Rescue Me – Capping a strong season with an emotional punch

Those first few minutes of the season finale … wow.

In a season where Tommy Gavin baptized his daughter in booze, where he was convinced he’d gone to hell when he flat-lined after his uncle shot him, where Lou had a heart attack and the fire house was temporarily shut down causing the guys to have to battle a fire with baseball bats and hockey sticks, I guess you really shouldn’t assume anything when you’re watching Rescue Me.

First and foremost, I must issue my mea culpa.

I assumed last week that when the fiery debris fell on top of Damian that it had fatally wounded him. That’s what happens to everyone around Tommy Gavin, right? They die and leave him feeling guilty because he couldn’t prevent it because what, he’s Superman or something?

The first few minutes of last night’s Rescue Me were meant to reinforce the erroneous notion that Damian was dead as Sheila talked to her shrink on the phone about how she blamed Damian for going to that fire, how she sometimes imagines she sees him walking around the neighborhood, how she’s trying to come to terms with the fact that what happened to him was no one’s fault. Then she crumpled to the floor sobbing.

But, as it turns out, Damian didn’t die. Instead, as we learned in that first, jarring scene, he was incapacitated. But “incapacitated” isn’t a strong enough word for what happened to him as he was serving the people of New York in one of the world’s most dangerous professions. Damian was severely — and it appears, irreparably — brain damaged, rendered unable to talk, communicate, move or feed himself. He’s confined to a wheelchair and has red, angry burns down the right side of his neck and face.

While Sheila appears to be in denial about what happened to him — thinks she’s going to locate a magic elixir that’ll suddenly make everything all better — Tommy is running himself ragged trying to balance two troubled, needy families as if he can be everything to everyone if he just scrambles around faster. Unsure what to do about Damian, Tommy has been acting like Sheila’s supportive husband — in all but a carnal way — leaving Janet, who’s been very patient for Janet, alone to deal with the kids just when they’re supposed to be giving their marriage one, last, final chance.

Why doesn’t Tommy just sit everyone down and try to delegate some of his responsibilities to others, like, say, hire home health care aides for Damian? Because Tommy, who Janet says has “emotional A.D.D.,” thinks he’s a superhero. “You are so busy trying to save the god damned world, you know, rescuing people from fires, from cars, Sheila, Damian, every other god damned soul on this planet except your own god damned family,” Janet said.

“I’m just one guy,” Tommy protested, “you know, with, you know, one family.”

“No,” Janet corrected him, “with two families.”

Colleen, who needed him to be her sponsor and to take her to AA meetings, sunk to pretending she was going to start drinking again in order to drag her father away from her cousin’s side. Katie needed Tommy’s help with a research paper on the Vietnam War and wanted him to go to her dance recital. Janet needed him at home and to help with Wyatt. Meanwhile, Sheila needed him to drive Damian around — she told Tommy he’s the only one, other than her, who can drive the special van — and to help feed and watch over Damian so she can leave the house. Then the guys at the fire house wanted Tommy to make an appearance at the unveiling of the Patrick James Mahoney Memorial “pavilion” outhouse.

It doesn’t surprise me that Tommy would feel compelled to tackle all of these things alone, without asking for help (except that one time asking Lou to take care of Damian and Lou took Damian to a bar) because what motivates Tommy is his oversized sense of guilt, as evidenced by the final scene where, instead of envisioning a ghost of someone who he didn’t save, haunting him, he imagined that Damian woke up, grabbed his arm and angrily said, “You did this to me Tommy.”

As for the thing with the pregnancy test results that Tommy found in the book (the book was called Blame) … I re-wound that scene several times and tried to read the date to see if it was an old bill from when Janet was pregnant with Wyatt or whether it was new. However I couldn’t make out the date clearly and Tommy had his thumb over the portion of the bill that indicated when services were rendered. Yeah, that’s what Tommy needs, a baby in the mix.

The mystery about Mickey that hung over the episode was that he’d told Sheila the bracing truth — which he probably shouldn’t have done as Sheila was completely consumed with grief — and Sheila couldn’t handle it, so she sent him packing. “She’s wasting her whole life, all her energy, her time, her money, her hope on a string of quacks, endless,” Mickey told Tommy after the two exchanged blows. “I mean, pills, protein powders, injections, aqua acupuncture what is that? I don’t know. She’s going for every bit of it, hook, line and sinker … I just try to tell her the truth, what this guy should be telling her and everybody else which is, Damian ain’t never walkin’ again. He is, as is, done.”

The few bits of laughter came from the banter between the guys at the house, and those laughs were very dark, especially when they used Damian as chick bait in a bar — the “ultimate wing man” as Franco called him — pretending that they’re all taking turns caring for their fallen comrade in order to impress women, that’s when they weren’t taking the Patrick James Mahoney plaque and gluing it to a more fitting location, rather than on the outside of a “comfort station.”

The way this season ended, with the potential costs of this dangerous vocation literally in you face (Damian in the wheelchair, Pat, who worked at Ground Zero, dead from cancer), capped a gritty, realistic and excellent season. What’d you think of the finale and the sixth season?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Sep 01, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT