Shameless Review: “Rites of Passage” (5×05)

I have to admit that as the season wears on, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to write about Shameless. It’s still a bridge too far to call the show weak at this stage—in fact I think it’s attempting a number of really interesting things—but there is a spark that, for me at least, has undeniably gone out. Part of that is just simple aging. Shameless is five years old now, and what was one fresh and edgy is now old hat, especially for a series so very reliant on envelope pushing. But part of it is also the show’s refusal to engage fully with its most viable aspects, instead choosing to hold on to things that don’t work anymore simply because it feels like it should.

I’m obviously talking about two things here primarily, and let’s get the one out of the way right now—I do not care about Jimmy/Steve. Not one bit. The character was always a lukewarm love interest for Fiona, useful insofar as he played straight man to various Gallagher antics. But as we got further acclimated to the Gallagher clan and began to see them not as a motley crew of South Side weirdos but as actual people with actual personalities, that narrative usefulness ran out. That the writers chose to replace it with the batshit incongruous insanity of Jimmy/Steve’s subsequent plots remains, to me, their most baffling decision. When he’d finally seemingly been killed off, it was a dumb but merciful end for a character who had gone way, way off the rails. His return this season (we are, after all, still pretending that the last scene of last season does not exist) shows no signs of being any less contrived, needlessly complicated, and ultimately unnecessary. The season needs a kick in the pants, but this is not what I had in mind by a long shot.

Fortunately Jimmy/Steve is but a small part of the episode. Unfortunately, our other vestigial character, fucking Frank, is once again front and center for entirely too much time. On the one hand I get it—William H. Macy is a hugely entertaining performer who is capable of some legitimately great stuff in this role. God knows Frank would be completely insufferable in less capable hands. But with the rest of the Gallaghers having shunned him and Sheila having run off, Frank has little to no place in the world of the show, and the haphazard employment of the character becomes more problematic with each episode. I get that Frank’s time with his organ donor’s parents this episode is black comedy, but I’m just not in on the joke here, I guess—or more accurately, there is just one joke here, being beaten senseless into the ground. The father is uncomfortably weird, and doesn’t garner the laughs that the script so clearly expects. Ditto the turn where Frank sleeps with the mother. The whole thing perpetuates the tonal whiplash that is so problematic.

Frank’s greatest sin, though, is the time he steals from the other, vastly more interesting characters and conflicts. The game of marital chicken that V is playing with Kevin is tremendously stupid, but is a thoroughly fascinating dynamic to explore. Why, then, is it relegated to C-plot status? It’s by far the most compelling aspect of the episode, and of the season, and it’s past time the show starts giving these characters their dramatic due. The same is true of both Ian and Lip, who once were so vital to the show, and who now both feel like afterthoughts to me. Ian’s increasingly wild mood swings have been jotted off carelessly in the margins of the show, making his decision to run off with Mickey’s baby at the end of this episode seem jarring more in a bad way than a good way. The way this story has reversed the emotional roles of Ian and Mickey should be paying way more dividends than it currently is, and it’s because the script is dealing with it in the bare minimum number of scenes possible.

Lip’s story is also playing out in the margins, and for no discernible reason. The fantastic shot of him standing, alone and slightly off center, in the middle of the empty Gallagher house is more compelling in its brevity and silence than anything that Frank has to offer. The kid has a serious problem—there’s no other way to explain how he ends up with an AK in his hands and running from the cops. Why can’t we delve further into the internal conflict here? There’s an amazing scene between him and Fiona early on in the episode, but then the characters go their separate ways. These two have a wonderful dynamic—take advantage of it!

The biggest sign of trouble, I think, is that I can get this far in the review and only now mention Fiona. She’s mostly basking in the afterglow of her shotgun wedding here, until her co-worker Jackie ODs on heroin right before the court hearing to retain custody of her daughter. Jackie and Sam are both dark mirrors Fiona can hold up to herself. Maybe her current brand of chaos and destruction is of the meet-cute, let’s get married and damn the haters variety, but it’s really just another side of the same coin, and deep down she knows that. That subtext runs throughout these scenes, but it might be too subtextual.

Shameless is a show with many, many strengths, and it’s just a shame (no pun) to see them squandered. This Sunday will bring us to the halfway point; in other words, to the point where it will be too late to say, maybe this all has a point. We need an episode with the laser focus of something like “Iron City,” and it can’t come soon enough.

Stray Observations:

• Holy shit Kevin’s playground game is absolutely horrid, and is also the episode’s biggest laugh.
• Mickey’s type: red head, batshit crazy, packing nine inches. Favorite character right here.
• Gus meeting Chuckie is fantastic, as is everything to do with Chuckie.