When it comes to the ongoing continuity of any sort of story, cause and effect are extremely important. What characters say and do should not be taken lightly, whether it is positive or negative, since completely ignoring a situation where something significant happened only serves to break the kind of immersion a series should be going for. This was never really a problem for Shameless in the past, but recently something has come up to make me wonder, but wait last episode they were literally…? Granted it’s not the biggest of plot points—or holes rather—but still if it happens one time what stops it from happening a second time. Maybe it’s just me nitpicking at this point because I know it wasn’t a central part of the plot (actually it was mostly filler), but the fact it made me question what was going is something that really made me wonder about the rest of the series.
On a different and more significant point, another thing that is important in a series is to divide the line between right and wrong, whether it comes from the for of good and evil or healthy and unhealthy. Granted this is Shameless we’re talking about, and a lot of the morality of the series is pretty gray. But one thing we can count on being thrown onto sides are feelings and emotion. One thing that certainly sets Shameless apart from the rest is it’s realism in context to our relation to its characters. Keeping that in mind, something so central to the show’s success should be able to give us a clear line between what we can expect could be positive characteristics in the form of development and learning while on the negative side being constant poor decision making and remaining the same person of the course of the shows length. This episode reminded me why the line exists and why it is so important.
Recap
The episode opens to Ian continuing his plans involving movements against religious homophobia while Frank tries to plan his retirement, which hilariously is nonexistent due to his whole six weeks worth of work in his entire life. Debbie also finds some off the books welding gigs that take place at night which is about as strange as it sounds. Celia appears to take Franny for a few days, begging the question as to what is going on with Derek? Meanwhile, Kassadi continues to be an insufferably happy fiance by buying presents for the family; I forgot she was rich. Yet scarily enough, she give Carl a necklace with a pendant sized bottle filled with her blood…crazy.
Fiona continues to work on the apartment and learns that Nessa lost one of her Ford babies but hasn’t told her wife yet. Speaking of Ford, he does text her asking her to look at some furniture for her apartment as she tells Nessa about their situation. It’s cute to see Fiona and Ford look at furniture and see another language he knows. At least it gets her a huge discount on a pretty expensive Danish chair.
Kev and V continue to try and find Svetlana a rich old man to marry to help her one up her old fellow sex worker from the previous episode. Lip goes to make a visit in prison to see Youens and we shockingly find out that he has passed away, all the office will tell him that there was an incident and he didn’t survive and that the body was claimed by the next of kin. What follows is a quite depressing montage of Lips ride home.
Once Fiona returns home, she sees the family of the man who fell off her roof arguing with his coworker, who is refusing to give her money for the work already done until he’s out of the hospital. It looks like they’re homeless at the moment and Fiona does what she can to help. She realizes they might be homeless, when what starts as his daughters wanting to use Fiona’s bathroom turns into a bath for them. Ian starts to see more supporters come out to see him after the viral video of him saving the priest and he’s approached by a minister to help more of the Gay community. Lip goes back to Youens’s home and walks in on his daughter, Tabitha, going through his affairs. It turns out the withdrawal from booze caused him to have a bad seizure, he tries to seem significant to her but she comes off as offended and asks him to leave and to leave his key.
Svetlana finally has her date with old rich man only to be treated like a cheap sex worker and she ends up punching him in the face when he asks her for a good time for very little money. Ian has a lot of the kids in his home to spread the message of love but it only serves to gain him more followers in which he’ll need a bigger place to speak. Though he’s not sure if he’s up to the task which is as much as he expresses this fear to Fiona. Though now he’s dubbed as Gay Jesus.
Debbie’s night welding job actually ends up working for a bunch of scabs trying to one up production for cheaper against a welding union. They do get caught but most of them get away, including Debbs. Kassidi gets more and more possessive and obsessive when she realizes Carl is still going back to military school. She has a clear freak out about it while Lip tries to write a speech for Youens’s wake. The family finds out he’s engaged, but of course Ian and Fiona try to convince him not to marry him. Frank does what he does best and acts like Frank.
Just as Fiona begins to enjoy life on her own, the man who fell off her roof is brought by ambulance to his family who are still living in a car right outside her apartment. Once Ford comes back, Fiona tells them she’ll try and find them family housing until they can back on their feet. Pun not intended. Meanwhile Kev and V work a scheme with mic and two way radio to help Svetlana act more like a submissive woman to help her find a rich old man. Debbs realizes even though there is danger with working with scabs, the pay was too good for her not to take the risk again. Carl comes back home to all his military uniforms ripped apart and this leads to yet another fight as she begins to describe that she’ll die if he leaves. The two compromise on getting married that day, oddly enough it’s not the weirdest marriage that the Gallagher family has produced.
