RESCUE ME: “Goodbye”

After a disappointing first half of season 6, Rescue Me has come on strong and is back to being a top-notch character drama. The season’s penultimate episode, “Goodbye,” consisted of three plot lines: Damien’s decision to stay or leave the firehouse, Lou’s inability to leave the job behind despite knowing it will cost him his life, and the age-old triangle of Janet, Tommy, and Sheila. And all three worked like gangbusters for me (the fact that Teddy was nowhere to be found didn’t hurt either; I’ll explain my objections to his role this season at the bottom).


The common thread through these plot lines is well summed up in the episode’s title, as we see various characters unable to say goodbye to dangerous and addictive relationships. For both Lou and Damien, that relationship is with the FDNY and their comrades within. For Sheila and Tommy, that relationship is each other.

Rescue Me has never shied away from giving truly important scenes the proper time to breathe. You’ll seldom see an 11 minute scene on any television show, but that’s what we got from the opening scene of “Goodbye” and it was well worth it. The scene was full of the traditional, hilarious, Tommy Gavin bullshit as he tried to get himself out of an impossible situation; first by intentionally choking on a piece of food to distract everyone from the bomb Mickey was about to drop, and then through his usual stammering and doubletalk.

But the best part of that scene is the way Sheila was able to put all the blame on Tommy after Mickey revealed he had caught the two of them half-naked and squirming on top of each other. Sheila didn’t accomplish this by lying, but by brilliantly framing the truth in just such a way that made her look innocent. “I told him to stop.” When Janet and Mickey ask Tommy if this is true, all he can say is yes. “I told him I had no more feelings for him and to get out.” Again, all Tommy can do is admit it. “He grabbed me and kissed me and I told him I felt nothing, so he threw me onto the couch and ripped my dress off.” Again, technically true. And yet, anyone who saw that scene in the previous episode knows full well Tommy went over there to end things for good, and then Sheila pushed every one of his buttons to manipulate him to her purpose. And since Sheila is much, much smarter than Tommy, she of course got her way. I’m not whitewashing what Tommy did; he has free will as much as anyone else. But Sheila was the true instigator of that encounter, and the way she used “the truth” to her advantage once she was caught, while simultaneously throwing Tommy under the bus, was magnificent.

Sheila was of course able to earn some quick forgiveness from Mickey, and Tommy should consider himself lucky Janet chose to forgive him…or unlucky, depending on how you feel about Janet. The condition for Janet’s forgiveness, he has to truly say goodbye to Sheila once and for all. No more contact. No more nothin’.

Despite that command, Tommy calls Sheila one more time to apologize for all the times he’s let her down (and there have been A LOT). Despite Sheila’s earlier insistence that she’s over Tommy and is ready to move on with Mickey, the phone call makes it abundantly clear who she still has that passion for. “Did you ever really love me?” she asks. Tommy admits he did, but says that at the end of the day, he loved Janet more, though not in so many words. Sheila’s façade cracks as she breaks down crying and tells Tommy that she hates him and he should never call her again. Somehow I doubt this is the last we’ve seen of these two together.

Sometimes, writers can go back to the same well once too often when they can’t figure out how to take characters in new directions. Rescue Me has fallen victim to this on a number of occasions, whether it’s Tommy’s repeated attempts to stay on the wagon, his hot and cold relationship with his estranged wife, or Franco’s multiple failed attempts to find a relationship that means more to him than sex. That being said, I will never feel that way about Tommy and Sheila. When those two are in a room together, there is so much heat, so much anger, so much wounded passion and sizzling chemistry, that the writers can go back to that well as many times as they want and I won’t complain. I always thought Tommy was a fool for choosing the ice queen over a woman with so much fire and passion, even if she is tightrope-walking the borderline of crazy.

Janet has one final test for Tommy, as she presents him with two glasses of liquor posing as a consequence-free last drink, a veritable Trojan horse. Tommy sussed out the trap (I’ll admit I was scared he wouldn’t for a moment) and poured both glasses down the sink. Having said goodbye to two dangerous addictions, Sheila and alcohol, he is ready to make one final go of it with Janet, and she appears willing to give him the chance.

