Shameless (US): Civil Wrongs
March 30, 2015 3:15 PM - Season 3, Episode 10 - Subscribe

Frank vaults into an elite position as spokesperson for the gay community, giving speeches that are cringe-inducingly unprepared but manage to hit just the right notes to appeal to donors to Abraham Page’s organization. Then Alistair Huddleston shows up touting his Return to Paradise Project, which offers reparative therapy to convert gay people to heterosexuality through “clinical fornication” — “no shame … no guilt … no knowledge of things that distract us from God’s love.”

Karen is in the hospital in a coma. Sheila and Jody are trying to wake her up by singing Billy Joel's “Just the Way You Are,” when Lip walks in and stops them because “she hates that song.” After Jody leaves, Lip tells Sheila he’s sorry, but Sheila says it’s fine: “I’ve always thought Jody’s musical repertoire could use some updating.” No, Lip means: “I wasn’t very nice to Karen the last time I saw her … and I don’t want that to be the last she heard from me.”

Sheila tries to console Lip by telling him Karen was probably so excited when she got Lip’s text that she just “forgot to look both ways” when she was crossing the street to meet him. “She knew you were texting to make up.” But Lip knows he didn’t text Karen that day. He looks at Karen’s phone and sees the text from him telling her to meet him at the park, and realizes that there’s one person who had the opportunity to use his phone and the motive to hit Karen with the car. When Mandy comes home later and joins Lip in bed, we see him looking off into the distance — perhaps a parallel to when he first gazed lustfully at Mandy while she was pretending to be Ian’s boyfriend. He’ll never be able to look at her the same way again.

Jimmy lets Fiona know he’s thinking about going back to medical school. After some teasing from her coworkers, Fiona tells Jimmy she thinks it’s a great idea. She asks whether he’d go to the University of Chicago or Northwestern, and Jimmy says he has “plenty of options.” Later, Jimmy admits that the only way he can keep his old credits is if he goes back to the University of Michigan, but he suggests Fiona and the kids could go with him. When Jimmy shows up after Fiona’s company softball game, she calls him out: “You knew, didn’t you? ... You knew you were gonna have to move back from the beginning ... Please don't be the guy who lies!”

V starts to worry that her mom, Carol, can’t get pregnant, and that they’ve “crossed this line for no reason.” But then Carol takes a pregnancy test, and she is pregnant.

Frank is initially turned off by the woman he’s assigned to “fornicate” with, Scotty, but eventually they both seem to like it (as long as Scotty imagines Frank is Angelina Jolie or Rihanna). When Abraham catches them having sex, he orders Frank to have sex with two attractive men while Abraham watches.

Ian copes with the realization that Mickey is going to get married. Lip tells Ian to get over it, go to a gay bar, and make his needs known.

The doctor tells Sheila and Jody: “Just keep engaging with her — doing things she likes that might trigger her unconscious. Let her know you’re here.” Jody urges Sheila to go home and get some sleep while he stays at the hospital. Sheila tells Jody about how she used to read fairy tales to Karen, who would "wait for the kiss of true love, and when it came, she would smile ... She grew up, and I took her prince! You're hers.” Later, Jody tells the medical staff that he found “the cure for comas” when he went down on Karen “and she came — she came to!”
posted by John Cohen (3 comments total)
 
And why does Lip say Karen hates “Just the Way You Are”? Well, in that song, Billy Joel tells his lover: “Don’t change the color of your hair/You always have my unspoken passion/Although I might not seem to care.” Maybe Karen hates the song because it brings up bad memories. Near the end of season 1, while Karen’s hair is dyed black, Lip has sex with her and says he loves her, but quickly corrects himself and says he doesn’t really love her — though he later seems heart-broken when Karen dumps him.
posted by John Cohen at 3:18 PM on March 30, 2015


Notice that Jimmy often shows up way too late — he showed up after Fiona won her softball game in this episode (missing the chance to cheer her on), and he showed up at the end of Kev & V’s fake wedding in season 1 (with the wedding cake).
posted by John Cohen at 3:24 PM on March 30, 2015


I think Lip says Karen hates “Just the Way You Are” because it's long been a thing for people who are supposed to be cool to hate Billy Joel. It easily registers as automatically funny. And it makes sense for someone Sheila's age to like Billy Joel, but I question whether someone as young as Karen has bothered to hate Billy Joel. It shows the age of the scriptwriters more than anything else. They think they are cool and they have long laughed at people who like Billy Joel.

Aside from that, it really is funny-sad or crazy-evil to be singing "I love you just the way you are" to someone who's in a coma.
posted by Alizaria at 5:54 AM on March 31, 2015 [1 favorite]


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