DNR

While Deb acquiesced to Lip’s demands to sell the house, she isn’t doing anything to help him fix the place to be put on the market. No one else is either as they go about thinking about their immediate future. They also have the matter of a very famous and expensive stolen painting to deal with.

Lip is doing everything he can to keep his head above water. Tami and Fred are staying with her parents while he fixes the Gallagher house. There’s a surprise gas leak so that means even more time and money to put in. He manages to sell his Indian project bike to the guy buying his rental but for thousands less than it’s worth. He now has $9k more than he did the day before but it’s a hit to his self-worth. He checks in with job applications and the only positive bite he gets is for $15 an hour with no benefits. There’s no release to the pressure on Lip in the foreseeable future.

Deb takes Frankie on an across-town quest to find a place to live. She immediately starts to panic when she can’t fight the feeling that she can’t function alone. She’s lived in chaos her entire life and anything less than that isn’t normal. She and Mickey remain pissed at Lip for putting them out for looking for a new place to live.

Liam is on a mission to get into a STEM school and he needs to talk to his main competition for one of the few spots available to give him an edge. No one wants to deal with Frank so Liam remains the good Gallagher and brings him along for the trip. This is the best part of the episode with some of the best writing. Liam and Frank’s relationship has always been unique and a bright side of the show since Liam aged up to a speaking character. Liam does everything he can to keep his ailing father on track but when he ruins Liam’s plans he’s not sure what he can do. In the scene of the episode, the two are sitting on the house stoop at the end of the day. Liam says “I can’t do this” and Frank answers “Do what?” “Take care of you.” “You don’t have to do that.” And then Liam has to tell him-again-that he has dementia. Frank doesn’t believe him and he tells him to look at the notes written on his arm. This-temporarily-centers Frank again and he feels bad for Liam. These two spend the most time together by far and Frank never shies away from giving his youngest son all the wisdom he’s gained over the decades. Most of it is horrible but still, it’s meaningful. Frank admits he’s lived his life the way he’s wanted to and that’s important to him. So when it’s time to go, he’ll be happy enough to go because he’s done everything by his rules. Their arc for the episode ends with getting Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on his chest.

Mickey and Ian travel to the Westside to look at apartments that are shockingly cheap. Brand new construction in a cut off at the knees market by Covid. If you can prove you can pay the rent, the place with amazing amenities is yours. Ian loves it and Mickey loves the pool. It’s a massive upgrade and Ian is all for the potential of moving up in life but Mickey can’t handle the change. He’s just like Deb, born, raised, bred to live in the scrappy world of Southside Chicago. Leaving his neighborhood feels like a betrayal to everything he knows and who he is. Ian makes the executive decision to sign the lease and this causes Mickey to dig in like Deb and ends up getting into a fist fight with Lip about moving. Mickey is a hilarious from start to finish. He finds everything distasteful about the Westside and every observation he has had me cracking up. “Why are you running when no one is chasing you?!”

With each work assignment, Carl’s ethics have been put to the test. He goes on eviction duty with Tipping and Carl has hit his breaking point. Everything is so stacked in the favor of the wealthy that Carl can’t keep putting his down while the people he lives with get stepped on every day. He ends up arresting the wealthy vulture doing the eviction and gets read the riot act by his boss. If Carl flames out of being a cop, likely quitting because it’s so hard to get fired, I don’t know what he’s going to do. He truly wants to help his neighborhood but I don’t see him getting into activism on his own. The only possibility is that he meets a person that becomes his mentor and leads him into a profession he never considered (or knew about) before.

Kev and V have a breakout day in Kentucky. They both get offered jobs that have the potential to boost their income up at least two tax brackets. It’s hard to believe they will stay in Chicago now. They are discovering too many benefits to stay put.

Survivors

Turns out the writers decided to take the shortcut. After building up that Brad is likely going to crack under pressure with the police, they just jump ahead with Brad and Lip going to Born Free to sign off on the final paperwork for the sale of the shop. They close the problem they wrote by simply saying that the police did their investigation and didn’t find anything so they’re in the clear. That’s really disappointing (and lazy) but time is of the essence as they have to wrap everything up in 4 episodes.

So, the new wrinkle is that Born Free was bought by a Chicago crime family and they’re pulling some insurance fraud, claiming that what was stolen is worth double what it actually is. Stealing from the mob tends to be dangerous. Things get sketchy when they notice they are being followed. Things work out for the best as the mob boss was told that Lip and Brad can fix anything and he needs a birthday present for his kid to be assembled correctly. They manage to put it together and with the scam going on the parts, Lip figures they’re completely in the clear now. I wonder if this is going to turn into a job offer for Lip. Why go out of the way to introduce mob boss Baggio like this if you aren’t going to do anything with it? Baggio probably owns a ton of cars or owns a few garages where he could use another mechanic. Helping him with his kid in a pinch is a good first impression.

