OH MY GOD RHONDA, ANIKA OBVIOUSLY PUSHED YOU DOWN THE STAIRS GET A CLUE

-Glad you're back, Gwen!

I mean, we're all agreed Anika pushed Rhonda down the stairs, right???

"He thought he could say what he always wanted to say to his father, AND know that it would hurt him." Good observation, I think that definitely rings true.

Glad you mentioned the casual "kill my husband" thing and Lip meeting Norbert. The former was just obnoxious and intolerably dumb (stop trying to off people, Shameless character!! Especially when the show doesn't even follow through. Enough!). The latter had potential as you said—shame they dropped it after one…

Yeah, the rocky relationship with Youens snuck up on me a little, but in the end it really did resonate with Lip's character development the past few seasons. Definitely would have functioned better as a tipping point in that regard, especially considering the well-executed ambiguity re: them essentially being…

That stood out to me as strange, too: "Lip is drinking his breakfast, lunch and dinner." Really? I wasn't aware Frank even knew what Lip was doing in school, let alone his daily alcohol intake. And then Debbie being like, "Frank says you're drinking too much." First of all, I get that the show keeps trying to hammer…

Agreed. And I also find Emmy Rossum and Jeremy Allen White amazing to the point where they start to make the other actors look like amateurs (ahem, cotton-mouthed Cameron Monaghan trying to sound Chicago).

YES. Thank you

Couldn't agree more.

Yeah, I thought Ian's righteous outrage sort of fizzled, seeing as there actually are plenty of jobs with specific physical or mental requirements; you couldn't talk your way into being a fighter pilot if you have bad eyes, for example. If they were discriminating against him for being gay, that would obviously be one…

Personally, I don't have an issue with the age of the cast—actors play young all the time, especially when it comes to mid-late twenty-somethings playing teenagers and early twenty-somethings. It's just that the show doesn't seem to care about its own chronology. Things would have been simpler for them if they'd never…

I think they're still saying she's 23, but Liam has aged up about 2-3 years since then…

Those ages sound plausible as long as you don't pay attention to previous seasons… Because if Liam is 6 and Fiona is 23 then he would have been born when she was 17, and for most of the show they've been saying he's 2 or 3, but Fiona has always been older than 19, right? (I'm also confused about the Monica timeline,…

I think that would be sort of unrealistically dark, to be frank (ha). I agreed with Myles that the scene earlier this season where Fiona walks through the Gallagher's empty house seemed like a perfect coda, although I would have wanted it to happen in the framework of a much stronger episode and season. For me, there…

Ew, gross.

Very good point. Reminded me a little of the season 3 ep where the judge awards guardianship to Fiona without terminating Frank's parental rights, which is all he really cares about anyway—being able to *say* he has kids and is a father (without ever acting on it), is crucial to his identity.

Ugh, the inconsistency with the kid's ages is one of the most frustrating things about the show from an audience perspective, and a major pet peeve of mine. The oldest three kids all have fucked up aging timelines imo, especially compared to Debbie and Carl whose ages remain pretty consistent across seasons, for…

This was the best Frank episode by far this season. At times I even felt a little sorry for him, in a perverse way. That said, I was still disappointed when he wasn't dead.

Totally agree. I have no idea why they don't write more Gallagher family scenes, because they're almost always strong.