Rescue Me – A man’s down

Lou’s big heart just can’t take it, this fire fighting business. You knew it from Lou’s first moments in the recent episode when his doctor told him to hang up his gear and move on. You knew it weeks ago when Lou collapsed and was hospitalized after having a heart attack.

Clearly Lou’s days on the job are numbered, which is why when he dropped to the ground inside the fiery coffin warehouse at the end of this episode, I figured I knew what’d happen next.

I was wrong.

Lou didn’t die. Damian did. (I’m assuming Damian’s dead. If he’s just severely injured, I’ll write a mea culpa next week.) Young, healthy, whole-life-ahead-of-him DAMIAN died, crushed by debris after the rest of the crew had rushed over to help Lou, who was trapped under a pile of rubble, gasping for breath, heart straining mightily. In a stroke of irony, the kid who’d actually filed resignation papers because he didn’t feel as though he’d really been “called” to the fire fighting profession — only did it as a tribute to his dead hero father — but returned to it after a conversation with (who else?) his uncle Tommy and a baby doll prank by his colleagues, he’s the one who dies.

(For those of you Sheila haters out there, you gotta admit, this sucks. First her husband, now her child. If she was messed up in the wake of Jimmy’s death, I wouldn’t be surprised to see cases of psychotropic drugs wheeled into her apartment on a dolly in the next episode.)

Of course, this being Rescue Me, the real cost of Damian’s death — other than on Sheila’s psyche — will come in the form of searing guilt among his surviving crew members … as if Tommy has any more room on his shoulders to lug around more ghosts and regrets. It doesn’t help matters that when Janet was explaining the “rules” of their new, last-ditch attempt to save their wacky marriage, one of them was for Tommy to stop treating Damian like his son because his real son was Connor, who’s dead. She instead, suggested that Tommy focus on the clean slate of baby Wyatt.

And then there’s Lou, who hasn’t come clean about his dire diagnosis with any of the people with whom he works. If Lou had told them the truth, he would’ve never entered that building and Damian might have still been walking around to whine another day. But Lou didn’t say anything and Damian went into that building with him, actually doubled back AFTER he’d gotten safely out to see his colleagues aiding Lou. Then Damian was crushed. The guilt Lou’s going to carry in his severely damaged heart makes me wonder if, in next week’s season finale, we’re going to see him sitting inside his apartment, filled floor to ceiling with gross quantities of food, eating his way to his grave. He did say he’s an “emotional eater.”

The few moments of levity in this episode included: The scene where Sean Garrity strutted around the fire house shower room wearing a red bathrobe, all weirdly proud of himself, and the long-ish scene where Sheila and Tommy attempted to make bizarre excuses for why Mickey found Tommy on top of a partially dressed Sheila. Mickey and Janet stood there skeptically, arms crossed, trying to discern the truth as the scene went on longer and more uncomfortably than scenes like this typically do on TV, but that’s why I liked it. The discomfort was palpable and there was no immediate relief by jumping onto a new scene.

As we head into the season finale, what do you hope to see in the next episode? I’m convinced it’ll be filled with emotional purging and Tommy flailing around trying to figure out where to direct his grief and anger, somewhere other than into a bottle of booze, a pack of cigarettes, mindless sex with strangers or putting himself in mortal danger. Paging Father Phil …

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Aug 25, 2010 @ 11:59 EST5EDT