Damien and Lou, however, were less successful in their bids to extricate themselves from dangerous situations. After Lou’s second heart attack on the job, the doctor tells him, in no uncertain terms, that if he doesn’t quit immediately he’s going to die. Lou makes one feeble attempt to bring up retirement with Needles, but when Needles makes an offhanded joke about rookies getting the jitters and wanting to quit, in reference to Damien, Lou backs down and fails to bring it up. I imagine this is a psychologically accurate portrayal of how hard it is for guys in that line of work to let go. Between saving people’s lives, the addiction to danger, and more than anything, the camaraderie that forms between friends in the same firehouse, it is difficult to say goodbye. To someone like Lou, who puts his life on the line every day, the threat of death by heart attack might be less intimidating than the threat of losing the only way of life he's ever known. Having a family, or even a woman in his life to go home to, would certainly make that transition easier; but Lou has never been that lucky. He managed to forego his demise this episode, but if he can’t muster up the courage to quit soon, he won’t have much time left.

Now, Damien. Oh boy. If there was one person I didn’t think was in imminent danger (though in hindsight, I should have), it was Damien. Damien is a confused young man. Last week, we saw how he had to take directions every step of the way from his girlfriend, while he had sex for the first time in his life (side note, if he is in fact dead, thank god he got to do that first). And in “Goodbye,” we see that Damien is just as confused and malleable about his direction in life as he is about sex. After weeks of working on him, Sheila and Mickey convince Damien the job is too dangerous, and that he should turn in his papers. But the truth is it’s too late. Damien loves this job. He’s already begun to feel the camaraderie and the addiction to excitement the other guys no so well. All it takes is a couple of war stories, one actual war story Chief Feinberg, and a great anecdote from Tommy about a practical joke Damien’s old man played on him when they were just starting out, and Damien knows he’s not ready to let this go.

In the episode’s climactic scene, I fully expected Lou to have his third heart attack and die right there. When he can’t breathe, and then a pile of metal coffins literally falls on top of him, he seems to be a goner for sure. But I should’ve given the show more credit than to think it would be that predictable. As the rest of the guys try to help out a clearly still-breathing Lou, Damien calls out from a short distance away, while foolishly clutching his helmet in his hand instead of wearing it on his head, “Come on guys, we gotta go!!!” Just then, debris crashes through the ceiling from the floor above, crushing Damien to the ground. Alive or dead, it’s hard to imagine Sheila truly forgiving Tommy for pulling her son back into the job (after having been the one to bring him in, in the first place). And if Damien is dead, I’d expect nothing short of a tour de force from Callie Thorne in next week’s finale. There’s no telling how Damien’s tragedy will affect those around him. It may drive Tommy back to the bottle. It may knock Sheila completely off the razor’s edge of sanity. And if nothing else, it will hopefully make Lou see the danger of staying on duty when he’s not equipped to handle the job. Even if he doesn’t die himself, it’s an inevitability he’ll get someone else killed. After all, if the guys weren’t helping Lou up, then Damien doesn’t double back to tell them they have to go, and he’s still alive. I’m not going to write off Damien yet, though. Not after one of this season’s earlier episodes ended with Lou lying on the ground after a heart attack, not moving and with his eyes wide open, looking deader than dead, only for me to find out the next week that he was alive and kicking.

As promised, my issue with Teddy this season. This is a 2-parter, and both have to do with last season’s finale in which he shot Tommy in the gut, and forced everyone in the room to sit there and watch him die, which he did for several minutes. I expected Teddy to be in jail at the start of this season, seeing as how he shot someone to death in a room full of witnesses. But not only is he not in jail, the police don’t even seem to be looking for the shooter. When someone is brought into the emergency room with a gunshot wound, there is a police investigation. It strains all credulity and story logic to think this guy would be running around with nobody looking for him. But making matters worse, and this is part 2, is the fact that nobody in Teddy or Tommy’s life seems to be saying boo about the fact that Teddy shot him to death. Even Tommy seems to be having reasonable conversations with Teddy as if nothing happened. And when I hear Teddy tell Tommy that he loves him and that he only shot him for his own good, and I see that accepted by Tommy and everyone else as the truth, I kind of want to throw my remote at the screen. Or better yet, jump inside the screen and yell, “HELLLOOO???? HE SHOT YOU!!! WITH AN ACTUAL GUN!!! THAT HAD ACTUAL BULLETS IN IT!!! TO DEATH!!!!!!!! DOES ANYBODY CARE????” In short, the more they keep Teddy off the screen in the finale, the way they have these past few weeks, the happier and less distracted I’ll be.

Lighting a candle for Damien.