"Rescue Me" Season Finale (With Spoilers)
Posted September 13th, 2007 by rheldenfels
So that's the defense for this off-kilter, badly paced, erratic season?
That "Rescue Me" is like life, which is like baseball, which has long boring stretches interrupted by marvels that we sleep through? That it's a Cars song — "Good Times Roll" in this case that moves along, with the seeming drone of Ric Ocasek's vocal, until you realize that the drone has gotten under your skin, and you're feeling some kind of exhilaration, the humming of your own engine in life?
Some nonsense like that. Not even John Scurti, as good as he is, could have made that baseball speech work.
This season has been a mess. It has rambled, it has fumbled. Tommy's flashbacks at the beginning of last night's season finale felt like, "Hey, remember when we were really good?" Now it's all too obvious. Weren't we waiting to see Tommy's daughter connect with the new firefighter? Didn't we long ago sense that Tommy's dad was close to death?
And, in letting Tommy's dad die, it loses another piece of its foundation. Charles Durning, ladies and gentlemen. Affable character actor and real-life war hero. (You can read about that here.) And such a fine actor, that when he was in a scene, I'd keep an eye out for what he was up to — because it was bound to be entertaining.
But now Durning's gone. And Tommy's season-long attempt to have a normal life — from not drinking, to that desperate domestic tableau with Gina Gershon — has taken another hit. Maybe the show is arguing that there is no such thing as a normal life. Maybe, again, the whole season has been an attempt to prove that a less tormented Tommy just isn't that interesting — again, like a life quietly led — so we'll go back to desperate, insane Tommy next time around. But it's more likely that the show has just lost its magic, the knack for balancing comedy and drama, the way it gave all the characters shape, the way it made us care about people.
Now it's just the (fake) ghost of Jimmy Keefe, rattling around the firehouse, stirring things up, but not really all that serious, and far less than it used to be.
September 14th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
'Rescue' is my very favorite TV show, so I'd sooo looked forward to this season's finale, cause I thought all this season's other episodes had been so great & so entertaining. So…WHAT A BIG LETDOWN! I kept asking, what the heck happened? This finale was the biggtest finale letdown I ever remember seeing, on any show!
September 14th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
As I've been saying, I thought the whole season was a letdown. But the finale certainly didn't suggest that Leary and Tolan had saved some marvelous inspiration for the end.
September 16th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
It's a shame when wonderful shows go bad. I just don't understand what happened. How a first-rate show with so much critical good-will could squander so badly the talent and material of the first three wonderful seasons. It's an awful tragedy, especially when you consider how The Shield has managed to remain gripping and powerful for 6 straight seasons. Very few things worked this season. Tommy and the chiefs daughter was annoying, Collen and the rocker was stupid, Janet and Sheila and that whole baby-nabbing story was absurd. The only thing that worked this season was the episode where those babies died and the episode where Mike attempted suicide leading to Leary's powerful monologue on the roof. What's worse now is that Friday Night Lights a decent but inferior show to Rescue Me will now probably upstage Rescue Me, and Peter Berg and his cronies will probably laugh at how they're now better than Rescue Me. Well, at least Denis Leary remains a superior actor to Kyle Chandler and the FNL supporting cast will never be superior to RM's supporting cast.
September 17th, 2007 at 5:15 am
You and I are going to have to disagree about "Friday Night Lights," which I thought had a terrific first season. If we compared apples to apples, I might consider the first season of "Rescue Me" better than "FNL's" but this year, it was no contest. "FNL" was far better and its cast was superb.