Holy crap.
OK, if you haven’t seen Tuesday’s season finale of “Rescue Me,” and don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading. Because I’ve got nothing but spoilers ahead.
Still here? OK, good. Anyway, as I was saying: Holy crap.
Tommy & Kelly forever? (FX photo)
How’s that for a cliffhanger?
So it turns out there are consequences after all. It had bugged me for a long time how Tommy got his entire family off the wagon and back into one big drunken stupor without any negative consequences at all. Hey, alcoholism’s a blast! But I suppose Ellie’s death and Teddy’s meltdown took care of that. Wow. “Rescue Me” has excelled this season in giving us 10-minute scenes of gripping, almost theater-like drama. And the last 10 minutes of Tuesday’s episode was no exception. Just a fantastically shocking, tense ending.
It wasn’t perfect though. While Teddy certainly has it in him – he did gun down the hit-and-run driver who killed Tommy’s kid – turning him into a cold-blooded murderer was too big of a leap for me. And sitting there watching Tommy bleed to death? Seems a bit extreme for a guy who was talking suicide a few minutes earlier. After all that buildup about wanting to get Tommy drunk enough to shoot him, Teddy changed gears pretty quickly once he accidentally shot him. Where did that come from?
I was also a little disappointed by the guys standing back and doing nothing. Gun or no gun, these are fearless guys, men of action, and hardly the type to helplessly watch one of their brothers bleed to death on the floor. You’re telling me one of them wouldn’t willingly sacrifice his life to save the others, as their fellow firefighters did on 9/11? Geez, did any of them even have a line of dialogue? That just didn’t work for me. Why not just have Tommy and Teddy in an empty room? If nothing else, I would have liked to have seen the guys be more than background scenery.
That aside, I thought it was a pretty good season finale. I loved that scene with Sheila (“Joe Pesci with t—.” Ha!) and Janet teaming up to scare off Kelly. Maura Tierney rocks, and if Kelly can stand up to those two and expose them as the immature harpies that they are, then maybe Tommy really has found his soulmate. Great scene in the background, too, with Janet downing most of a bottle of wine (And Kelly’s assessment: “She’s OK, she’s a fun drunk’). How about the reaction of Janet and Sheila when Kelly told them how Tommy just held her? Priceless. That’s soooo not the Tommy they know and love/loathe.
It was so satisfying to see Tommy seemingly burn his bridges with both Janet and Sheila. That was looong overdue. Even if Kelly doesn’t work out (which really I hope it does), it’s about time he left those two in the dust. His pseudo-torture of Sheila was disturbing (especially leaving her shattered and humiliated for her son to find), but you can’t say it wasn’t justified, especially after her creepy lighter exploits with a handcuffed Tommy last week. That trifecta has left a destructive swath of pain and suffering with everyone they’ve touched over the years, and it’d be nice if in the final seasons Tommy actually moves on and finds something that he doesn’t turn to ashes.
That’s assuming he’s still alive. So is Tommy dead? Denis Leary has said on multiple occasions that he’d like to kill off Tommy at some point. But come on, they couldn’t have a whole season of him as a ghost, could they? Who would he even haunt? Not that I think they wouldn’t do it – this show has proven that anyone can get killed off – but from the sound of this story from TVGuide.com, Tommy will be among the living when the series returns next year.
All in all, it was an uneven season. The first 10 or so episodes were fantastic, then there was a noticeable lull where storylines inexplicably came and went, but things picked up a bit in the last few episodes. It probably would have worked better as a 13-episode season, but whatever. I’d rather have 22 weeks of hit-an-miss “Rescue Me” than no “Rescue Me” at all. No other series blends laugh-out-loud crass comedy with poignant, gasp-inducing drama as well as this series does. It’s been a fun ride, and I can’t wait for the final two seasons.
