Shameless Season 9 Episode 11 Review: The Hobo Games
And to be fair, she certainly fucked up this week, but not in the way Lip necessarily perceives it. Clearly written in a way to force audiences to choose sides, it’s best to get into how and why that battle line was drawn. Last week Xan* was readmitted to the Gallagher madness after her deadbeat mother proved to still be a deadbeat. It felt like a natural development given it was unlikely that a mother who abandoned her child once was really ready to commit for the long-haul. Lip should know after being raised by Frank and Monica.
However, I was curious that since Lip now had a little perspective on his own life, and for months he hasn’t been obsessing over this child’s well-being, if he still wanted to be essentially a guardian to another sibling. As it turns out, he doubles and triples down on becoming Xan’s surrogate father. He’ll even do it the right way this time by going straight to social services and beginning the mountainous paperwork he must now climb.
And that’s where Fiona’s failures, perceived and real, come in. When the episode starts, Fi has bruises and scratches we can’t explain and is awakening in little better than a crack den with a rumpled cocktail dress on. She snatches some Oxy and runs for the door. To Fiona’s credit, she hasn’t sunk so low as to be downing the opioid, but she’ll sell it to pay for some utilities. It is not necessarily a shock that she is still living inside of a bottle, even after a time-jump from her arrest, but back in season 4, going to jail and almost prison scared her and Lip enough for him to give her some tough love about cleaning up her shit, and for her to reevaluate her self-destructive life choices.
I imagine the repetition in season 9’s downward spiral has something to do with Rossum’s desire to jump off this merry-go-round, and yet I do wish some repetitiveness had been experienced rather than the rest of the Gallaghers shrugging off an offense that should be risking Fiona’s freedom. Instead they’re turning a blind eye when she’s going to bed drunk and bitter at 11am. It also has disastrous consequences when Lip goes to DFCS in order to avoid the same pitfalls as before. Unsurprisingly, his earnest plea leads to an unannounced inspection of the Gallagher house, and quite expectedly, our South Siders ain’t exactly up to code.
Ignoring the unlikeliness that there’d be an inspection on the same day Lip went to DFCS, it is a terrific go-to cringe when an authority figure is allowed to see the squalor we as viewers come to take for granted. There’s a hole in the floor as Debbie and Kelly are in the midst of replacing furnaces, and worse they’ve left Franny, as well las Kev and V’s kids, unattended in the downstairs while playing in the background in the night’s worst storyline. (Seriously, who is really invested in Debbie trying to steal Carl’s girlfriend via her continued narrative-convenient dabble between being bi and straight?) Nevertheless, this is really just set-up to put Fiona in hot water.
No one asked Fiona to watch Debbie or Veronica’s children, nor did she even know Lip was going to DFCS that day, much less to be prepared for a spur of the moment inspection. She answered the door like a reasonable person and was left to pick up pieces to an unreasonable degree by Lip. The house is in usual Gallagher chaos, a fact that was never negated by Fiona’s sobriety in the past. Her biggest mistake might’ve been to tell the truth that Xan sleeps on the couch, but then again, “Phillip” did not share with her that he was buying a bunkbed. Of course Fi is at least partially responsible for this clusterfuck, because she is clearly drunk (or hungover) in the middle of the day, a fact the DFCS inspector sees and likely smells too.
