Tonight on Showtime the uniquely twisted and highly entertaining show Shameless returns with an all-new Sunday, February 24, season 9 episode 12 called, “You’ll Know The Bottom When You Hit It,” and we have your weekly Shameless recap below. On tonight’s Shameless episode, as per the Showtime synopsis, “When a blackout hits the South Side, Kevin and Veronica come up with a plan to bring the neighborhood together. Carl grows suspicious of Debbie’s attempts to get closer with Kelly; Fiona receives guidance from an unexpected person.” Tonight’s Shameless season 9 episode 12 is going to be great, and you won’t want to miss it. So be sure to bookmark this page and tune in for our coverage of Shameless tonight between 9 PM – 10 PM ET! While you wait for our recap, make sure to check out all our Shameless spoilers, recap, news & more, right here! Tonight’s Shameless Recap begins now – Refresh Page often to get the most current updates! Frank is asleep outside on the front step. Lip his helping Xan pack, then they head downstairs, he wants to make her something to eat, but she says no. He says he is sorry she has to leave, but it is the best thing right now. Lip gives her some money and she gives him a bracelet she made for him. Xan leaves with DCFS. Lip fights back the tears, then after Xan is gone, he runs upstairs and packs Fiona’s things and throws them outside. Lip has to leave, he tells Deb that Tammy is pregnant and he has to go deal with it. Fiona goes to the diner to pick up her final pay cheque. She gets it, but not before making a fool of herself in front of the diners. Carl is at work, Laurie is hitting on him. He goes outside and calls Kelly. He tells her that the Buccaneer Biscuits that were his idea were a big hit. Kevin is on ice from the vasectomy when Fiona walks in. V has no pity for Kevin. Fiona asks V to cash her cheque, then she tells her to keep it because she is ready to drink. All of a sudden the power goes out, it is a citywide problem. Frank wakes up, its a blackout and he goes to the see the professor, he has a generator, Frank makes a deal for cost plus 15% to sell his supplies at a higher price. V tells Kevin that she spent $500 on steaks if the power doesn’t go back on they are going to lose everything. At work, Carl and the guys want to leave, Laurie says no, they could all clean the kitchen. Laurie ends up letting Carl leave so he can spend time with Kelly, but he soon finds out she can’t. Lip goes to see Tammy, she tells him that the pregnancy doesn’t involve him at all. He tells her that if she decides she wants to keep the baby, he wants to be a part of it. He tells her about Xan, but she has only known she is pregnant for two days and needs time to think about it. Frank arrives at the bar and says hello to all the sweat hogs. He sees Fiona and she tells him that she was fired. He tells her that Ingrid left him and took all his children with her, life is not all rainbows. Frank tells her about his blackout supplies, he charges a little more, but it is all a business, he offers to let her in on it. Deb is texting Kelly and Carl is furious because Kelly is not supposed to text. Deb stops texting, she says she is going to meet Kelly, Carl follows her. Kevin heads over to Gallagher’s house and takes a lot of clothing out of the closets. Frank and Fiona are talking and walking through the neighborhood, she has an idea, they steal a kids pool from a yard. They then go to the diner and steal ice from there. Lip is at work, Tammy being pregnant is driving him crazy and he is having trouble working. Tammy’s sisters drop by, they warn him that if he hurts her, they will mess him up. Lip says he wants to do the right thing. Brad tells Lip to take the day off, he is having a bad day. Fiona and Frank’s business is booming. They have a stand setup that is called Gallagher Blackout Stand. Fiona arrives home and finds her clothes outside on the front yard, she grabs the bags and runs inside. Lip is there, Fiona freaks out and he tells her that he is not letting her life there. She starts screaming the title is in her name. Lip tells her to get to a meeting, she opens the fridge and grabs a beer. Frank tells lip that he should be thanking Fiona, he couldn’t have raised six kids without her. Deb and Carl are at the baseball game, Kelly is playing. Deb and Carl are getting out of control with their cheering her on. Kevin is back in the bar, he put all the coats on the freezer to keep it cold but it didn’t work, the steaks are already unthawed. He has an idea, have a $5 cookout, surf and turf for the community. Frank and Fiona are going over the money they made, he gives her her half and she wants to renegotiate. Frank gives her more and says she is worse than the mafia. Frank has