her on the mouth a few times and generally acts like a crazy person but I think it's too soon to tell what she's really up to. Tony stalks Steve all over the place and ends up handing him a pretty impressive ass-beating, and an ultimatum: Go to jail or disappear.
Ian and Lip spend the episode looking for Ian's biological father, which while it's the backbone and most interesting thread this week, it also seems a bit rushed and silly. First they go see Grammy Gallagher -- Louise Fletcher, from Cruel Intentions and also the planet Bajor -- who tells them of her sons three: Frank's blue-collar twin; the suburban success story; and Wyatt, who lost his testicles in the Navy. The twin is pretty funny, paranoid and bearded, but the boys instantly know when they visit the cul-de-sac of the second brother that that's their mark.
Of course, so does his wife -- given that Ian and their son Jacob are pretty identical -- and the boys eventually bounce. Ian's already made peace with their family's peculiarities, and is fairly open the entire time about the fact that he's only been indulging Lip's fantasies of having another life and father. Of course, he might have reason to rethink that, since the thing that happens to them is that Tony calls in the stolen car they're driving, under the assumption that Steve is behind the wheel, and gotten the boys into the biggest trouble of their lives.
week's finale: More pressure, more noises, some pretty confusing messes for Fiona and poor shitty old Eddie Jackson gets it in the teeth once again.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Oh, Fiona and Steve. Aren't you being adorable? Wiggling your ears at each other, curling tongues and doing tricks. Fiona sticks her ankle behind her ear and sings "The Star Spangled Banner," as one does, which is exactly when Debbie shows up to ask what the hell they're doing, and whether sex is even weirder than she thought. "This has nothing to do with sex," they explain, and even those two have to agree that makes it a weirder little moment.
So why is Debbie there? Well, the Monica Thing churned up a lot of stuff, obviously, and in this case it also activated Debbie's orphan shame: She signed Monica up for the PTA or whatever, a responsibility she's longstandingly left off Fiona's impressive To-Do list, and so now Fiona has to go there and make decorations for some party. Fiona is not interested, because of the ladies involved -- "All they do is talk about their husbands and their jobs and their dental plans" -- and while Steve thinks maybe she could impress them by sticking her ankle behind her ear and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" (once we meet Jasmine, as you'll see, it's possible he's not wrong), Debbie's only real issue is that their kids are as terrible as their moms and she's getting some heat. So, of course, Fiona will be cleaning up Monica's mess once again.
Fi heads downstairs to make some coffee and Debbie leans on Steve once again, asking if he's told Fiona about his other life as Jimmy, and he swears he'll tell her soon. Maybe sooner than they think: Tony and a partner we haven't seen before are staking out the place, bitching about Steve's Porsche and hoping that Tony will soon move on to obsessing about "another skanky hood girl." At this point I don't know what it will take! She has screwed him over like eleven times, even discounting the fact that boys are idiots about this kind of thing and he takes offense to all kinds of unnecessary stuff.
Deb: "Snob Mob says it's not fair that I get to go to all the class parties and stuff, even though we don't contribute."
Fiona: "You can't listen to those bitches, Debs..."
It's half-cute, half-sad the way Debbie marches Fiona around the house to dress as nicely as possible for this little disaster in the making, and eventually they end up in Lip and Ian's room -- "Stop downloading porn!" -- looking for clothes. Seems Lip is still very interested in looking for Ian's biological dad in the wake of last week's DNA revelation; of course, Ian couldn't care less about any of this.
Lip's reasoning is technically valid -- maybe they could scam him for money or something -- but it's fairly obvious that he's taking this one personally. If anybody would benefit from finding out they're not Frank's, it would be him. It would kill Debbie, and it would more than likely kill Fiona too just with the total unfairness, but Ian is already the man he is going to be. He doesn't have to make the decisions that Lip still needs to make.
The three eldest confab about how you would even find a Gallagher in the haystack of Chicago, try and come up with even the names of the three brothers in question, and then Fiona reminds them about Frank's mother Grammy, who is obviously going to be hell in a handbasket, and the guys brighten up and head for the bus.
