As I've mentioned before, I watched this season's first five "Rescue Me" episodes several months ago without taking extensive notes, so I'm going to offer up some very brief thoughts until a few weeks from now, when we get to the episodes I've seen more recently. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I pay a bribe...Now here's where things started to get interesting for me with this season.
The arrival of Genevieve and the re-examination of 9/11 has led to some good moments in the last few episodes. But it wasn't until Tommy saw Jimmy in the DVD footage -- after the first tower fell, which is where and when Tommy has always believed Jimmy died -- that I really felt like "Rescue Me" was back.
Tommy's inability to cope with Jimmy's death was always the core conflict of the show -- the deaths of his brother, his father and even his son simply don't matter as much, because the series is about the emotional costs of being a firefighter -- and Tommy discovering that the death didn't happen the way he thought it did brings the show back to that core.
Along the way, "Jimmy" provided the first good Sheila scene in forever when her therapist (previously a buffoon) explained how she projects her anger about Jimmy onto Tommy(*), as well as a great fight between Tommy and Lou where Lou pointed out -- as this season already has, repeatedly -- that 9/11 wasn't Tommy Gavin's own personal tragedy.
(*) As with the fight in last week's episode (which I never got around to reviewing) between Mike and Franco over Franco's conspiracy theories, it's remarkable how much more interesting the comic relief characters on this show become once the writers start to take them seriously.
I still want to be rid of both the bar subplot and Black Shawn's relationship with Colleen, but the rest of the show -- including Lou's hilariously disgusting apartment, and another memorably weird rescue, with the car sinking into the street -- is really clicking right now.
What did everybody else think?
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