MovieChat Forums > Shameless (2011) Discussion > I'm mid-way through Season Five... (SPOI...

I'm mid-way through Season Five... (SPOILERS)

posted 4 years ago by Ace_Spade (9658)
3 replies | jump to latest

SPOILERS

Twice-warned.

Just finished watching "Tell Me You F***ing Love Me" and I'm a little PO'd. Jimmy was a great character and his dynamic with Fiona was great. I'm really bummed out that he's "adios", but I'm just as - or possibly even more - ticked off with how they wrote him out.

Jimmy was a perfect fit in the Gallagher world. He was just as loving, dedicated, degenerate, baggage-saddled, and crazy as the rest of them - just with his own spin on it. This dude wasn't perfect, but he did care for the family and loved Fiona.

...well, until Season Five. In Season Three he made bad decisions, but mostly/partly because he was kinda hemmed into a corner between Fiona making radical life decisions without his input and the drug cartel guys threatening him with a whole lotta death. But in S5 (f---ing Season Five!) they write him on as this smug jackass who doesn't care about Fiona so much as just winning. He's pushy and a real jerk, and that was never his style, and then his send-off is basically another character we barely know saying, "Oh, that whole guy you've grown to love - thief though he may have been - yeah, he's a scum-bag and you should hate him." For who? For Gus? Don't get me wrong, Gus is a fine enough character, but we barely know this guy. There's no connection. It really feels like the writers *want* us to root for Gus and Fiona, so they're deliberately blowing up Jimmy and his relationship with Fiona.

I'm kinda ranting right now because that character and that relationship, I felt, were part of the central, core story of the show, and to throw it out is a really nasty thing to do, especially while flipping him off. It feels like they're trying to invalidate the character as-written until then. "Oh, that great character we wrote? You should hate that guy".

I don't know how much further I'll watch it. There are lots of Gallaghers to love, but knowing that huge puzzle piece has been turned into garbage...it's galling.

[–] Ace_Spade (9658) 4 years ago

I've definitely decided to take a break post-Jimmy/Steve/Jack butchery. I might go back later, I might not.

[–] Jinx (3877) 3 years ago

Jimmy/Steve was great and you are so right, it felt like a core relationship to the show. It really was a bad decision to have him not be end game.

[–] Ace_Spade (9658) 3 years ago

I think a big part of the problem is that they followed the Shameless UK blueprint pretty closely and, while I haven't seen all of the original Shameless, they were setting Fiona and Jimmy up as a kind of trailer park Romeo & Juliet, so that setup fizzling out - no, imploding while spiralling out in the wrong direction - seemed jarring to me. It was almost worse than no follow through, it was going against the set-up, and not in a great plot-twist way, in a "these characters aren't acting like themselves" way.

They didn't have to end up together, I suppose - it could have ended tragically - but I was hoping for that semi-happy ending that only Shameless could have delivered on. So not getting it was a disappointment. But, honestly, my biggest disappointment - and what really soured me on it - was how they decided to kick Jimmy and make him horrible. Jimmy wasn't a horrible person - well, for somebody who travelled in the Gallaghers' circle - and it felt like they were *trying* to make me hate him so that they could axe the character. They even had Dichen Lachman's character take a parting shot at him, like, "Oh, yeah, Jimmy sucks, didn't you know that? You're stupid for being invested in this character we wrote to be a good person and now 180'd just so we can kick him to the curb."

I only intended to write a quick, "I know, right!?" response, but apparently I'm still pretty bitter about it. I still haven't watched the rest of Shameless. Closest I've come has been thinking about re-watching the first couple of seasons again.