Jasmine Hollander -- played by Amy Smart somewhere on the thankfully far-lefthand side of the Butterfly Effect role spectrum of Trophy Wife/Total Crackwhore -- welcomes Fiona to the mom meeting, and we learn that she's a few years older than Fiona and used to babysit one of her friends. She's intensely friendly with Fiona, in stark contrast to the bitches sitting at the craft table making four-leaf clovers and other St. Patrick crap and talking about mortgage rates. Their conversation is about as simplistic as you can imagine, as though they have just learned to spell the word "mortgage," but it doesn't keep one of them from being all, "Must be nice not to own a home and have to deal with this stuff!" And Fiona's response impresses Jasmine just fine, considering it's the only possible response you can give: "Yeah! It gives me more time to buy drugs and fence stolen goods." Funnier if it weren't true, Gallagher, but well done nonetheless.
Carl and Debbie are playing a shooter game when Frank comes sniffing around for his check, making reference again to the whole optional-Fridays budget cut thing in the school system, and they pretty much ignore him until he starts screaming: His Worker's Comp has finally been terminated. Presumably, they are precisely as worried about this being a major storyline in this episode as they should be.
How's Karen doing? Glad you asked. She is doing trainwreck bad. Cliché bad, cut your hair at random bad, dye it black bad. She's got a chain from her nose to her ear as though this has happened on a single face since 1990; the whole effect is like a costume, which I guess could be intentional -- or a side effect of how pretty she is -- but I can't help but think about how cool it would be if she actually looked the way we're pretending she looks. It can't be that hard to get footage of actual disaffected teens at the mall and then work from there, but this looks like something focus-grouped at Tom Hanks's house to represent Disaffected Teens. It's timelessly lame.
Lip is there, in the basement -- which has been spraypainted with profanities and is actually much more convincing as a sign of Karen's breakdown -- to invite her along to visit Grammy, or otherwise get her out of the hell she has created for herself. "It's gotta be better than hanging around here all day being angry at your dad," Lip suggests, and she breezes right past him about how that's not going on: "I'm fine. I'm just glad that my dad's not around anymore to call me a whore."
This is the part where Lip makes a mistake.
So Lip wonders about all that, worried now for real, and she goes on the offensive -- "You're going to analyze me now, like you don't have enough problems of your own?" -- so he goes to the classic Lip place of wisdom: "I just don't understand why you give a shit about what your dad has to say." Which would be fine, now let's go to White Castle. Except then he leapfrogs over the part of that sentence, which is that "whore" is not a word that means anything, and right on into "Not to be a dick or anything, but you have been kind of a whore."
So what he means is, "whore" is a construct of the patriarchy in which your dad excels and part of the deal of being a sexual revolutionary is not letting those words apply or have meaning to your identity -- i.e., having all the sex you want and getting to be a good girl are at odds because they're two different games played on two different boards in two different rooms and you pick your pony and stick by it -- but what just came out of his mouth is, "You have been kind of a whore." So the fact that she pretty much comes at him with a knife at this point, well, good on her.
Frank goes to a gross ambulance chaser of his acquaintance who is -- this is clever -- drumming up business by pouring water on the steps of the El and waiting for somebody to slip on the ice. Seems he was advised by this attorney, a Larry Burke, to "lay low" in the case of this Worker's Comp thing. Frank points out that all he does is go from Sheila's house to the Alibi Room and back again, when not sleeping in his own piss or vomit in the outdoors, but in any case it didn't work out. The meeting comes to a close as Larry's victim comes down the steps, ass over teakettle, and learns she is about to become rich. Do people actually do this? How horrible. I should just put that at the end of any paragraph starting with "Frank."
Having done her time with the bitches, Fiona makes ready to take off, but Jasmine stops her and tells her that the other women are twats and whatever Old Christine stuff, but she's not like them, she's special and cool, she says words like "twat," and then she very aggressively asks Fiona to coffee. Fiona snarls that she doesn't have the luxury of "doing coffee" in the middle of the day, and -- this is embarrassing -- Jasmine goes, "Hey, don't be a hater!" Apparently talking that Kevin nonsense is the ticket, because once Jasmine raises the bar to alcohol, Fiona agrees. Only for Fiona would a change from coffee to day-drinking seem less sketchy and not moreso.
Carl and Debbie are conscripted into Frank's job search. You heard me right: Job search. Of course, the only criterion is that the job be something that will terribly but not permanently injure him, and anyway it's nice to see the kids, so I can't complain. Debbie has, of course, typed up Frank's resume at this point and filled it with a bunch of embarrassing buzztalk, but that's Debbie. She's a grifter and a smooth-talker.
