Rescue Me – Laughter and optimism amid Lou-mageddon

During the opening scene of Rescue Me’s series finale, I was girding myself to shed a tear or two. Initially, I saw visions of what I had expected I’d see: Flags draped over coffins. A church packed with firefighters wearing their finest uniforms. Anguished widows. Talk of brotherhood and bravery from a uniformed man with fresh wounds on his face.

All of it, accompanied by the soundtrack of an ominous, melancholy drum roll.

Then Tommy woke up … what the …? For a good chunk of the beginning of the finale of Rescue Me, I found myself confused. Was Tommy the only survivor? Wait … Lou died and not the five other guys from 62 Truck? The tension was amped up as the answers to those questions were gradually provided via Tommy’s grisly flashbacks of the warehouse fire. “Go Tom, go,” Lou had told him seconds before he perished. “We’ll be fine. Trust me.” (“We’ll be fine,” oddly enough, turned out to be this episode’s theme.)

It was minutes later when we learned that not only had Franco, Mike, Sean and Shawn also survived — albeit after being battered, bruised and broken — but that Tommy had submitted his retirement papers and the other guys wanted to flee the firehouse or quit the job altogether. From that point on, the finale took a strange, circuitous route to its final scene which brought us back full circle, to Tommy, once again, standing with the New York City skyline in the background, ushering new, standing-at-attention firefighters into “the calling” just as he did in the first minutes of the 2004 pilot episode during which he originally told those Probies, “I’ve seen it all.”

I spent most of the rest of this episode surprised to discover that I didn’t need tissues after all. Lou, big-hearted Lou, was dead, and I didn’t shed a tear. But maybe Denis Leary didn’t want us to shed a tear; maybe he wanted us to marinate in the gallows, firehouse humor and to be optimistic about the future … which felt odd for this normally dark drama, one in which many (including me) surmised that Tommy Gavin would wind up dead in the end. Instead it was Lou. And, aside from the scenes when Tommy was recalling seeing Lou’s charred body and covering it — almost protectively — with his coat, it wasn’t as sad as I imagined it would be.

Much of that lack of gut-wrenching sadness was in the overall uplifting tone of this episode as well as in the strange choices the writers made, like having Lou’s ashes, ironically, blow all over his colleagues, and then be replaced with red velvet cake mix. That was so over-the-top that it somehow made sense in the twisted world of Rescue Me. (Sean dropping his pants by the side of the road in order to remove Lou from his rear end was so unspeakably odd that my mouth was agape.)

Then there was that over-long scene with Tommy railing against socialism at the playground and intermittently shouting “penis” and “vagina.” That was a head-scratcher. Sure, I get that they were trying to establish that Tommy’s no good with “regular” life, but there are a lot more options than just firefighting or being an at-home dad who has to kowtow to militant sanctimommies and playground supervisors. When Janet told him to return to firefighting because he belonged there — after one of the strangest TV birth scenes I’ve witnessed — it felt forced. If, however, Tommy and Janet, in recognizing that he’d made peace with his demons (as was clear from his declaration to the Probies at the end that “you can’t drink or fight or screw your way to figuring out the answer” to why some firefighters live and some die), had cited Tommy’s improved mental health as a reason for returning to the job, that would’ve seemed more realistic. But fighting over a blue shovel and fainting after delivering his child didn’t seem like good enough reasons for Tommy to do a dramatic 180 in just a few days.

I also grew tired of Franco’s constant “end of an era” commentary, as if we viewers needed reminding that this was it. It made some of the scenes featuring all of the guys together feel artificial and stage-y. (I’m thinking specifically of the guys sitting around the kitchen table in the firehouse, the conversation in the car before Lou’s ashes went everywhere and each man approaching Tommy individually after the cake mix was distributed.)

Nevertheless, it was daring for Leary & Co. to utilize humor and hope instead of despair and darkness. It was as though they wanted to tell viewers that, despite the horror of 9/11, of all the deaths and atrocious things that have happened to Tommy Gavin and the crew over the years, they survived, they endured and, like Lou said, they’ll be okay. It was a big embrace of optimism instead of the raw rage and guilt that had been swirling around in Tommy’s chest since episode one.

“People die,” Tommy said to the men and women preparing to join the ranks. “We’re firefighters. We die a lot.” And in the last moments of Rescue Me, it appeared as though those deaths weren’t going to break Tommy Gavin after all.

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Sep 08, 2011 @ 13:11 EST5EDT