the share for the professor and she says screw the professor. He tells her that she is a bad drunk, she gets mean. Carl is with Kelly, she is packing her things up, while Deb moved into the front seat beside Kelly. Deb says the Alibi is having a cookout, they head over there. At the cookout, Kelly has just about had it with Carl and Deb fighting over her. Frank gives Kevin some ice, free of charge, to help him with the swelling. Music is playing and everyone starts dancing. All of a sudden they find out that 90% have power, but the south side. Fiona organizes a march, everyone joins in. Lip is trying to get in touch with Xan when V drops by. She tells him to let Fiona back in the house. Lip says that she needs to hit rock bottom first and she shouldn’t let her stay with them. He says if she really loves her, and if she really is her friend, she won’t let her stay with them. The march continues, then all of a sudden power is back. Frank turns the crowd around to go to the Alibi and get a drink. Fiona says she is continuing on to tell the north side it’s not right, everyone leaves with Frank. At the Alibi, Kevin makes an announcement, it was a good day. They found the true power of the south side, don’t work and get drunk. Fiona screams and tells them to f-off because they did nothing. She says they talk a big game and do nothing. V goes around to the other side of the bar and tells Fiona to calm down. She then tells Fiona that she can’t stay with them. Fiona says she understands, V says she is sorry and gets up. Deb, Kelly, and Carl are back at the house. Deb goes upstairs to bathe the little one and Carl grabs a beer, then he asks Kelly if she is screwing Deb. She calls him insane and tells him that he is overthinking things. She tells him that she wants to break up, she leaves. Tammy arrives at the door to see Lip. They start talking about the baby and being together, they end up laughing. The next day, Fiona wakes up, she slept on the floor, she starts vomiting, has one shoe on. She starts crying and realizes everything she lost. Lip is at AA when Fiona walks in. He turns around and sees her. THE END!<doc-sep>Shameless S 9 E 12 Close this dialog window Streaming Options There it is, the moment we’ve been waiting what seems like a long time for, but has really only been a couple episodes: Fiona hitting rock bottom. How do you know you’ve hit rock bottom? Well, bonding and teaming up with Frank has to be the clearest sign. And while that partnership proved to be just what Fiona needed to realize how far she’s fallen, it also provided a welcomed dynamic, especially considering this could be Frank and Fiona’s last significant storyline before Emmy Rossum departs. So grab a beer, bail your sibling out of prison, and find out how shameless your favorite Gallagher was this week. 1. Fiona Yikes, that was tough to watch. If you told me that we’ve spent a season-plus watching Fiona struggle with the setbacks in her life, then I would have believed it. And yet, it’s only been five to six episodes, an arc that inadvertently is setting up the character’s exit. While it was tough to watch the final few minutes of Fiona waking up next to Frank in her old abandoned building and throwing up multiple times before joining Lip at an AA meeting, it felt earned and needed. Now we see how much progress she can make in two episodes. 2. Frank And as sad as those last few sentences sound, this episode was a lot of fun thanks to the pairing of Frank and Fiona. The Gallagher patriarch and default Gallagher matriarch haven’t shared too many significant scenes or storylines in the last few seasons (not since he outed Sean’s drug use), so it was nice to see them back together. The reunion was only further enhanced by the added element of Fiona on the verge of truly becoming her father’s daughter. Frank is still typical Frank in this episode, exploiting his neighbors to make enough money to buy alcohol, but he also kind of attempted to be a good dad? First, Frank tells Lip that he should stop yelling at his sister and start thanking her for raising all of the kids on her own. Then, he addresses her drinking. He stops short of telling her to quit because he “would never say that to my worst enemy,” but he does call her out for being a bad drunk, unlike the fun drunk that he apparently is. What’s next? Could he possibly go back to being there for Liam? Wait, where the hell has Liam been? 3. Debbie Debbie, you’re doing a great job stepping up as the new Fiona of the house, making sure the bills get paid and that everyone contributes, and I’m glad to see you expanding your small friend group, but do you need to be competing with Carl over his girlfriend? Bringing a bigger Gatorade than Carl brought to her softball game is downright unforgivable. 