Carl takes a swipe at her for once again winning Frank's love, but whatever. That is a currency you don't really want to spend. Like, Lip and Ian -- having dispensed with the idea of dragging the wild animal formerly known as Karen along with them -- wait on the bus and have a conversation about dads. Firstly, of course, whoever he is is going to be a douchebag per Ian. Lip says that he couldn't possibly be worse than Frank, which is not really selling it, and Ian points out that he'll still be a Gallagher. Lip continues to dream his pipe dreams of donated kidneys and school tuition, and finally they're like, "Do we know any cool dads?" Just one: Scotty Houston's father. "But," Lip remembers, "He's on that sex offenders list for jacking off in Sherman Park." Say, that is cool.
There's a very long conversation with the employment agency guy about the different real jobs Frank might be able to get, and Frank demands "the special list," which has to do with places of high risk. They barter and negotiate and wiggle-room and whatever at each other for a while -- "How do you feel about metal splinters to the eye? Are you up-to-date on your rabies shots? What about seared flesh?" -- and then Frank finally gets his hands on the list. Debbie starts to feel a little weird about this plan. I just feel weird about the fact that every episode they show you ten ways that Frank might die, ten ways to feel excited, and then they dash those hopes again and again. It's just not fair.
Grammy greets them at the glass with a grumbly, "Who the hell are you?" She is like Frank in many ways, but her speeches are a bit more enjoyable: "I have never seen apple and spice looking so nice," she tells them, and follows that up with a report on the conditions: "Well, the food's not so great, but the pussy's pretty good. Never thought I'd be the type. Oh, this dump ain't so bad. I can get blow anytime I like. Only thing that sucks is, they got me cleaning toilets. I wanted to be on the kitchen crew, but they won't let me anywhere near the place. One meth lab explosion, and this is what I get."
I mean, in theory she's as bad as Frank obviously, but it's a lot funnier coming from Louise Fletcher than it is William H. Macy. Lip points out that two college students also died in that fire, and they get down to it. Grams, it turns out, hated Monica as much as the rest of us, and is not surprised that she fucked one of Frank's brothers. She'll give them contact info for all three, in exchange for a carton of cigarettes a week, the irony of life inside being that blow is easy but cigarettes are hard.
"Clayton, Jerry and my baby Wyatt. They're in the book. But don't bother with Wyatt, he lost his testicles in the Navy. And you tell Jerry that if he doesn't pay me back that five grand he stole, I'm going to send my ex-husband Ronnie over to gouge his eye out with a grapefruit spoon." Which is the point where I would be like, "Ian, you are right. Questions of paternity are not as important as the here and now."
Things about Jasmine you might not know: She is quite limber, thanks to her 24-Hour Fitness membership. Her quote "cookie box" is quote "all stretched out." She is however, at this very moment, doing her Kegels. She had three kids before making her husband Hal, quote, "snip his business." Her main issue with her marriage? Lack of passion.
Nothing gets a guy going like talking about your stretched-out cookie box, one might suppose, but one would be incorrect.
Jasmine: "Your dad still a drunk?"
Fiona: "Um."
Jasmine: "Mine, too. He's good at hiding it, though. Has to. He's in the Fire Department."
Fiona: "Oh."
Jasmine: "Before I met Hal, I was engaged to this guy Ralph. We fucked everywhere. I mean, one time we did it in the bathroom at a party!"
Fiona: (Unimpressed.)
Jasmine: "I like you, Miss Fiona. You're a dirty girl like me!"
I think it's safe to say that I am going to hate Jasmine. Stop trying so fucking hard. But also Fiona only has like one friend. Maybe Jasmine and V will get along and they can be like a Chicago version of those old ladies that talk about dick all the time. More likely, however, Veronica will hate her for exactly the right reasons, and Fiona will feel pressure, because I don't know if you've met my friend Fiona. So they talk about boys, whatever, it goes on and on, and Jasmine says, "Hold on to him, because guys like that get scooped up fast, and before you know it you're thirty and the good ones are all gone, and then you have to wait until they get divorced, but by then you'll be 45."
That is some bleak motherfuckerism. I had not thought about it like that. Anyway, she's gotta go, but first she plants one on Fiona. Fiona just sort of cocks her head like, "Well, wasn't that unexpected," with a funny little smirk, but Kev gets a boner and tells her about it, which ruins everything.
