It’s almost darkly comedic, this epic Gavin family dysfunction that continues to plague the members of this alcoholic, firefighting clan.
While Maggie (of all people) was running an AA meeting — which quickly devolved into a typical evening with Mickey, Tommy, Uncle Teddy, and Colleen (meaning there was drinking, cursing, and fighting) — Mickey and Teddy copped to lacing Tommy’s whiskey with liquid roofies, the whiskey which, in the previous episode, caused Tommy to forget most of what happened during his bender when he left Colleen nearly dead on the beach.
And while Mickey and Teddy thought that giving Tommy tainted booze would rouse him from his drunken stupor, it simply encouraged Colleen to keep on pursuing her wild, inebrieted ways as she tries to blot out the pain of her life, including her dead brother, dead uncle, alcoholic death-wish-seeking father who was recently shot by another of her uncles, and the horrendously tumultuous marriage of her parents.
Throw in the death of a young woman in a drunk driving accident, and all of this drove the once again “clean” Tommy — though he nicely played down his “I’ve changed” mantra this time (which I hope means he’s serious this time) — to seek out the potty-mouthed, hard drinking, Janet-lusting, karma-believing Father Phil.
Father Phil is precisely the kind of priest that suits Tommy’s needs. Like George Bailey needed an angel without his wings who was really, earnestly, trying unorthodox ways to save George, Tommy needs the likes of Father Phil. Most tragic, though, was the fact that nothing Father Phil said to Colleen seemed to penetrate her tough Gavin hide, or seep into her consciousness. She was unrepentant about her desire to spend as much of the rest of her life drunk, to hell with the consequences.
This energized Tommy, who’d just witnessed a woman he couldn’t save die as the result of an inpaired driver who behaved very much like a wasted Colleen. In one of the weirdest scenes I’ve witnessed on Rescue Me — and there’ve been plenty — Tommy handcuffed Colleen to the altar in Father Phil’s church, grabbed all the priest’s booze, dumped it into the baptismal font, and performed his own brutal christening/exorcism by practically drowning Colleen in a pool of alcohol, demanding that she reject Satan and agree to whatever lines Tommy and Father Phil could recall from The Godfather’s baptism scene.
At least Tommy hoped he could save his daughter, unlike the drunk driving victim from earlier in the episode.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Aug 04, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
I have to say this is the 1st episode that I completely enjoyed since the ghosts 1st appearance last season. I really can’t think of anything to nitpick.
Another great episode. What really struck me about the episode was that Peter Gallagher is really convincing as a priest, in contrast to Joel Gretch in V (granted different genre). Gallagher has a certain measured calm in his voice, a paternal quality, while Gretch is a few years younger and better at playing self serving characters such as Owen Crawford in Taken. Maybe its not the performances so much as the writing.
In Rescue Me, Gallagher’s character is a working priest, who’s religious beliefs have a significant part to play in Tommy’s attempt to save his daughter from a life of alcoholism. In V, Gretch’s character is more like a token priest, who’s religious beliefs are a throw away mention of religion because Battlestar Galactica had made the clash between religion and science interesting again. Except that V, being a prime time show, is afraid to step on any toes, and so says absolutely nothing about religion, avoiding the subject not least by having Gretch’s priest with a millitary background, act more like an FBI agent than a priest.