This Rescue Me episode began with Janet walking into the kitchen to find Tommy pouring “booze” down the sink. “No more booze, no more butts,” Tommy said. That’s a motto he and his daughter Colleen, both alcoholics, had agreed to abide by as a way of “kicking” their bad habits.
Janet was, as most people would be, astonished when Tommy then proceeded to explain that he and Colleen would still drink wine because, “Wine is like grape juice, but with a little kick.”
“Do you see how desperate you are?” Janet asked when Tommy persisted with his unreasonable rationalizations about why wine should not be considered “booze.”
Tommy’s on-the-wagon-once-again relatives scoffed at this plan, too.
Mickey and Teddy showed up at the fire house on Tommy’s first day back on the job after Teddy had shot him, and presented Tommy with a pricey bottle of Irish whiskey as a parting gift because they decided he’s a lost cause and they were done with him. Plus Teddy said he was out of bullets. When Tommy then informed them of his ludicrous “strictly a wine man now” scheme, Mickey, channeling Yoda, said, “Oh, the wine, changing seats on the Titanic he is.”
Tommy isn’t an idiot, but the level of denial at which he must be operating in order to think that drinking glass after glass of wine is better than drinking glass after glass of vodka or whiskey has to be extremely high. (He argued it would take much more wine than hard liquor to get him drunk, so Tommy believes that neither he nor Colleen will get drunk on wine.) When Janet called to tell him that Colleen was on her fourth glass of wine and wasn’t yet drunk, Tommy considered that a victory, a sign that his “plan” was working.
Meanwhile, Franco was cracking me up throughout the episode. He kept getting phone calls from “Jan-Jan,” and discussed things like what she should wear (“No, no, no, no; I don’t think those pants are too dressy at all, but what top are you gonna wear?”) and shared an inside joke about Vaseline. And when Franco would hand the phone over to Tommy, Janet would mysteriously be gone.
And Lou — who’s been turning to baked goods rather than booze for solace for whatever is ailing his haunted soul — was last seen lying on the fire house floor. I hope he’ll wind up being okay. He’s one of my favorite characters.
Funniest scene in the episode: The insane conversation between Sean and Mike about how they could “prove” to the guys that they’re smart. They came up with the idea of doing something charitable, and then brainstormed about what kind of work they could do. However, for every idea they came up with, they said some celebrity — like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon — already had dibs on that cause.
“Starving children in Africa!” Sean said triumphantly.
“Ahh,” Mike said, disappointed, “George Clooney’s taking care of them.”
“What? Since when?”
“Yep, since he, um, won the Oscar dude. He’s saving, like, all the starving kids, and then he sells ‘em to Angelina Jolie who flies ‘em over here and feeds ‘em, bro.”
“When did she become a pilot?” Sean asked.
“Uhh, right after she became an ambassador I guess,” Mike replied.
Later, Shawn gave Sean a suggestion for his “good deeds” project, saying that since Sean got cancer from working at Ground Zero, perhaps he could use his experience to call attention to the problem. This could be great fodder for a new storyline.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Jul 14, 2010 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
