![]() ![]() Nothing Frank did last season, or the season before that, or the season before that has mattered after the credits rolled, and when you contrast that with a story like Ian and Mickey’s relationship it just makes you wonder why we’re wasting time on another topical, empty Frank diversion when we could be reflecting on the journeys his children have had over eleven seasons.Īs with last season, that reflection comes exclusively from Lip and Ian’s respective stories, which are at this point really the only parts of the show that feel connected to where the story began. But while Frank is the easiest way to reflect current events, he’s also the least effective: there’s a reason why, despite the fact that Frank introduces the “Here’s what you missed on Shameless” sequence that opens the season, he never actually appears in it. The choice to set Shameless’ final season in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic means that we land on Frank throwing out talk of “the Vid,” calling it a hoax, and thanking China for manufacturing the virus and thinning out the number of coffee shops, and the show loves this kind of shit: every season, Frank becomes an inscrutable mouthpiece of the latest hodgepodge of current events, and we’re just supposed to lap it up because he’s controversial and unfiltered. I understand that Shameless continues to find Frank useful, but the results are never actually interesting, nor do they ever add up to anything. The point of Frank’s voiceover is to reflect on how much has changed in a decade, but the fact he’s doing the voiceover at all reminds us how much Wells and his writing staff have failed to recognize the impact those changes should have had on the narrative core of the series. ![]() And the idea that he’s allowed to talk about “family helping family” and the “Gallagher way” is frankly insulting to viewers who’ve watched him continue to disregard that family even in Fiona’s absence. This idea that Frank is paying any attention to his children’s lives is a hard pill to swallow in an episode where he interacts with none of them, cordoned off in a COVID-focused storyline with Kev and Veronica like the directionless side character he’s been for pretty much the entire five years I’ve been writing about the show. To return him to a place of omniscient observation here is perhaps an understandable instinct to symmetry as a decade-long journey comes to an end, but it ignores the fact that Frank is no longer a part of the Gallagher family. It’s no secret that I’ve been heavily critical of Shameless for many reasons over the past few years, but my biggest issue has always been the idea that Frank is anything but a sideshow. Perhaps Wells believes that this universal sentiment is enough to get me to ignore the rest of what’s going on here, but if so he clearly hasn’t been reading these reviews for the past five seasons. ![]()
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