Rescue Me, "Control": Bad old Tommy

Spoilers for tonight's "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I absorb a muffin...

"I'm not an alcoholic." -Tommy

I feel like I may have to spend the rest of this season -- and maybe the series (unless the stress of producing 22 episodes in a year leads them all to give up the ghost after this) -- prefacing each review with a list of the things I'm trying to ignore so I can enjoy the good stuff. For "Control," that list would have to include the Teddy stuff in the VA hospital(*) and most of the stuff with Sheila.

(*) Actually, I think I'm done with that storyline, which has nothing to do with the show, always ends with the cheapest and most obvious punchline, and is just an excuse to keep Lenny Clarke (and Tatum O'Neal) hanging around. Somebody let me know if/when it starts tying back into the main story again, if ever, so I know if I should stop fast-forwarding through it.

Sheila's attempt to control Tommy's drinking was moderately less annoying than her seduction of him last week, but it still feels like her great monologue about 9/11 was just a blip on the radar, and she and Janet are back to being characters the writers don't know what to do with except make as broadly comic and hateful as possible. And that's a shame, because Callie Thorne showed that she's capable of so much more.

Speaking of 9/11, I'm starting to worry that we're dropping away from all that material. Sure, there was the joke here about Franco decking the guy he was told hated 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and Sean still has his kidney cancer, but we haven't seen Genevieve in while, have we? (IMDb has Karina Lombard listed as being in the last few episodes -- which, admittedly, I watched a few months ago -- but I don't remember her in them.) It'd be disappointing if this was all of that just a pretext for Tommy's latest fall off the wagon.

That said, the idea of Tommy trying to chart a path between "sober" and "alcoholic" is an interesting one (albeit one that I assume is doomed to failure), and worked well for both comic and dramatic purposes as he dealt with the rest of the firehouse. Those scenes, and the hilarious interludes with Sean and his family (and then the sweet moment where his mom told him about her own cancer scare), were the highlights of an uneven but interesting episode.

And yet, in going over my notes, I keep being pulled back to the negative things. Was anyone really looking for the return of Lou's con artist hooker girlfriend? And wouldn't the idea of Mike finally standing up to Tommy be a lot more interesting if the show didn't constantly arrange to give Tommy the moral high ground? Last week, he was punching out Tommy over a screw-up (Damien in the fire) that he caused himself, and tonight he starts yelling at Tommy right before he panics over the realization that he didn't refill the oxygen tanks. In the moral universe of "Rescue Me," all of Tommy's failings pale before being either a coward or a bumbler as a fireman, so the Mike/Tommy scenes don't have the heft they should.

I said I wasn't going to watch the rest of my screeners (the five episodes after this) in a rush, so it would be easier to blog as if I was watching along with the rest of you. But part of me wants to just dive through them to see if my fears are unfounded. Remember: I didn't like the first couple of episodes this season, but I powered through and got to the good stuff before I lost my patience with the bad.

I have too much else on my plate right now for a mini-marathon, but don't be stunned an episode or two from now to find out I did it, if only so I can know whether I want to keep watching/blogging. I still think the better parts of the show are outweighing the parts I dislike, but as we saw last season (and for large parts of season 4), it's not hard at all for the bad stuff to overwhelm everything else.

What did everybody else think?