Shameless Review: “A Night to Remem—Wait, What?” (5×04)

First and foremost, fuck that title, which is a bitch to type and is not clever in the least.

With that out of the way, while this week's episode of Shameless shows sparks of promise in a few key areas, it does not deliver on these within the confines of the episode itself, which is a sluggish, overly cartoonish romp that plays up the show's weakest aspects while giving short shrift to the things the season is actually doing well—in other words, the opposite of a successful strategy. I'll freely admit that a big part of my issue is that I am partial to the version of Shameless that skews dramatic, and this season has been resolutely not that. But even with that bias acknowledged, there's no getting around the way that this season has so far been a mish-mash of ideas. Plots careen together without much thought or reason, jokes don't land, structures don't hold up; and this episode is more of the same, at the end of the day.

The bummer of it all is that much of the character work is pretty solid. For instance this episode returns to an idea that the show began seriously toying with toward the end of the last season—namely, that Fiona and Frank are far more similar than Fiona would ever be comfortable admitting. It's no stretch to draw a parallel between Fiona's lost week with Gus, one that ends in an impromptu marriage, with Frank's lost evening of temporarily rich debauchery. This will always be interesting ground for the show to cover, and in fact I wish it would address the similarities more directly than it does here. Even so, the final shot of Fiona speaks volumes on the issue.

So it's a shame that the actual storytelling here is so poorly executed. Fiona's time spent with Gus is sweet for a scene or so, but it drags on forever, and is just bland, boring and predictable, even up through the marriage itself. Gus just isn't a fully-fledged character, not even to the extent that someone like Mike was, and certainly not the way Jimmy was before the Steve nonsense. What's of interest here isn't what's happening, but how Fiona and, more especially, the rest of the Gallaghers, will react to it, and that's all withheld from us, save for, again, that closing shot.

As for Frank, he spends the episode reenacting The Hangover, which is every bit as grating as it sounds. He receives his insurance payout, only to lose it in a massive binge (of course), and so has to re-trace his steps from one ludicrous situation to the next in order to find it again. It turns out he donated the money to a charity for kids in need of prosthetic limbs, which is actually pretty funny, and the fact that Frank decides this is a mistake and wants the money back further highlights how much of a total monster he is (as though we needed reminding). The fact that he blew up his wife's house and is ostensibly homeless himself goes unmentioned, as does Sammie, which feels like another narrative misstep to me.

Meanwhile, Lip takes a break from hauling rocks to visit Amanda, and ends up bonding with her dad over engineering. Credit to the writers—this does not immediately cause Amanda to stop liking him, and in fact it seems like Lip may be growing on her. The story is told in pretty broad strokes, and the dad goes from cartoonishly stand-offish to pot-smoking Cool Dad in an insanely short amount of time, but this is such a great direction for the character, and it's so satisfying to see Lip with a positive male role model for once, that I ended up buying into it this week anyway. As usual, not enough time was spent here, and I wonder if more scenes would have helped everything feel more three-dimensional than it does as is.

Meanwhile, Debbie takes up boxing after she gets saved from a girl fight by an improbably handsome young man. Age appropriate love interests are always welcome for Debbie, and while there's not much to this storyline, it's also nice to see a lighter touch, given that last week she raped a twenty-year old. (The sentences one gets to write when reviewing Shameless!) As for Carl, he starts selling drugs under a bridge, about which the less said, the better. Black humor is Shameless's bread and butter, yes, but I had a hard time finding the funny with a lot of this story. One exception: Frank teaching Carl “drug fractions”, and Carl studying flashcards on the subject in the tag, had me laughing out loud.

Overall this is about on the same level as “The Two Lisas”, raising some good ideas and suggesting a direction for the remainder of the season, but not making any real strides in the direction. The episode is content with broad strokes, but since too many of the notes fall flat (to mix metaphors), the overall effect is diminished. As always, a caveat that an episode down the line may bring all of this into focus, but it seems increasingly more likely that the obvious explanation is the correct one: this is all a mess just because this season of Shameless is kind of a mess.

Stray Observations:

• Debbie: “Here's what went down last week on Shameless.” Carl: “Me, a lot.” I laughed.
• Veronica and Kevin's marital issues continue, and I like the show's brutally honest portrayal of post-partum depression here, even if it has yet to label Veronica's condition as such.
• Mickey and Ian have a cute moment involving a dildo (which is not nearly as dirty as it sounds), but man, the show is underutilizing these two so far.