Shameless: Where There’s a Will Recap

The Gallaghers all meet on the corner where Aunt Ginger plied her trade in Season 3 Episode 8, “Where There’s Will.” (3/10/2013). Cousin Patrick has decided this is the appropriate place to scatter “her ashes,” right where she belongs — in the gutter. Whoever that really was, Patrick refuses to discuss his upcoming plan to kick Fiona and the children out in the streets with the authority he now has a heir to the Gallagher house. Or will have.

A probate hearing is coming up in a few days, and the family meets to discuss their options while Frank crows over the irony of it all. Getting the will declared invalid, persuasion and death are considered with persuasion rising to intimidation. Fiona even shells out $200 to send over the Milkovich boys with some bats. But Patrick and his shotgun toting wife are hardly fazed. Lip futilely bones up on probate law. Carl takes Option No. 4 — killing Patrick — to heart and sprinkles rat poison on cousin Patrick’s sandwich. That lands Patrick in the hospital but doesn’t keep him out of court.

See Quotes from Where There’s a Will here

Jimmy’s small attempt at comforting Fiona that things will work out is met with sarcasm. “You realize only rich people say anything like that,” she shoots back. “We have no backup plan. There’s no running to mom and dad.” Fiona and Jimmy look into the job and housing markets. Both are pretty bleak. There’s a left behind crack pipe in the one dump they can afford. And their first day at work, literally shoveling sh*t at a sewage plant for $14.50 an hour, doesn’t go too well for Jimmy. Unable to cope with roaches inside his worksuit, he bails and lands a job in a coffee shop. A classmate from his pre-med days shows up and Jimmy claims working at the shop is a requirement of buying a franchise. His friend invites him out to dinner with some other school buddies and you can see Jimmy yearning for a more carefree life-style.

Although Fiona thought it would take a couple of weeks for cousin Patrick to get his paperwork together, the rat poison incident has provided him with a way to speed up the paperwork process. Tony Markovich apologetically shows up with some eviction papers with the proviso that if they leave that night, Patrick won’t press charges. Debbie saves the day with a molestation charge against Patrick, who can’t believe she knows just the right dialogue. “You told me not to tell anyone” and “I knew it was wrong.” Fiona now has the upper hand and wangles a 50-year lease for $500 a month.

Karen’s perfidy slowly begins to come to light. She tries to throw some napalm on Lip’s relationship with Mandy. She goes to a support group for families with a Down’s Syndrome member with Sheila and Jody. There Sheila gets caught up in a squabble over the use of the word “retard.” She decides to help “reclaim and redefine” the word.

Frank is delighted when Sheila returns home with shirts that say “I am a Retard” on the front and “and Proud” on the back. He wants 5 to take the bar. Sheila chides him over his intended purpose, pointing out the purity of hers, and also tells him to find another place to live. She goes off to rally for the Retard Nation and gets in a fray with a shop owner who doesn’t want her rallying outside his store. Frank goes to AA where he meets Christopher, who needs a sponsor after his last one flew the coop. Frank realizes the sponsor was living with Christopher and immediately offers to move in, where he finds all kinds of stuffed wildlife. Christopher is a vet tech who occasionally “rescues” the animals by taking them home and stuffing them. Kev points out the worst case scenario of this arrangement to Frank — Christopher could really be a serial killer and that’s why the last sponsor disappeared. Eventually, Frank chooses to believe that Christopher, who really doesn’t have a drinking problem, is just clingy and lonely. Frank thinks that won’t be much of a challenge in exchange for room, board and booze.

Kev and Veronica continued with the surrogate baby plan, only now V’s mother is beginning to like the job a little too much for V’s taste. She’s been buying sexy clothes and V is really pissed and suspicious when Carol shows up days in advance of the calendar’s ovulation cycle. She brings a CD for ambiance, but the last straw is when V looks in and sees how much her mom is enjoying it. Although Carol tells them to find someone else to have their baby, an early morning text to Kev shows this is not the last of that subplot.

When Mandy confronts Lip about seeing Karen and not saying anything, he reminds her that their relationship has gotten to the stage she thinks it’s at without any input from him. He never asked her to do all the things she does for him. Mandy storms out and Lip visits Karen where he calls her on her sympathy-seeking lying. Mrs. Wong shows up to collect Hymie’s crib. She argues with Sheila over fighting in public and informs Sheila that Karen was the one who told her Hymie wasn’t living in a healthy environment. Sheila is devastated and confronts Karen who goes into a big act of how she did it so she and Sheila could be close again.