O Captain, My Captain
After leaving Frank handcuffed to a bed last episode, you’d think there would have been more substance to his story added this week but it was pretty bare. Faye uses Oxy to coax a confession from Frank even though she knows how he sold out her fiance all those years ago. Once she realizes he doesn’t remember what happened she uses drugs as a carrot on a stick to keep him talking. By doing this she basically leads him to all the answers she wants to hear so it feels more or less like a waste of time. To end her plan she gives him multiple pills and he passes out, letting her dump him into a car with a bunch of prescription pill bottles. I guess she wants to set him up to mirror what he did 24 years ago.
Lip manages to pull in hustled side work with Brad. They overcharge a doctor to fix his bike so Lip will be able to pocket a few thousand by fixing this bike outside of work hours. It’s a big score for Lip and he doesn’t get the reaction from Tami that he was expecting. Not that she isn’t happy about the much needed money but she’s not happy about their station in life. She inadvertently insults him but she has a good point in the end. We can’t think only of the immediate future, the biggest problem we have now. We have to start working for a better future where we aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. She’s fine with living in the RV for now but that’s not going to be true forever.
Deb is having fun with Claudia and when her older lover runs off to work, Claudia asks her to pick up her daughter from school and take her to her after school stuff (something to eat and spin class). Julia is 16-17 years old and she’s used to her mom’s hookers girlfriends picking her up after school as a babysitter. They butt heads for a bit, Julia testing Deb’s boundaries while trying to figure out who this new random girl is (as she insists she isn’t a hooker). Julia has been through this so many times she considers it a joke and tries to layout to Deb the kind of person Claudia really is. This leads to them trading bad mom stories to each other and Julia turns here, putting her guard down and kissing Deb. Deb is all about it too so now this plot just took a sharp turn I was not expecting. Even though Deb is a few years older, I think Julia is still minor so Deb is getting into extra dicey water on top of the whole “wanting to date another family member” thing.
Carl is having a blast with his vigilante class but he goes too far with it. After a number of kids get seriously hurt, the parents complain so Carl has to be moved to something else. How does Carl feel about trash? We’ll find out next week.
Kev and V have unloaded all of their snail patches and have moved on to another side hustle to make money. They come up with the idea of a mobile health clinic (think as ghetto as you can…the van they’re using is Kev’s old topless maid service mural one along with a high supply of Vick’s Vaporub). So the two hit the street and help super glue some people together. That’s where they run into a 15-year-old girl and her mother from a neighboring state who are in need of an abortion. With shifting abortion laws, the girl is forced to get help elsewhere (they don’t have insurance) and V does what she can to find a loophole for the situation. Word quickly spreads about the “abortion van” and the Ball’s now find themselves deep into a moral, societal, and political issue.
Lip and Mickey’s relationship is more than on the rocks. Mickey bails for the first guy that gives him attention and moves out to live with him. Mickey feels like he now knows how Ian feels about him and he’s not going to wait around for Ian to decide he loves him. This scares Ian into feeling like he’s being forced to marry Mickey or lose him forever. Liam helps him buy engagement rings and then he finds Lip to ask him what he thinks. Lip and Ian don’t get nearly enough screen time together. All the way back to the start of the show, their scenes were some of the best. There’s a certain level of honesty from brotherly love that no other characters can have (Liam is too young still and Carl is an idiot). Lip thinks Ian should wait to get married–to anyone–as simply diving in out of a perceived obligation is a bad idea. This is the opposite of what Deb told him. Do it and get divorced if/when you need to. She thinks he should live in the now to hit every vein of happiness that he can get. Terrible advice but that’s how Deb is living so it fits. When Ian essentially throws himself at Mickey, he sees through it and calls him out on his pity party. Ian has no self-confidence and thus doesn’t think he deserves love, which makes him afraid of commitment. Mickey sticks to his guns, figure yourself out and then maybe we can talk. This is probably the smarted conclusion Mickey has ever come to but is such a dumpster fire that his time living with his rebound is not going to last long.
There are varying levels of interest with each story going on for me. Frank’s was the most disappointing, but I like the beats that Lip and Tami are going through. Kev and V’s are getting surprisingly deep as they always have the D level stories. But we’ll see if anything of substance comes out of it as they tend to rush through their plots.
Some of my favorite moments are when the Gallagher’s are all (or mostly) together and that happens way too infrequently. The scene in the kitchen was hilarious as the kids are coming and going at the start of the day. They all have different stuff going on and they each get these mini-updates on each other that serve up these amazing rapid-fire one-liners. Add in the antagonistic Aunt Oopie running her mouth in the background and Tami mixing it up (more or less taking Fiona’s spot) and you have my favorite scene of the episode.