Shameless Review: “Drugs Actually” (5×11)

Well, wouldn’t you know it? It’s another great episode of Shameless! The show isn’t necessarily firing on all cylinders even now, but in all honesty, even at the heights of the fourth season there were still missteps here and there (and one pretty big misstep named Matty…). So while not everything in “Drugs Actually” is exactly the best Shameless has to offer, so much of it does hit that mark that it’s useless to kvetch.

I think the very best thing about this episode is that, for the first time in a while, it bends its structure to portray Fiona and Lip once again on parallel journeys. The storytelling is at its best when it draws lines between different characters and highlights the ways that they end up on very similar trajectories, even when they’re in rather disparate situations. In this instance, Fiona and Lip are each being helped, in some way, by entirely inappropriate benefactors—and yet that inappropriateness doesn’t negate the good that’s being done. The fact that the episode finds a way to wind even Frank—Frank!—into this schema is nothing short of astonishing.

Fiona’s continued dalliance with Sean takes on a new dimension this week, as he helps her through her visit to the military prison where Ian’s being held. She tells him things she doesn’t tell Gus and leans on him in a way that she won’t lean on Gus—not because she can’t, but because she seemingly just doesn’t want to. She fears stability because “stability” is a foreign notion to her. (Remember South Side Rules?) I mean, they literally toast to self-sabotage. They’re cut from the same cloth, which makes them so well matched to each other, and yet which spells doom for this romance before it even gets off the ground.

And this all happens as Gus is getting ready to come back, so he and Fiona can work on their (admittedly reckless) marriage. Really, Fiona is a monster—she’s going to trample all over Gus’s life, and while, yes, he maybe shouldn’t have married this obvious train wreck so impulsively, he’s also a nice, well-meaning dude. He deserves better. The twist of the knife here is that Fiona knows that too. It’s Fiona’s own self-doubt and her inability to believe in her own ability to be faithful, to be stable, that fuels her infidelity, that feeds her chaotic inner self.

Compare that to Lip, who goes to a party in the newly gentrified South Side, along with Helene and her husband. She takes him there to meet Norbert, an aerospace engineer that she thinks can line up a job for him down the road. Helene finds Lip an interesting curiosity, a project, someone she can mold. But Lip is engineered to resist that sort of thing, and he fits in terribly at the party, whose host basically lays out Lip’s own worst fear of the situation. Like Fiona, he doesn’t believe that he deserves the success life has granted him. He doesn’t want to be viewed as a success story, a South Side kid gone good. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that, hey, good can be a good thing.

And then, turning all this on its head, are Frank and Bianca, who basically swap roles here. Bianca is completely off the rails now, having wholeheartedly embraced Frank’s philosophy to an extent that even he can’t keep pace with. It’s amazing to me that Shameless has somehow managed to, again, revitalize the Frank character with such effectiveness. Somehow, Bianca smoking crack with him becomes a sweet, romantic moment. Their sex on the train tracks is dangerous, and yet the audience actually sympathizes with Frank, who gets exactly what he wanted but in a manner that even he realizes is problematic. He ends up betraying Bianca by virtue of trying to help her, by calling her family to convince her to go to the hospital and get treated. Instead, she’s off to Costa Rica, or something, and Frank is going right along with her. It’s a complicated, messy situation, but that Frank can acknowledge this, and seems to genuinely want to spend time with Bianca and improve her quality of life, is an amazing development for a character of whom I was quite tired of not five episodes ago.

But the biggest bombshell of all is the usual Shameless ace in the hole: Monica, who turns up to visit Ian after the rest of the gang has already given their testimony regarding his mental state. She is a toxic, horrifying woman, a terrible influence on all of her children’s lives but especially on Ian’s, who not only has to suffer with her genetic curse, but is now suffering her wholly inappropriate life advice. She tells him exactly what he wants to hear, though, and in this case that’s enough. The military releases Ian into Monica’s custody, and they hop on the back of a truck headed anywhere south of here. The ghost of Monica, as I said earlier in the season, has loomed large over this story, and now she’s here in the flesh. As ever, it’s a major narrative kick in the teeth. I can’t say enough good things about Cameron Monaghan’s performance throughout this episode—he’s almost completely silent the whole time, but his entire demeanor has changed from earlier depictions of the character. You can see just how totally his disease has enveloped him, and it’s heartbreaking.

As I said there are missteps. Kevin and Veronica make up in a pretty anti-climactic fashion, and the whole bit with the Alibi Room springing a leak is, maybe, a little on the nose. And as for Debbie and Mickey’s runner regarding whether or not to torture Sammie is fine, until they accidentally kill her (or so they think), hide her body in a storage crate, and then just kind of forget to mention it for the remainder of the episode. A tag at the episode’s end confirms that Sammie is actually alive, just stuck in a storage crate, but ,hey, Debbie and Mickey killing someone isn’t that funny.

But the major stories of this season have emerged to be Fiona’s, Ian’s, Lip’s, and Frank’s, and these four stories are on point here going into the finale. That’s more than I expected, frankly, from the early going of this season. And that’s more than enough for me.

Stray Observations:

– As you’re reading this, the finale has already aired. The holiday got the best of me, but the final review will be up shortly. For this reason also the Stray Observations are mostly just a list of the episode’s (several) funny one-liners.

– “We want people to think we lead reasonable lives,” Sean says to Fiona. Truer words.

– “There’s always room in the Caddie.” Sean is actually full of wisdom this week.

– “The roof’s a nice place to drink.” “Most places are.” Frank is also rather full of wisdom, between this and: “They won’t have crack, they’re winos!”

– “Top shelf here is the cheap shit, just on a different shelf.”