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.