I get what you're saying because one of the best qualities of Shameless has always been its ability to play on your emotions. But I think it would've felt contrived to draw a big emotional climax out of Monica's death. They had no real cause to mourn Monica for who she was beyond their blood relationship, so it feels…

We knew what he was feeling because we've been through grieving Frank before. He didn't hit any acting beats he didn't hit already with Bianca two years ago. No disrespect to Macy, but Frank is no longer a part that merits a bigger paycheck to play, no matter how well he does it.

Shameless has never been a show to set up breadcrumbs like that, especially between seasons. I love this series for many reasons but plot device continuity is not one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the meth gets sold offscreen and everyone just has their $10k at the beginning of next season, or even if it just…

I dunno, I think Frank and Carl have always had kind of a special bond. Carl's been a more enthusiastic participant in many of Frank's schemes and has seemed to tolerate him more than the others, maybe because (to my memory) Frank has generally been less directly shitty to him. I could believe that Carl would be…

I don't know how you could watch an episode in which Rossum basically runs the entire gamut of human emotion and decide Macy out-acted her because he had one decent monologue. Just Rossum's line reading of "I guess that's something" (paraphrasing) earned her her raise as far as I'm concerned.

I think with the house it was a last resort and a compromise she had to make because she didn't have another choice. It's also a little less visceral to just generally think of "drug money" than to literally be handed a pound of meth to go sell yourself. Plus, Fiona has developed as a businesswoman this season and…

That's pretty much how I feel about Fiona's love interests (even though they ultimately ruined Steve) and why I was very happy they kept her single this year.

Agreed - a massive step up from last year, but let's not pretend that the bulk of the season wasn't basically carried by Fiona (the only character they seem to still be able to write consistently) and Emmy Rossum's performance. Otherwise they pretty much drove the rest of the cast into the ground and only fixed them…

Macy was good, for sure, but MVP of this episode goes to Ethan Cutkosky for me. His slow, pained turn away from Monica's casket broke me in a way I wasn't expecting in an episode about the death of a character I never really cared for.

I may be the outlier here, but I actually liked Amantha's on-the-nose use of the show's title. Rectify has trusted the audience thus far to understand the themes and arcs of the show, and one of those themes has been self-reflection and processing trauma. If they'd dropped it in, say, the first season, I'd agree it…

I absolutely loved the "hello brother"/"hello sister" moment, partly because my sister and I say that to each other, but also because I thought it really encapsulated the dynamic of their relationship. Amantha has spent so much of her life helping Daniel at any potential cost to herself because he's not just Daniel,…

I actually yelled "Hug your damn son, you monster!" when that happened, but it played a very interesting contrast to when Ted Sr. does hug Tawney when seeing her at the Paulie Tire closing. I think it was a good window into how he was processing the divorce; that he trusted his son to be strong and do what was right,…

I think it's more of a Madonna-whore complex - Lip desperately wants the kind of maternal care he never got from Monica, but he's uncomfortable when he finds that care in a sexual partner. I think that does trace back to his parents, because Frank and Monica set the example for him that a relationship is built on…

I saw those as ways to draw parallels between Fiona and Frank and how she puts the conniving tendencies she inherited him to more productive use (although not necessarily any less shady). I thought this was implied by her letting Frank stay at the laundromat and pretend to be Wendell despite her generally wanting…

The core engine of Shameless in its early years was that you did always want to side with the Gallaghers. It feels to me like the show was ready to have them make more blatantly bad decisions but didn't trust the audience to stick with protagonists who were no longer the underdog heroes, so they just let them do…

Agreed - my sole regret about kicking Lip to the curb is that it means the show probably won't have a reason to keep her around as anything but a guest actress next season, which is a bummer.

I thought with things like the off-the-books after party that served booze in mugs, the show has been positing that South Side is experiencing a hipster-y, Brooklyn-esque takeover. Laundromat happy hour dance party fits right into that aesthetic.

The characters on GoT aren't interesting enough to fill entire episodes that aren't devoted to moving the story forward, and some characters don't have enough plot to fill 6-8 hours. You'd either have to have more characters go a whole season without appearing a la Bran or we'd end up with entire filler episodes…

Huh, I apparently either missed that or forgot about it between when the episode aired and now.

"This means that the AUTHOR of this story doesn't know of the movie, that it's "made up" by the TV show producer."