RESCUE ME “Menses” Season 7 Episode 2 – Last week’s episode ended on a game changer as Tommy’s daughter went on another binge and he found himself blowing holes the tavern walls and once again confronting the ghosts of his past. Or so I thought. The way “Menses” played out, last week might never have happened. There were no consequences for Tommy’s rage, and no consequence for Colleen’s binge. Indeed, in her first scene on the show she stomps onscreen to shrilly demand that her father go get her some tampons.
This episode embraced – or tried to embrace – the comedy aspect of the show. You know how there’re lines in comedy where you can be as misogynistic, homophobic, racist etc as you like, so long as the punch line works? Well, the punch line did not work. Watching the women of Tommy’s household gang up on him as he ignorantly demands they toe the line was just uncomfortable. You could imagine the director giving instructions to the actresses: “Be more shrill! That’s it-you’re a harpy, go for it. Squeal, ladies, so the bats can hear!”
The problem is not that these women are weak or have no personalities: it’s that they aren’t even characters, just brick walls which Tommy can bounce off. Even Maura Tierney, reappearing as Tommy’s old flame Kelly (and, true to life as to be uncomfortable, she has breast cancer) cannot help but sympathise with Tommy and his unimaginably impossible situation of dealing with four shrews.
Like I said, last week’s episode seems to have been forgotten as Colleen goes to a black bar in Harlem to propose to Black Shawn. I may be old fashioned, but I figured that if one person gets down on their knee and proposes, and the other person accepts, then that’s them engaged. I did not realize that this proposal had to happen twice. But with Rescue Me, it clearly does, not because Colleen and Black Shawn have a weird relationship, but because Black Shawn needs an excuse to confront and defy Tommy.
Meanwhile the subplot involving duping the doctors during a routine health check up so that they could protect Lou did feature some of the episodes’ best bits and showed that Rescue Me can work effectively as a comedy – so long as it features no women.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below.
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