‘Rescue Me’ starts its final season with a bang

New York firefighter Tommy Gavin opened the seventh and final season of “Rescue Me” as the responsible one.

Unfortunately for the people in his life, that doesn’t preclude his unloading multiple shotgun blasts in his uncle’s bar.

As dramas go, “Rescue Me” is beginning to feel like a bit of a period piece. The firefighters on Ladder 62 have aged a lot – more deeply than the seven years since the show premiered in 2004. “Rescue Me” traces a culture of lives lived hard, played hard, the cumulative effect of long stretches of inactivity punctuated with periods of adrenaline, smoke inhalation and danger.

And in their personal lives, these characters have encountered nearly every permutation of relationship explored on television.

The Attacks of Sept. 11 cast a long shadow over the lives in this show. In the seventh season premiere, Tommy is visited by the ghosts of his father, his late brother Johnny, and his cousin Jimmy, who lost his life at Ground Zero.

The show over the years has explored a lot of feelings surrounding the Attacks – highlighting people who exploit them for a quick buck or cynical politics, the “truther” movement, people who use them as an excuse for self-serving memorials and generally the hole shot through the lives of people and the loss left in the wake. Tommy referenced them talking with his wife, Janet, about their own struggling relationship.

“’Normal’ died on 9/11,” Tommy said.

His family’s firefighting legacy only got more complicated last season when Jimmy and Sheila’s son, Damien, was injured when a ceiling collapsed on top of him while fighting a fire and he’s now a broken and severely brain-damaged shell of his former self.

Family

As season seven starts, Tommy and Janet are back together, and Janet discovers she is pregnant with her fifth child. Tommy urges her to keep it.

Skip ahead five months, Janet and Sheila – whose history with Tommy is complex to say the very least – have reconciled their past differences and Sheila is supporting Janet in her pregnancy. Like sisters, she said.

Which reminded me of an exchange from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which goes:

Jack: “I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.” Algernon: “Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”

And indeed, between Tommy’s affairs with Sheila – and Sheila’s repeated sexual assaults on him – not to mention her attempts to kidnap Tommy’s infant son or possibly nephew (these are people with interesting lives) – Janet and Sheila have called each other every name in the book.

What led to the dust-up at the bar was a marriage proposal, in fact. Black Shawn (which is how he’s differentiated at the firehouse from White Sean) has been dating Tommy’s daughter Colleen and he proposed last week.

Colleen is an alcoholic who has been dry for months but is working as a waitress in a bar owned by her sponsor, Uncle Teddy – the whole family has a complicated relationship with alcohol, which is another recurring theme of the show. On accepting Shawn’s proposal, Colleen downs four shots in rapid succession, chased with half a bottle of vodka.

When she is discovered passed out in the back room, Tommy (her former sponsor) is called. He comes in, calmly announces “Last call,” takes the shotgun from behind the bar and fires multiple rounds into the back bar, causing probably thousands of dollars worth of damage and emptying the place for the night before leaving with Colleen.

This of course was the same bar where Teddy left Tommy for dead after his wife was killed in a drunk driving incident, so this is a family with some history.

The out-of-control nature of their lives reflects the free fall of lives in the wake of the disaster. This final season is set to conclude Sept. 7, 2011. Ten years after The Attacks, and the same year as the architect of those Attacks was put down.

So if “Rescue Me” feels like a period piece, it’s only because The Attacks are frozen in time, but the aftershocks continue to affect our lives in large and small ways to this day. This show has been an ongoing search for meaning in a whirling mess of meaninglessness, and I’m interested to see them play it out to the end.

New episodes of “Rescue Me” premiere Wednesdays at 10/9c on FX. The show carries an MA rating for excellent reasons.