TV Review: SHAMELESS: Season 4, Episode 6: Iron City [Showtime]

Showtime’s Shameless Iron City TV Show Review. Shameless: Season 4, Episode 6: Iron City was the aftermath of two of There’s the Rub‘s storylines. Fiona Gallagher (Emmy Rossum)’s storyline took center stage though Liam Gallagher’s ran a close second.

There was a startling dichotomy between two scenes as they transpired simultaneous, Iron City‘s editor switching back and forth between the two sequences. On 24, back when the series took real-time seriously, the scenes would have run coterminous on a split screen but Shameless is not 24. The back and forth did not distract and made both scenes stronger: one Gallagher was walking toward disgrace, the other to hear about the doom or salvation of a sibling.

Both scenes eventually resulted in troubling crescendos but the most grueling to view was Fiona’s. Unlike most if not all of her former nude scenes on Shameless, this scene took a completely different approach and had a divergent dynamic. This scene had nothing to do with titillation or sexuality and thus the camera was kept shoulder level, on Fiona’s reaction to the more and more degrading things she was asked to do. It was her emotions that were naked for the viewer, far more so than her *cough* physical self. There is a scene in Ric Roman Waugh‘s Felon that is similar to this (and I am guessing in Orange is the New Black as well) but no where near as powerful. Its a shame, no pun intended, that Shameless does not strike this dramatic tone more often.

Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy)’s storyline took a turn that was inevitable but it was still hard to believe. Is Frank really a dead man walking or will an eleventh hour reprieve show itself? Even if he somehow gets a new liver, what about all the other internal damage alcohol had caused? How will that be dealt with?

Lip Gallagher (Jeremy Allen White)’s collegiate / home-life situation is most-likely only going to have one outcome. The reality of that struck him hard as exhilaration for a good grade on a test was replaced by a foreshadowing that washed away the emotion on his face. Lip is smart enough to know what is coming. Perhaps that was part of the reason why he was so angry with Fiona. She was the one that pushed him to graduate from high school. She may now be the cause of him “stepping up” and becoming nuevo Fiona: a drop out and Paterfamilias.

There was a gargantuan hypocritical moment in the episode that was completely absurd: Lip and Carl Gallagher (Ethan Cutkosky) are sitting in their home kitchen. Carl is eating a Big Mac. Lip sees the Big Mac, goes to the frig, takes out a bottle of beer, and trades the beer for bites of the Big Mac. Carl is fourteen (or there about). Lip’s little brother is in the hospital for a drug overdose and he gives alcohol, another drug, to his other underage brother? It was jaw-dropping to watch this transpire, especially after all the hospital time Lip had logged between this episode and the last.

Sympathy for Lip’s imminent and impending situation ended with that exchange.

From this point on, if Lip looks down his nose at Fiona, he is a hypocrite. At least Fiona can assert that Liam’s predicament was an accident and that she did not intentionally give her brother a drug to use. What if Carl becomes another Frank? Frank starting drinking when he was twelve.

The home visit that a social worker alludes to at the end of the episode will indeed be interesting.

Like to jailbird Fiona, Mike Pratt (Jake McDorman)’s appearance was a surprise. What he said to her before getting back into his car was not. Does this mean that Fiona is fired? It was left in the air but his distaste for Fiona was crystal clear.

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