4. Carl That being said, Carl should have played it a tad cooler. Getting so jealous that you straight up ask your girlfriend if she’s sleeping with your sister seems like a hard place to come back from. But I do have to respect him giving up his girl-on-girl porn because it now makes him too sad. 5. Carl’s boss I don’t know if that seafood restaurant has an HR department, but if they do, they probably should hear about the boss’ advising her underage employee to stick his finger in his girlfriend’s behind. 6. V “What kind of friend do you want to be?” Lip asks V. “If you really love her and you really are her friend, you won’t let her stay with you.” And that’s exactly what kind of friend V ends up being to Fiona, going back on her initial invite and saying that there’s not enough room for her struggling BFF at the Ball residence. It’s a hard decision and a conflicted one, but as we see by episode’s end, maybe the necessary one. Now if only Lip had some advice on an aspiring steak business. 7. Lip When was the last time that Lip just had a chill, fun day? Like I wonder what that would even look like for him anymore. In this episode alone, he’s dealing with saying goodbye to Xan, a distant pregnant girlfriend, and an out of control sister (and that doesn’t even include niece-desperate Debbie). But by the end, both his persistence with Tami and tough love with Fiona appear to have worked. Hopefully, he gets to celebrate by going to a White Sox game and having a nice big soda. 8. Kev He finally went through with the vasectomy, but Kev’s really feeling the heat when the power goes out and he (and his junk) lose access to ice. His problems are only enhanced with the discovery of V’s steak entrepreneurship. But Kevin Ball is a problem solver, stacking a pile of winter jackets on top of the freezer, followed by the smarter plan of having a blackout cookout for the neighborhood. A true man of the people. 9. Kelly What does a girl have to do to be both a best friend and a girlfriend? C’mon, Carl and Debbie, let Kelly have it all! 10. Xan Can we just have Lip be a father to her instead of a new baby? What did you think? Did this properly set up Rossum’s final two episodes? Close this dialog window Streaming Options Related content:<doc-sep>Photo : Paul Sarkis ( Showtime ) The pivot point of Shameless’ ninth se ason was Fiona’s fall from grace: on the verge of translating her investments in to true financial stability, her entire future vanished after a combination of a poorly thought-out investment, an ugly breakup, a drunk driving accident, and the underlying argument that the universe was never going to allow her to escape the South Side. It was a story decision that the writers made knowing that this was possibly Emmy Rossum’s final season, but ultimately— as far as I can piece the narrative together—executed before Rossum had confirmed her exit. Advertisement Reviews Shameless Reviews Shameless "The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Alibi" C- C- "The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Alibi" Episode 8 We’ve had a couple of months to sit with this story development due to the mid-season hiatus instituted by Showtime, and if I’m being honest I haven’t really thought much about Shameless during that period. The choice to split the season is driven by a variety of factors—this includes cynical ones like extending the amount of time you have to spend subscribed to see the entire season and possibly practical ones tied to the show’s production schedule. However, it’s not like the season ended on a huge cliffhanger that left us desperate to find resolution. The season just sort of stopped, setting up a bunch of stories—Lip has a girlfriend! Carl has a girlfriend! Frank has a manic lady friend! Kev and Vee have randomly decided to adopt another child!—that lack anything approaching a spark. The one exception to this is Fiona’s story, but even there the show didn’t really give us much to go on. I didn’t spend the hiatus anticipating the next chapter of Fiona’s story—I spent the hiatus questioning what narrative value they saw in punishing Fiona in such an aggressive fashion. “The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Alibi” alludes to this question in the episode’s title. Fiona spends the episode stumbling drunkenly through her life, acting out at Patsy’s and spiraling when she learns that the sleazebag developer who bought her building sold it at a huge profit to another developer who’s razing the whole block for condos. We learn that she hasn’t been paying any of the bills, despite the fact her siblings have been giving her money. She ends the episode literally taking Frank’s stool at the Alibi, and then takes Frank’s place in the