Fiona talks to Trevor about the housing for the family, and Trevor mentions that Ian hasn’t been around much even though he was supposed to speaking to some kids for him that night. Trevor expresses that he misses him. Frank, now pretty much back to his old ways, is using Ian’s message for shameless advertising; of course Ian tells him that 95% of the sales must go to help Trevor’s kids.
At the wake for Youens, Lip realizes that he was not the only life touched by his professor, in fact he was actually the least successful of all of them. They all come up talking about how he helped them become masters in their field, or was there for them when they needed him most, and even more emotionally exclusive situations. Lip crumbles his speech and leaves in anger only to go back to the bike shop to destroy things. Fiona tells the family outside that she found them a place that will take them in two days but offers to let them stay at her apartment until then. Carl and Kassadi’s marriage falls through when they’re told they have to wait for the next day for their marriage license to take effect.
Fiona and Ford spend more time together as she finally confronts him about his lack of interest in her life, only to realize he already knows everything bout her by asking around. She’s surprisingly not creeped out by his extensive knowledge of her because of how he words it that she’s completely out matched by his charm. Svetlana’s second attempt at wooing an older suitor has her take off her mic in frustration and go straight for grabbing the mans crotch. Another successful meeting gets Ian a larger group for support, he waivers only at the idea of saying the same things over and over but quickly picks back up once he’s told that sometimes that’s all one needs to hear.
Carl finally admits to Kassidi that he’s having doubts about their marriage the next day and that he was relieved that they had to wait. He wants to wait a little longer and she seems to accept based on his honesty. Probably the best thing she’s done until she ruins it back trying to fake hanging herself so that she’ll be saved by Carl, using that as a sign that he really does love her. This leads to them getting married that day after all.
After Fiona and Ford finally pop the cherry she’s rushed back to her apartment because more people are now squatting with the family to make money off of them. Trevor finally confronts Ian about missing his promise to him and the two fight, Trevor brings up some valid points. Lip finds Tabitha on his porch, she brought him the draft of a recommendation letter written for Lip and she expresses how he was a great dad to strangers but not to her. She says that he never saw her father right more about a student than he did for Lip. She begins to cry and Lip does his best to console her.
The episode ends with Fiona attending Ian’s big night while calling it a cult under hush hush, though I’m not sure if she’s serious or not. Ian gives a great speech, charismatic and relatable. Debb’s gets injured at her scab gig when a heavy metal pipe falls at work, her expression gives away that it’s a serious injury. Fiona finds out that the man whose family she’s been letting stay at her place is now suing her for falling off the roof and wants 6 million dollars.
Review
The first thing I really want to talk about is Youens’s death. For Lip this had a profound effect and swirled emotions around like crazy. Up until now Youens had been a sort of crutch for Lip; sure he was grateful for the man helping get his life straight and paying for his rehab, but at the same time Lip centered his true rehabilitation by trying to help Youens from succumbing to the same fate. Clearly the man did not want to be helped after he showed up to court drunk. Emotionally the thought of the old professor going to jail weighed heavy on Lip and with his passing Lip was given a forced release from that pain. I’m not saying I wish death on anyone holding someone back emotionally, far from it, but in this case it might have helped Lip in the long run.
The second part of this is Lips handling of the wake. We’ve seen Youens not only help Lip to sobriety but a long time ago he saw a future in him, a promising career. This slowly fell apart as the drink became most of what Lip cared for. Upon witnessing all that former students and the like had to say about Youens at his wake we realize that they were all a lot more successful in life than Lip. We could understand if this made him feel like a failure in some respect but the real emotional turmoil is the feeling of not being exclusive or not being someones, “one”. While on the surface it seems like a selfish thought on his part but surely he knew he couldn’t be the only one whose life he touched. Of course this feeling is remedied by Tabitha who most likely feels the same exact way, especially when students had a better child to father relationship than she did with her own father and like that we are given a proper division between healthy emotional grief and selfish possession.
On the opposite side of that spectrum, we have Carl and Kassadi’s relationship which is pretty much dominated by her over bearing possessiveness and emotionally abusive attitude towards Carl. She literally pressures him into seeing things her way by threatening, screaming, and just all around acting quite frankly insane. Carl really needs to find a way out of this before it continues to get worse.
Ian’s plot has gotten a lot of traction of the course of the season with a major pro and con. The pro of course is not only sending this message of love while at the same time facing the realities of being looked to as a hero by so many. The show brilliantly weighs in the issues that are faced by people of importance into their personal lives. But the major con is that earlier this season we saw Ian at an all time low saying something was going to be done. It was solemn, thought provoking and then never mentioned again. It seemed pretty significant at the time so why was it completely forgotten?
I had the same issue with the new plot for getting Svetlana a new old, rich husband. Kev and V just spent almost an entire episode working to shame and humiliate her and once she has a moment of true weakness they run back to her side? Granted they are good people and would do something like that for a friend in need but they literally just spent almost a whole season hating her and suddenly they don’t? Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