The big problem is the battle for the house. Lip has a timer over his head for his home being taken out from under him and moving back to the Gallagher house or Tami’s parents isn’t a solution. With his share of the sale, he has a down payment. Liam and Deb are convinced if the house is sold, the family is basically done. So Deb digs in further, Lip is furious, and Liam runs around looking for a place for him to live in case the house is sold. His journey takes him all over the place. This and Frank’s day highlight how the Gallagher’s rarely talk to each other anymore. Talking at someone rarely does anything.

There’s basically nothing they can do about Frank, he’s drunk himself into pickling his brain so everyone goes on with their lives ignoring him like they always do. Frank, reminded that the house may be up for sale, pulls at an old heist plan that he’s kept in case of emergency. He’ll get the money to buy the house by stealing some expensive art. He goes around town looking for his old partners and crime to find that everyone is either too old to do some crazy theft or dead. It’s a bad day for Frank (which has some really funny lines).

V goes to Kentucky to help her mother unpack convince her mother to move back to Chicago. This leaves Kevin with the twins and that turns into not a good idea, which many people predict. V’s trip does have a surprise turn: while sightseeing with her mom, it ends up showing her a lot of reasons to leave Chicago with her family. Her mom never says anything about it, so there’s no annoyance or outside pressure for V to get mad at. On her own, she starts thinking about the upgrades they could afford just by moving to another state. This may mean the character I never thought would leave Southside, could.

Since Carl piledrived another department into a ditch, he gets reassigned once more and he gets his first partner back, Officer Tipping. He’s in great spirits which is shocking considering where we last left him. His spirituality has really opened up and he’s not irritatingly positive. His desire to make work as easy as possible and go eat hasn’t changed.

Mickey and Ian spend their day finalizing Terry’s burial plans. In his stuff, they find a box that’s labeled for a mysterious woman named Rachel. This is the best story of the episode as Mickey is torn in every direction. He’s hilarious and the moments they go through are super awkward. Terry’s background is something else and we find out why he was such a miserable person. This thread has come to an end.

When Lip swings by the house at the end of the day, progress actually happens. After he and Deb fight again they do something long overdue. They talk. She tells him she wants to keep the house because she wants to keep the family together. Family is everything to Deb. They might have had a brutal childhood but she had her siblings through all of it. She wants Franny to be close to her family like she was and she’s terrified that this will break them up for good. She tells him Liam basically thinks the same thing. Lip assures her that they are all going to live nearby. It’ll take more effort to see each other (real talk: they barely see each other as it is) but they’ll put the work in. Having a weekly family dinner is his first solution. I would have liked to see them talk more about this (Deb should have brought up Fiona, for example) but it’s a good start. Lip then talks to Liam and Liam admits his fears too. Lip apologizes for making him feel like he’d be abandoned and offers for him to move in with him and Tami. Liam is so happy he gives Lip the biggest and greatest hug. It was really touching to see.

The stinger for the episode is a good one: Frank managed to steal a painting on his own.

Cancelled

I was right about Frank. But first:

After the mega argument with Sandy, Deb decides to go AWOL. She crashes with the bar owner she met a few weeks (days?) ago and spends the day with her. This leaves Franny at the house and Carl takes her to school. With a serious case of the “walls are closing in on me” emotional state, Deb dives into day drinking and ends up hooking up with a married man. She freaks out and runs away from the scene and while she works on sobering up, she gets a call from Franny’s school that no one has picked her up. Deb races to her daughter. At the end of the day, Sandy comes over to talk to Deb. It turns into another argument and Deb lays it all out, she doesn’t think she and Sandy are compatible. This time, despite the irresponsibility of the day, Deb is making a mature decision about one of her relationships.

Ian and Mickey have to take over care for Terry. The rest of the family is useless and Ian and Mickey work all day, so they need to get him an at home nurse because he can’t do anything himself. Terry, being the racist bigot, sends every nurse heading for the hills in a matter of minutes. The final nurse is a retired nun. She’s white, so Terry is okay with that part of her, and she clearly has the fortitude to put up with Terry and put him in his place when needed. Ian and Terry take off for work confident they have this problem sorted out. In a huge twist, the nurse does what countless people have wanted to do to Terry for decades: turns out she’s an angel of death!

