Rescue Me' Final Season, episode 1: Tommy's got a gun

Rescue Me didn’t capture my eyeballs until after I moved back to Atlanta from NYC in 2005 and it was thanks to a friend of mine who has an uncanny ability to recap multiple seasons of a TV series so one can get caught up before the first commercial break of the first episode ever watched. Season 3 was what I began watching and I’ve been told time and time again that season 3 should have been the final season for one reason or another. Yes, maybe the series has gone on a tad too long (not nearly as long as Nip/Tuck dragged on), but I know there’s a point to keeping it around until now.

The reason I didn’t watch the show before coming back here was two-fold. A) I worked in a very Devil Wears Prada atmosphere, meaning my TV viewing was confined to 7:30am-8am while I got ready for work (thanks for playing music, VH1!) and because it hit a little too close to home for me. I was in NYC on 9/11 and I used to work across the hall from the Denis Leary Firefighters Association.

So, I hope you’ll trust me when I say that the show needed to last this long if for no other reason than to be there for the 10th anniversary of why the show was invented to begin with. If there is nothing else that can rescue Tommy Gavin, maybe being there for the anniversary will. I don’t know if Tommy will die or simply go totally batshit crazy and move to Bellevue. I don’t know if he’ll end up with Janet or Sheila or Kelly (ZOMG!), if any more of his kids will die or if the new baby will hit the brown bottle right out of the womb like his pops. I also have no idea how they’ll pre-create the nation-wide memorial service on the 10th anniversary or how they’ll CGI in what the new WTC looks like in its barely-above-street-level state, especially since they wrapped up filming a year ago. What I do know is, this first episode of the final season was predictable and boring as shit.