You’ll Know the Bottom When You Hit It

Don’t be mad. It’s no ones fault.

Xan

A lot of what I was hoping was going to happen, happened this week. Lots of necessary talking and confrontation goes down. Plus, the classic Shameless side talking digs come fast and furious. Surly Fiona can be really funny.

At the start of the show, Xan says the above line to Lip and once she leaves with the DCFS agent, he promptly goes to Fiona’s room to pack up all of her stuff and throw it onto the curb. In a heavy Fiona episode, anger is the focal point.

Fiona spends most of her day at The Alibi and day drinking Fiona makes a quick impression on V. When she asks for a vodka on the rocks, V accidentally makes her a vodka cranberry. Frank moseys in just after a blackout starts after setting up a supply line to sell the neighborhood the needed essentials at a significantly raised price. Since no one in the South Side prepares for anything, it’s a good time to be a hustler. Since Fiona has nothing to do and about $100 to her name, she strikes a deal to help Frank sell. Her business acumen kicks in and she gets much more ambitious than Frank. Ditching a half-assed wagon idea, she creates a stand for them to sell much more. It works.

When Fiona makes her way home in the middle of the afternoon and finds her stuff outside, Lip is there to greet her with a fight. They have it out in the kitchen and Frank breaks it up (for quite possibly the first time in his life). Lip tells her to GTFO and she tells him to GTFO of her house. Lip tells her to go to a AA meeting and Frank rolls his eyes at the judgment. When Fiona storms out, Frank leaves too but with some parting advice for Lip: You should be thanking her, raising 6 kids by yourself isn’t easy.

So Fiona and Frank go back to The Alibi. Furious Fiona asks V if she can crash at her place and Frank divies up the days take, Fiona gets aggressive and Frank now has advice for his daughter. While they continue to drink, he tells her she’s a bad drunk. That makes her laugh at loud and he lays it out to her: you’re abusing the gift of booze. She doesn’t get drunk and have fun, she gets angry and wants to fight everyone while thinking about the past. In eccense, Handle Your High or else. Normally when Frank gets on his soap box it’s the ranting of a brain pickled by substance abuse and scams, but this is downright sage like wisdom that only Frank can deliver.

As the day goes on everyone is sweating it out with no power, except for Liam because again, he doesn’t exist. Deb continues to buddy up to Kelly which drives Carl nuts and the battle comes out in front of Kelly. She’s weirded out and doesn’t understand Carl’s reaction (still naive of Deb’s true intentions) and she breaks up with Carl because he’s too clingy.

On the positive side with Lip, he talks to Tami about the pregnancy and makes some headway. His main message is that if she keeps the child, he’s on board for fatherhood. He’s not going to ditch her or the baby.

To my delight, V is brought in to engage with Fiona. Today marks the first time V has seen her in her full collapse, she now knows what’s going on in her friend’s life and can see what state she’s in. This isn’t her first rodeo of course. V has been there to catch Fiona when she’s fallen and vice versa. Since Lip wants Fiona out of the house, V goes to talk to him to try and fix things. He’s adamant about kicking Fiona out because it’s time she hits rock bottom. If he doesn’t she won’t get better and V is doing nothing more than enabling her. V objects at first but he makes a clear impression on her.

At the block South Side party Kev put together, it turns out that every town in Chicago except for the South Side has power back. Fiona, primed and ready to continue her quest to rage against the machine leads the group on a march on the north end. En route, their momentum and catchy chants stop short when the power comes back on. Everyone is happy that the power is back and are ready to go back and kick it at The Alibi. Except for Fiona. She’s incensed and tries to rally them to keep going, raise hell to make change happen. No one cares and Fiona lashes out, making V move in to carefully calm her friend and lay the news on that she isn’t welcome to crash at the Ball home anymore. Fiona puts on a stiff upper lip in a show of understanding and leaves the party.

The next morning we get to see Fiona at the bottom. Frank is passed out next to her on the floor. Apparently, they met up later that night and continued to drink. They broke into her old apartment complex which is now a full-fledged dump. She can barely move the hangover is so intense, there is no water on in the building, and she vomits in the hallway a few times. She picks up one of the business magazines she left behind. It has her name and address on it, a subscription. A woman in a power pantsuit striking an executive power pose is on the cover. This was Fiona, what she was working so hard to achieve, to move her life forward for the first time. Now she has nothing left from that time and any happiness and optimism she had have been replaced by uncontrollable anger.

The final scene warmed my heart. Lip is at a AA meeting listening to a man talk about his life’s greatest regret and Fiona walks in and takes a seat. With the poignant voice over from the man over the scene, Lip looks over and sees his sister for the first time in a while. Shameless at its best.