While Carl hits on a little girl nearby, Frank works his way into some kind of sewer job, and then right as they're agreeing on it -- and Debbie is getting more and more nervous about this grotesque plan -- something explodes and some dude underground is like burning to death. The only funny thing about this story is the total sadness that washes over Frank's face as he realizes he could have been down there. I mean, it's just so Frank: Putting more work in to scam money than you would actually just having a job. But I guess that's an addict thing too.
Tony has, of course, memorized the license plate number of Steve's Cayenne, so it's exciting when the owner, who is not Steve of course, calls it in as stolen. Tony gets more excited than you've ever seen him, and asks the partner not to call it in for a few hours, because what if this is the ticket to getting Fiona to love him, somehow? I don't know how that's supposed to work, but probably Tony will be a lot less cute by the end of this.
The job spot is medical waste disposal -- "Blood-soaked bandages, contaminated needles, body parts" -- which is almost as exciting for Debbie as it is for Carl. Sadly, however, the man giving them the tour is a CDC-ordered compliance officer from OSHA, who has turned the place around. "Come on, I'll show you your workstation. AIDS needles!" he grins excitedly, but there is just the whistling sound of Frank getting the fuck on out of there.
Tony drops by to see Fiona, asking tiny questions about Steve and the house door, and Fiona goes into major defensive mode. Things go from bad to worse as Tony asks why Steve even slums on the south side and Fiona's like, "That is an actual insult, see," and Tony realizes he has screwed up, and Fiona comes after him about how Steve is nice and Tony is apparently mean and whatever, finally kicks him out. It's all pretty rote. Immediately after she starts calling Steve over and over and over again, because Tony's sniffing, but Steve is nowhere to be found.
stop: Cabinetry refinishing and installation, using only the finest in non-green, poisonous chemicals. Somehow Frank -- a genius with just a wealth of information at his disposal, usually -- doesn't understand how carcinogens work, and thinks if he sniffs a can of paint or something it'll kill him. Debbie, on the other hand, knows that it's the safest option so far, and negotiates his position.
"Hi, I'm Karen Jackson. I mean, Daddyz Girl. This is my first web diary entry, and it's dedicated to my daddy. Eddie Jackson. Here he is on the left. You can visit him at the ITC on 126th where he works. My daddy and I recently went to a Purity Ball, where he asked me to confess my sexual sins, so that we can be closer. But when I did, guess what he did. He called me a whore. In front of a room full of people. A whore. Yelled it. So guess what, Daddy? I've got something for you."
Black hair, chopped at random, and what appears to be a tattoo on her arm reading WHORE. But I mean, who doesn't have a regrettable WHORE tattoo somewhere on his or her body, right? We were all disaffected teens once. It's why I wear a lot of turtlenecks, you don't want people to know. At least not right away, am I right ladies?
Everybody shows up at the house at once, including Steve and the boys, and they all decorate cupcakes for a while. Steve tries to calm Fiona down about the Tony thing, and Fiona worries about everything in the world, and the kids are cute.
Ian and Lip take the Cayenne out to investigate the family situation, but of course Tony thinks he's following Steve, so that's going to end poorly. Lip's still worried about Karen, but she's not picking up; they head to the first door. The guy who answers the door is identical to Frank, apparently his twin, and it's bizarre. We don't really get a vibe on him, except he hates Frank and looks unsettlingly like Hoggle. "I don't want that dick being my father," Ian says, and when Lip protests the guy inside the house offers to shoot them with a shotgun, so they decide maybe they should leave after all.
Steve lies and says the new Xbox belongs to him, and that's when Jasmine shows up unannounced with a bunch of bags of her sister's old clothes, all "so why don't we go upstairs and have a clothes-trying-on party." "Having just met you yesterday, Jasmine, that sounds like a totally weird idea." But no, Fiona is like, "Awesome, let's go do all that." Steve makes ready to leave, and Debbie once again corners Steve about the Jimmy thing. He gives her an iPad, and she does more of that awful precocious shit -- "It's unnatural for a kid to hold a secret for so long, I'm gonna crack!" and "Pinkie swear. Do it!" -- and whatever, Steve leaves and Tony follows him to do some mean stuff.