fabric of the series as Kev and Veronica deliver a passed out Fiona home for her own protection. But what am I supposed to be getting out of seeing Fiona’s tragedy extended like this? The parallel with Frank is fine, but is that an actual story? There’s a collateral effect of Debbie having to take over the mantle of the Responsible Gallagher in order to keep the power on, but the show just does this matter-of-factly, instead of presenting it as a significant development for a character whose responsibility has been erratic at best. The episode is deeply unclear in terms of how much time has passed since Fiona’s accident (more on that below), but no one in her family seems to have flagged her behavior as a concern, and everyone seems shocked to learn she hasn’t been paying those bills, as if the warning signs weren’t in front of them the entire time. The show continues to have Fiona spiraling, but with no apparent purpose, and with no urgency to demonstrate why this was a better path than having Fiona suffer smaller setbacks or actually find some semblance of stability. I’m open to the possibility that this was the best path for Fiona, truly, but I desperately need something to go on here, and this episode has no interest in providing that. Photo : Paul Sarkis ( Showtime ) And I, honestly, have no interest in literally anything else happening in this episode. Am I supposed to be excited by the writers plug-and-playing the personal scooter trend into Carl’s grift cycle? Was the sudden swerve into ripped-from-the-headlin es child separation immigration intended to make Kev and Vee’s sudden interest in another child feel more organic, despite seeming entirely out of left field? There’s nothing for me to analyze in either of these storylines, because everything is on the surface, with zero bearing on any long-term character arcs or larger questions raised by the series. I understand the writers’ interest in being topical, and especially their interest in exploring the cruelty of the child separation policy and the plight of asylum-seeking children, but the value of such a story is limited when filtered through the inert, untethered world of the Alibi. The show has spent years now just throwing Kevin and Veronica into topical situations without ever really grappling with the consequences—as was pointed out in the comments earlier in the season, their last (child bride) foster child Ethel allegedly made it impossible for them to adopt, but that doesn’t even come up here, because why would it? Kevin and Veronica are tools for filtering stories through more than they’re actual characters, an unfortunate but unavoidable truth late in the show’s run. Advertisement It pains me, but I really have nothing to say about the rest of this episode. The show hasn’t given us any reason to really care about Ingrid, but this storyline doesn’t even pretend to be about anything but a bunch of sperm jokes. The same goes for Lip’s new girlfriend Tami—there’s a potential story here about Lip getting a glimpse at how other people his age live in a gentrified Chicago, but there’s no real tension established in the episode even after she walks through the house judging them for all their Gallagheristic ways. But who cares about what she thinks? Why is Ingrid wanting to have Frank’s baby and ending up with Carl’s semen meaningful in any way? It’s one thing for a show to hold cards close to its chest if it has our full attention in general, but this is season nine of this television show, and between character exits and rebooted storylines the word I’d use to describe its current storytelling status is stagnant. If you’re in that position, you can’t just casually jump into a new half-season with warmed-over storylines. You need to give the viewer a reason to anticipate next week’s episode because they’re excited by the prospect of what’s to come, and not because they’re desperate for any reason to keep investing in the show. Advertisement SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: WHEN IN THE WORLD IS THIS EPISODE OF SHAMELESS HAPPENING? So, how much time do YOU think has passed since Fiona’s accident? The internet informs me that a cast for a broken wrist is usually on for six to eight weeks, so it’s definitely less than that unless Fiona needed a second cast for some reason but let’s say for the sake of argument that she didn’t. But that means that the Gallaghers racked up $1700 of bills in that period, and potentially even more since Debbie seems to sweet talk her way into only paying a portion of the outstanding balance. It’s definitely still summer, since school hasn’t started yet, but it’s been long enough that Kev and Veronica have gone through the entire foster care licensing process, which the internet says takes at least three months (and that’s being optimistic). Now, it’s possible that the show is suggesting that they were fast-tracked due to the huge influx of children separated from their families, but that is never clarified through dialogue, and feels like a stretch. It’s less clear how much time has passed in Frank, Lip, and Carl’s relationships, which makes them the control group that could be just as easily read as “two weeks” or “two months.” Advertisement Join us next week when I’ll have hopefully had time to investigate Chicago’s tenant laws to determine how much notice they would have had to give Fiona’s former tenants of their plans to demolish the building. Stray observations<doc-sep>
