#AbortionRules Recap: Shameless

In the second episode of Shameless Season 6 (1/17/2016), Fiona tries to get Debbie to the abortion clinic through every means at her disposal and gets a couple of big surprises of her own. Lip’s involvement with Kinky Helene gets even stranger and The Alibi gets an award.

Debbie and Desiree

Sean advises Fiona to cool it with Debbie because she should know a teenager will do the opposite of whatever you want him/her to do. But Fiona is hellbent on stopping Debbie from ruining her life so throughout the episode she sends her text messages with reasons why she needs to terminate her pregnancy followed by #AbortionRules. But Debbie dressed up a bag of flour in baby clothes, named it Desiree, and took it to school to prove that she could handle motherhood and school just fine. She remained #defiant even after getting some real horror stories from a couple of student moms, one of them only 13, and even after accidentally leaving flour baby, Desiree, on the train.

Before the Desiree abandonment, Debbie had just learned from Tanya that Derek’s parents did not make him go to Florida. Tanya was the one who inadvertently gave Debbie the idea that if she got pregnant, Derek’s family would open their arms and door to her without reservation. Now, Tanya says, Derek left because he doesn’t want to be a father now. He wants to go to the Air Force Academy but Debbie didn’t know that because she wasn’t interested in anything Derek wanted. “Guys wanted to feel supported, not trapped,” Tanya advises, so Debbie plans to take off for Florida to make up for that shortcoming. Yes, we know that hashtag: #Delusional. But it may be too late for an abortion by the time Debbie learns that her big sis was right.

As if having to deal with that all day isn’t hard enough on Fiona, it’s her first day as the assistant manager at the diner. The staff is giving her the business and Sean is in and out all day “at meetings.” Narcotics Anonymous meetings, it turns out, when he admits to Fiona that he shot up after finding a stash when cleaning out Otis’ locker. Sean bails yet again when the lady shows up to take Fiona’s drug test “in case she wants to test me, too.” Fiona passed the drug test but failed the rabbit test. Yes, that’s right. She is pregnant too.

Ian wasn’t much help to Fiona with Debbie because he was sick of her controlling ways himself. He was also sick of being expected to work like a whirling dervish at the diner while on meds and quits. Fiona fires him, too.

Lip’s affair with Helene takes an even more disturbing turn, if it’s not strange enough already that her husband, Theo, is in the shower singing the Hokey Pokey while Lip and Helen get it on in the marital bed. Helene suggests that Lip can kill Theo and make it look like an accident. Theo is insured for a “cool mil.” “You are joking,” Lip wonders more than says. “Am I,” she replies. Manipulative! Helene heads to the shower and tells Lip to make her some coffee. Lip encounters her son Dylan in the kitchen. He informs Lip that it is really Theo he’s sleeping with, not his mother. Theo reminds Lip that it is only through his good graces that Lip is sleeping with Helene. On another show, this could be a real recipe for disaster, but on this one, we’ll go with comedic bungling.

Lip is offered an internship on a geothermal research team by Professor Youens. He accepts because he needs to borrow Youens’ car and the Professor will only oblige a future intern.

Carl did offer Fiona a couple hundred to help pay for Debbie’s abortion and to pay for Nick’s room and board. Nick has no family and his stay with the Gallaghers is seemingly indefinite, or at least until he and Carl get pinched for extortion and gun dealing.

Still grieving for Bianca, Frank is advised by Gar to take all her stuff to the hospital where he met her and burn it. There he meets Dr. Jenny who makes Frank see the reason that he and Bianca were ever together in the first place: Stage 4 Terminal Cancer. This revelation sends Frank off in search of a replacement Stage 4. He finds Hilary and convinces her to smoke crack with him and have sex on the train tracks. Before indulging, Hilary confesses that she has not been touched in 15 years. That status remains unchanged when she dies from the dose of crack Frank gives her. Later, Frank does burn all Bianca’s belonging, setting the wooden shed by the trash container on fire in the process. He takes off just like he did when Hilary died.

At The Alibi, Svetlana did such a bang-up job of capitalizing on the hipster invasion, charging them up the kazoo for drinks, karaoke, espresso, and insults. The result is getting the dive voted the “Best Sh*ttiest Bar on the South Side” and Svetlana is named “the skankiest and meanest Russian bartender,” and there’s no end in sight: she’s bringing in a barber chair with plans to charge $30 a shave next.

Yanis continued his neighborhood nuisance, gay-bashing ways, and Kevin got directly involved because his antics were waking the twins, interfering with V’s seduction plans and with his subliminal training tapes designed to turn the babies into the next Serena and Venus Williams. Kev decides to put a stop to it once and for all by cutting the throttle cable on Yanis’ bike. He cuts the brake cable instead. The next morning, while out for a noisy ride, Yanis can’t stop and gets hit by a car right before Kev and V’s eyes.