Terry has always been a side character, brought in like a tornado in Mickey’s life every so often so I was shocked the writers went anywhere in this direction to finish Terry’s story on the show. Ian and Mickey are stunned and it’s safe to say they aren’t going to do anything about the nurse. I would expect to see Mickey processing his father’s death. He was the leader of that cesspool for ages so it would be interesting to see what happens with the family dynamic now that he’s gone. Of course, the dysfunction in the Milkovich family is off the charts so everyone will just keep doing what they’re doing like Terry just went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. He’s probably done that a dozen times. I do believe this means the family has no claim to that house as they now can’t say Terry is dating the owner. The block could soon turn back to being better but the odds of increased gentrification just went up.

After putting a hole in the wall, Lip gets brought in for questioning about the robbery. He handles it like a champ, knowing that since they haven’t arrested him, they have no proof that he had anything to do with ripping off the motorcycle shop. While he is let go easily, the cops don’t give up and get a warrant to search his house. In a panic, thanks to a tip from Carl, he calls Tami to get rid of the boxes of merch he has stored in the garage. He gets home moments before the police do, but they find nothing because Tami brought everything to her parent’s house. The two bond over the cover-up and all seems well until the loose thread emerges: Brad gets called in for questioning and the new crime duo race to get to Brad before he walks into the police station. Brad can’t handle any kind of questioning, he’ll give everything up after 2 questions. They need to figure out a solution. Brad is such a bundle of nerves, I have no idea how they can manage this. They can’t keep him away from the police forever…they’ll come to him the next day.

V is upset that her mother is moving out of state. She feels this huge loss coming but her mother is excited beyond words. If V is going to do nothing but mope about it, her mom doesn’t want her around if all V is going to do is make her feel guilty. Kevin gets good news at least and arranges a small and special meeting at The Alibi. The courthouse has resumed marriages over teleconference and he slots them a time. Kevin and V are finally, officially husband and wife.

Carl gets assigned to a vice squad and these two guys seem like the coolest people on the planet. Carl soon finds out that these two are also crooked as hell. In a really funny moment, after Carl finally grasps their scam, he asks them why they chose him to ride with them. It turns out that in Carl’s file, it says that he’s a person who is really easy to convince to do just about anything. In his eagerness to please and follow others, it doesn’t take much for a superior to go along with what they want to do. Carl seems to understand what that means, going “oh” and then he quickly smiles and says “okay” and runs off to do their shady errand. What the two cops don’t know is, Carl is also really loyal. The Alibi is on their list to set up and shut down and Carl can’t go along with that. He hatches a quick idea to sabotage the raid and it looks like it’ll keep this vice squad sidelined for a while.

Now for Frank. At the start of the episode, he finds out that Liam’s middle school (which he and all of his kids have attended) is renaming the school because the guy it’s named after now is a convicted pedophile. Frank think it’s stupid cancel culture plowing through his life. The guy did a lot of good elsewhere and his whole sexual predator crimes should just be ignored. So he gets into wanting to name the school. If he can’t get them to keep the name, he’ll pick on that he’s happy with. His solution: name the school after him. Let’s just hope no one knows about his extensive arrest record, right?

For most of this day, Frank does well. But just before he goes to the meeting with Liam at the school, Frank has a bad episode. He talks to Liam about naming the school, says he has to go the bathroom, and complains that there is no toilet paper. So he comes out, grabs a roll of paper towels and then repeats his plan with Liam. Liam is confused and Frank goes back to the bathroom where he says again, there’s no toilet paper. Liam looks at the paper towels Frank left on the counter. Then, at the meeting, Frank gets even worse. For the whole day he was able to remember about what he wanted to name the school and he forgets. It quickly goes down hill from there and Carl has to jump in to keep Frank from getting arrested. He gets Frank to the ER and the kids find out that Frank has alcohol induced dementia. Standing there, Frank has no short term memory. The kids are stunned and the episode ends.

For the first time in…ever? There is no in-credits stinger. It’s just credits. There’s no where to goofily bounce to after Frank’s health reveal to the family. We’re left with two major plot lines that affect all of the Gallagher’s: the sale of the house and Frank’s health. Both are tied together on how/if/what parts of the immediate family stick together. I do wonder what Liam will do, no matter what happens. With Terry gone, that does give him some kind of pressure release. Side pieces that could and do have a lot of importance: fallout from Terry’s death and Lip staying out of jail.

Only 4 episodes remaining.

Two at a Biker Bar, One in the Lake

The debate to sell the Gallagher home roils the siblings into sides with Liam and Carl being on the fence about selling. Ian is against it along with Deb and Lip is pushing for the sale. The day starts with a fight in the kitchen (Deb goes hard on everyone against her) and everyone splits up (except for Liam, he’s hiding at the Ball’s) for the day. 

Deb and Lip call Carl and Liam to swing their vote to their side and neither one of them picks up because they know why they are calling and don’t want to deal with it.

