Home Article 'Rescue Me' series finale: Did you like it? Save FB Tweet More. Rescue Me. TV Show. Episode Recaps Image. The ''Rescue Me'' season premiere: After the fire. All rights reserved. Close this dialog window View image 'Rescue Me' series finale: Did you like it? That was not satisfying either. But, ultimately, we came to realize… that the idea of the show was, will a man who has survived this great tragedy actually survive it or not?
So we decided to, at that point, go with something a little more hopeful. I agree with TheWrap's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and provide my consent to receive marketing communications from them.
This death felt dramatically right; in the preceding few episodes, Lou had become the conscience of the show's extended community of firefighters and significant others even more so than in the past and had made a conscious decision to put an admonition by Deputy Chief Sidney Feinberg Jerry Adler , a Vietnam veteran, into practice: "You want to memorialize somebody, you do it by talking about their deeds.
The killing of Lou also highlighted one of the show's major preoccupations, survivor's guilt. Tommy, Lou, Franco, Sheila, Janet -- pretty much everyone -- was living in a fog of guilt, ashamed of still being alive even if they didn't consciously think of their unhappiness in those terms.
I'm pretty sure we only saw Tommy's ghosts, but all the other characters had theirs, too. Of course it never went away -- every time the guys walked into the firehouse or looked up at a tall building they probably thought about it -- but over time it became just one source of pain among many. Tommy took a run at this in a conversation with Janet in the season opener, but Janet conspicuously failed to challenge his assertion that most of his current problems were aftershocks from the ordeal in the towers.
The subject was revisited again in a scene a couple of weeks ago between Tommy and Lou -- the one where Lou told him that he, Tommy and everyone else who survived that day actually died that day, that they were all just a bunch of walking ghosts. That's a chilling image, but it's also oddly self-flattering -- and self-flattery has always been a problem on "Rescue Me," a series that often seemed to think that copping to its innate sexism, homophobia and racism was the same thing as being honest about it.
True, the show's straight guys were all borderline emotional basket cases, and arrested adolescents to boot, but the writers nearly always tacitly endorsed their worldview; women were mostly hotties, nags or crazy bitches, minorities were mostly professional victims and troublemakers, gay men were mostly pleasant but fey and gross, etc.
The racial banter at last week's wedding was supposed to be painful, but it just felt painfully contrived. It might also have been viewed as an act of anti-FDNY sacrilege on par with pissing on a photo of the twin towers. But the show never followed this train of thought for too long. Lou's "We all died that day" speech, and variants thereof, became the show's official explanation -- and a conversation-ender.
I'm going to miss this series, though. For all its ludicrous melodrama and "Home Improvement"-style, reductive theorizing about men from Mars and women from Venus -- the group period shtick in "Menses" was especially sitcommy -- "Rescue Me" was committed to living in the real world.
Its characters were adults with adult problems. And over time, Tommy actually, finally grew up. He quit smoking and drinking.
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