Frank finally gets the lowdown from his new coworker at the cabinetry place about how the fumes and toxins will take seven years to make him sick enough to go home, and somehow he is shocked by this, and the coworker guy does this whole routine about how the last guy was his best work friend, but Frank will be his new work friend, whatever. I realize that there is a Frankness to this show and probably there are plenty of lovely people who enjoy the Frank stuff, the Teabagger nonsense and the constant racism and the totally gross way he looks, but I'm not one of them and I never will be. It is not accessible to me on any level. I simply do not enjoy having Frank Gallagher in my home.
Fiona and Jasmine try on clothes upstairs and, needless to say, Jasmine is very appreciative of Fiona's body in a way that could mean anything at all, and then suddenly she's offering Fiona a job at her husband's accountancy office. The correct answer at this point is, "These people are swingers and you need to get out of here and do not go to the second location and do not leave your drink unattended," but Fiona, who knows what she's thinking. "I'm lonely and miserable much of the time." She at least asks Jasmine what her game is, but Jasmine's just like, "Don't be silly, boo!" and kisses her again, earning another hilarious WTF smirk, on the way out.
Karen smashes the windows of Eddie's car, stalking across the snowy landscape like a Scott Pilgrim character, and it's fairly beautiful.
Since we're not dealing with Wyatt, and Jerry was the twin, it's going to be down to Clayton. Who is a suburbanite, with a brittle wife named Lucy and a huge house and lots of stories about how "Father Frank" was a devout altar boy as a child, and who looks eerily like Ian Gallagher. This fact -- as well as Ian's resemblance to their own son -- has not passed wife Lucy by, so there is some very awkward shit going down. Clayton is code-switching like a motherfucker, trying to make small talk at the same time he's apologizing to Ian for the way all their lives have turned out, and this also does not pass Aunt Lucy by. Finally she drags him into the kitchen and yells at him about all of this stuff, while out in the parlor Lip and Ian are just completely flipping out, and eventually bust a move.
Ian does his best with the speech he has to deliver at this point -- "I'm happy with who we are, even if you're not" -- but it's just not a great speech. On the page, not a great episode. Anyway, Lip waves goodbye to Clayton, and that's the end of that.
Frank does his best to slip and fall, but his best coworker friend catches him midair and then hugs him for about a million years. I can't imagine even touching Frank Gallagher. Tony finally catches Steve in a parking garage, doing some car theft stuff, and beats him up with a quickness before tying him up in the backseat and slamming the brakes over and over so Steve keeps punching his face into the headrest and interrogating him about cars and stuff. Steve, he's playing it like, time to taunt Tony about fucking Fiona. Over with Frank, he finally gets so sick of the constant talk of his work friend that he nailguns his hand to a cabinet.
Steve offers to cut Tony into his action, points out that arresting Steve is the way to make Fiona hate him forever, and this is the ultimatum that Tony gives the battered puddle of what used to be Steve: "You got two choices: You could turn yourself in, spend a couple of years in jail. Of course, by the time you get out, Fiona and I'll be married... You could save your ass. Disappear tonight. Walk away. Just leave everything behind. Don't go back to your house. Don't call her, don't say goodbye. Just leave. But you have to decide right now." I don't really see him doing either of those things. Showtime shows nearly always fall apart at the end of the season, don't they?
St. Patrick's party. Hal Hollander compliments Fiona on her ass (SWINGERS) and Jasmine's like, "Don't mind my husband" (SWINGERS) and they notify Fiona about her new job at the accountant firm, and immediately Jasmine grabs Fiona and drags her out into the children's party to get drunk (SWINGERS) and ask where Steve is (TOTAL SWINGERS).
Tony pulls over the Cayenne, but of course the boys are in it, so now he's in double-trouble. Of course Fiona can't figure out where Steve is, because he's having a bad bad day, so eventually Jasmine just offers her some drugs and that's when she gets the call that her brothers are in jail, and wigs out. Which is pretty bad. But not as bad as what else is going on, which I will tell you is the worst thing maybe that has ever happened, and this is what it is:
Daddy Frank comes home to Sheila's with a bottle full of Oxy and a hole in his hand, and hears Karen crying, so he goes down to the basement to check on her, and then before you know it Karen's popping Oxy and tearing off her shirt and then they are... Fucking. On camera.
"What do you think now, daddy? Am I still a whore?"
I can't even... Hat's off to you, Karen Jackson. You have redefined the entire concept of the downward spiral.
week: Finale, boys in jail, Steve on the run, Karen finds a way to do something even worse.
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