Admitting you need help is the first step to recovery. Shameless Season 9 Episode 12 found Fiona hitting rock bottom, and it was about time. After becoming a successful businesswoman, and someone who stood to make a lot of money from her own apartment building, managing Patsy's and investing, Fiona lost it all. It was cruel to take everything from Fiona, especially when you consider the fact that she's raised her siblings, worked several jobs to keep them above the breadline. She aspired to beat the odds and make something of herself. She was well on that track, but the going got tough, and she turned to alcohol to self-medicate. People fall down and need some assistance, and I'm starting to understand why the powers that be chose this arc for Emmy Rossum's final episodes. Related: Enjoy UNLIMITED access to thousands of Movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video. WATCH ANYWHERE. CANCEL ANYTIME! Anyone can fall down, and while I still think Fiona deserved better, this is going to be a meaningful farewell to a character who has been at the center of the show since it premiered back in 2011. Frank: If you need a little walking around money, you should hang with me today. Fiona: Why would I do that? Frank: Where there's panic, there's money to be made. Permalink: Where there's panic, there's money to be made. Permalink: Where there's panic, there's money to be made. The most awkward thing about her continued fall was that Frank was the one who told her her actions were not right and that she's drinking for all the wrong reasons. Who would have thought that Frank of all people would be that type of dad? Hell, he even admitted to Lip that Fiona was the one who raised him and his siblings. That's not usual for Frank. He could see his daughter was traveling a dark path, and in all honesty, it made me like Frank again. Related: Shameless Renewed for Season 10 Having Fiona and Frank working together made for some comical scenes, but it also made me realize that this is likely the only time they'll ever work together given Rossum's looming departure. As for Lip throwing Fiona's belongings out of the house, that was low, but he's met lots of people who have been alcoholics and knows the triggers to get help. His rage seemed fueled by what happened with Xan and the man he was sponsoring. In reality, he wanted to push his sister to the point she knew she needed to get help. I'm glad he made V realize that or else Fiona would not have sought help in the final moments of the episode. Waking up in the rundown version of the building that was once hers was a powerful scene. Walking into the AA meeting and Lip already being there was beautiful. It helped Lip realize his sister was actually trying to better her life, and now that he knows she's serious he's going to help her out. The more likely scenario that leads to Fiona's exit is that she gets a job well away from the city with the aim of making a clean break. At least, that's what I'm hoping. It would be crappy if she were killed off, but something tells me the powers that be want the character alive in the event Rossum opts to make a return. As for Lip, I loved his struggle with what was happening with Xan and the prospect of becoming a father. Tammi has been running hot and cold for a while now. If you watch Shameless online, you know that the hairdresser has worried that she's going to die at a young age. Knowing you're bringing a life into the world, but not knowing whether you're going to be around to care for it is not easy to grapple with. Carl: Oh. Tammi: What do you mean oh? Shut up. Permalink: What do you mean oh? Shut up. Permalink: What do you mean oh? Shut up. I hated Tammi when she first appeared on the show. She was overconfident, rude, and wanted all eyes on her. But now that the layers are being pulled back on the character, she has the potential to be one of the show's best. Tammi's biggest concern with bringing a child into the world is that it could wind up with no parents. She lives life without taking many risks.