Rescue Me: Jimmy

Tommy and Lou are roommates now, Tommy having been kicked out of Valerie’s place last week after his night on the town with Genevieve, the French journalist interviewing the guys of 62 Truck for her book on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Lou’s place looks like a Burmese war zone. While getting settled, Tommy sees a box of 9/11 newsreel footage from Genevieve. She wants Lou to watch the footage and write down his responses to it. Lou explains that he could only bring himself to watch three seconds of it.

Tommy looks straight at Lou and says: “Let me get this straight. You’re taking the biggest tragedy in the history of this city, perhaps the country, and you’re taking your feelings about it…which I know are real and genuine because you were there and you lived through it…but you are now reconstituting them so that you can get laid by a French broad. Is that right?” Lou: “Yeah pretty much.” Moments like these are what make Rescue Me unforgettable. Five seasons in and the writing and performances are as sharp and on the money as ever.

We also get one of the most intense action sequences the show has ever done when the guys get to a scene and are told there was a big explosion. Lou knows that it wasn’t a bomb but steam pouring out from the city’s underground infrastructure. Manhole covers start shooting into the sky and Lou goes after a guy stuck in his truck with a giant sinkhole filled with boiling water right in front. Lou climbs in to get him out and the truck starts sinking rapidly. The truck dips more and more until Lou gets the driver out right before they both become human tempura. It’s a hair-raising, amazingly-staged sequence, and it’s great to see Lou get to be a hero. One of the things I’m continually impressed by in the show is how believable and authentic they manage to make all of the rescue scenes. This stuff is pretty much better than any disaster or fire sequences I’ve seen in any movie, and I’m sure they had a fraction of the budget that would exist on features.

Meanwhile, Sheila continues to meet with her bogus psychodramaturgist, who tells her that her real problem is that she has transferred all of her anger over her son Damian wanting to be a firefighter and losing Jimmy to Tommy, and she’s keeping Tommy around so she can blame him. Sheila is the hardest character to take on the show (though come to think of it, I hate Janet too) because she’s so high-strung and emotionally insane. But she really had nothing to do last season, and so far she hasn’t had much to do this season. I wonder if Denis Leary and Peter Tolan have anything cooked up for her. Otherwise, they should just get rid of her altogether.

Mike is 0 for 2 on the bar. The lumberjack motif failed, as did the let’s-have-everything-inside-be-black-but-call-the-bar-White thing. The guys are all trying to scrub out the black paint when Black Shawn mentions that the theme of the bar doesn’t matter as much as the word of mouth and hype. He says that the hottest bars he ever went to were at places people didn’t even know about. Franco looks at him and reads his mind: let’s make the bar underground. They pay guys to stand outside the door while Franco blocks them from getting in. Soon, their crummy little bar is doing a bang-up business. Tommy even gets Derek, the loser he’s sponsoring in AA a job there. It’s hilarious to watch this recovering alcoholic be surrounded by temptation.

But the real juice in the episode comes courtesy of Tommy and Lou. Even though Lou has churned out 46 pages for Genevieve, he hasn’t watched any of the footage she gave him. Tommy keeps ragging Lou for this, until Lou loses it and starts shouting at Tommy. He asks him if he really thinks that he has to watch footage to remind him of what it was like on that day: “You know Tom, you weren’t the only one down there that day. And sometimes you forget that. And sometimes, I have to remind you. I just did.” If John Scurti doesn’t get an Emmy for that one scene, I’m going to have a psychotic meltdown.

Tommy however, does watch the footage, and what he sees haunts him even more. He sees Jimmy on the dvds. After the first tower came down. The catch? Jimmy died in the first tower, so how could he be on tape afterward? Tommy hasn’t had a visit from Jimmy in a long time, after Jimmy told him he was turning his back on him. Rescue Me fans have all been awaiting Jimmy’s return, but I sure didn’t think it would be like this. This isn’t funny, it’s disturbing, it’s scary, it’s haunting. Those are emotional responses very few television shows can cause.

It looks like there will indeed be a love triangle between Lou, Tommy and Genevieve. Sean and Franco don’t have a whole lot to do this episode, but hopefully that will change.

Season 5, Episode 4: Jimmy (originally aired April 28, 2009)

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Tuesdays at 10pm on FX

Photographs courtesy of FX