Liam doesn’t want to sell because he doesn’t know where he’ll go if the house is sold. He’s always the odd man out of the family as no one seems to pay attention to him unless they need something. He goes to the polling place with V and she tries her best to talk up the young black man to make his voice heard. He sticks with not wanting to sell the house

Carl has a full day of work to do, going to an elementary school to talk to a class about stranger danger. His co-worker tells Carl that he went through a similar thing that he’s going through with Tish. With one conversation Carl is convinced that Tish is trying to trap him by getting pregnant. As the hours go by, he panics more and ends up confronting her. When you assume everything, it’s easy to be wrong about everything and Carl embarrasses himself.

In the light-hearted story of the episode, Ian and Mickey take the day to find gay friends. They don’t have any friends and realize it’s probably best to interact with people outside of the family. Plus, if the house is sold, they are going to need people to actually interact with. Ian is pretty defensive about their living situation. It’s not ideal, but he’s used to and comfortable living with everyone. Sure they fight but that’s normal for him. They have a funny and fun day out and when they come home, Ian wants to sell so he and Mickey can live independently. This puts Carl as the deciding vote.

Kevin is storing the bikes that Lip and Brad stole and he gets the dumb idea to take one of them for a ride. Can’t say I blame him, but man is it stupid. He gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop and she insists on swinging by his gym to talk to the owner of the bike to buy it. Kev is the second character to panic this episode. He comes up with stupid ideas to hide the bikes, it makes things worse which means Brad and Lip are left with nothing. Brad’s medical bills just got much bigger and now there is no way Lip can afford a down payment to move. This shoves him into applying for a job at a Amazon warehouse (he hasn’t heard anything back from the mechanic positions he’s applied for) and having to move into Tami’s parent’s house.

Tami isn’t putting up with Lip’s moonshots. Her parents aren’t as bad as being homeless, so when Lip’s efforts for the day fail (she doesn’t know about the Kevin disaster) she says, I gave you your chance and now we have to be practical. Lip walks out of the house angry. I’m on Tami’s side on this one. She’s being the adult, as hard as that is for him. Everything is spiraling out of his control which is something he’s never been able to handle.

Sandy is like an onion. She’s got a lot of layers. Many of those layers no one knows about. This week’s exposed layer: she had a son with Royal. And he’s like, 9 years old. Deb is stunned to say the least. And she’s mad that Sandy could abandon her kid. Deb has been doing her best with Frannie and can’t understand why Sandy can’t stick by to family. She even thinks Royal isn’t so bad. Sandy has a very different perspective on getting pregnant at 15 by a 30 year old man. Deb, continuing her “adult” assertive attitude proclaims that she’s going to talk to Royal about getting shared custody of Prince. Deb will co-parent with Sandy. This sends Sandy out the door even faster. In their argument, Sandy picks up on something. Deb’s controlling behavior is from her abandonment issues from her mother, Monica. Deb does not like hearing that and it shuts her down, forced to think about how she feels instead of projecting her pain on others.

With all of this going on, no one thinks twice about where Frank is. We first see him ranting in a bar and when the camera pans back, we see it’s not at The Alibi. Frank doesn’t know how he got there or what bar he’s in. Even worse, he ordered five beers and didn’t touch them. That’s really weird. His dementia is getting exponentially worse. He’s losing chunks of time that seem to be something like an hour long. He gets lost and struggles to find his way home…the Gallagher house he can’t even remember the address to. With night fallen, Frank is walking down the sidewalk in total despair. He actually cries out to his kids for help–he says Fiona first, which broke my heart–and suddenly Lip shouts for him to get out of the way. As Lip storms into the house with a sledgehammer, Frank is relieved to have finally found home.

Lip went right from his house to the Gallagher home and in a manic rage he announces renovations to sell the house are starting and starts hitting a wall with the sledgehammer to make “the open floor plan!” Deb is beside herself in anger as everyone else just stands there watching Lip tear down a wall. She runs out of the house crying and runs into two police officers looking to talk to Lip about a robbery in his former place of employment…

This was another really good episode. V is losing hope about her home (her mom is leaving the state) and everything is pointing to the Gallagher family splitting up. There are two major issues.

1) No one knows about Frank yet. With how bad he is in this episode, I don’t think it’s possible for them not to notice it anymore. How will they deal with it? There are a lot of complicated questions from here. I think this will make Deb dig her heels in more; they can’t split up with Frank in this condition. She’s going to want to take care of him.

2) Is Lip going to be able to dodge punishment for stealing the bikes? The evidence is largely gone, I don’t know if the cops will be able to connect the dots to him and Brad well enough to charge them. If he’s locked up, that changes a lot.