Rescue Me: Letting go

I'm about to leave on a road trip that will have me away from the computer for at least a couple of days, if not through the weekend, so very quick "Rescue Me" thoughts before I go, and then you savages are on your own until probably "Deadwood" time.

Another comeback-y episode, with one very large exception. At this point, I don't think I ever, ever, ever want to see Janet and Tommy alone in a scene again. Too much baggage there from The Incident and what happened afterwards, both on and off-screen. As soon as they made plans to meet, I cringed, and the actual meeting was even worse than I was expecting. No. Just no. Time to start fast-forwarding through that stuff, methinks.

Lots of goodness in the rest of the show, both light (Lou looking at Garrity during the discussion of "retard strength," Tommy's debate with the cabbie about the 72/77 virgins, the woman at the bar being turned on by Tommy's woe-is-me monologue) and dark (Tommy talking Stack into dying for the sake of his family, the entire sequence with Connor on the bus and Tommy showing off his scars).

On the other hand, there was one very unfortunate bit of timing: the shot of Tommy looking at the WTC-less skyline coming immediately after the commercial for "World Trade Center." Not only did the ad kind of wreck me emotionally for a good five minutes, but it completely threw me out of the Tommy/Jimmy scene because, even though in my head I knew the timing was coincidental (for Leary and Tolan, if not for the FX exec who sold the ad time), I couldn't stop viewing the scene as some kind of weird movie plug.

What did everybody else think? Talk amongst yourselves for a bit.