Last we saw of Rescue Me’s Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), he’d been shot by his grief-stricken Uncle Teddy and lay bleeding on the floor of the underground bar he ran with his firefighter buddies. Not too long beforehand, Tommy -- who’d given up on his hard-earned sobriety -- had been preaching to all comers that they should drink as much alcohol as they wanted, screw AA, Tommy said. However when Teddy’s wife died in a booze-fueled car wreck, Teddy held Tommy responsible for persuading everyone to start drinking again, thus the bar room shooting.
The sixth season premieres Tuesday at 10 on FX and I’m really interested to see what, if any, impact this near-death experience at the hands of his uncle has had on Tommy. If 9/11 rocked Tommy’s life, what would nearly dying do to him? Would there, could there be any real change? I’m doubtful.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure what to make of the two FX promos: The first one, “Cradle to Brave,” is a parallel portrait of two boys, one who grows up to be a professional baseball player for the Yankees (Derek Jeter) and the other who becomes New York City firefighter (Tommy Gavin). Something about seeing Jeter slowly drive by after Tommy risked his life to help a colleague out of a burning building, just felt odd to me as Alicia Keys sang “Empire State of Mind.” (Or maybe that’s just my reaction as a Red Sox fan.) Is this some sort of heroic equation, that Jeter gets cheers and accolades while Tommy gets a soot-covered face and is lucky to live to see another day?
The second video is a more traditional promo for the season as the words, “Sometimes you have to die to learn how to live” appear on the screen and Tommy is lectured about how not to let the “bad Karma” get the “upper hand on the good Karma.”
The New York Daily News wrote about the new season by saying that its first four episodes “build on Gavin’s collapse. He is haunted by his cousin’s death [on 9/11] and his own mortality. He’s also suspicious of his firehouse family, though they rallied to help his wife maintain their home when he recovered.”
Of the fifth episode of this season, series creator/writer/star Leary told the paper: “It’s an explosion of everything that’s gone on in Tommy Gavin’s life. It’s the bottoming-out of his alcohol addiction. It slips in time from past to present, constantly back and forth. It’s a really nasty episode. Everybody’s abandoning him.”
Are you looking forward to the sixth season?
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