Rescue Me - "Jimmy": Ghost in the Machine

Four episodes in, I can safely say Rescue Me is now better than it's been since since season one, which is high praise indeed. It's no secret that the key has been getting back to it's roots, which begins and ends with 9/11.

Lou scribbling down 36 pages after seeing 3.5 seconds of footage that fateful day works much like a metaphor for the series. The series had been floating in the past couple seasons, occasionally going back to the well, but never looking very long at it's ultimate source of power. After deciding to get back to the post 9/11 storyline, the pages and episodes just flew, so much that this season has nearly twice the number of episodes (22) and there's another 18 slated for a sixth season. The series isn't just revisiting 9/11, but also bringing into the plot some discussion on the conspiracy theories that Daniel Sunyati (Franco) apparently espouses in real life. When Tommy (Denis Leary) sees his cousin Jimmy in the footage, very much alive after the first tower fell (where he was supposed to have perished,) signals the series is about to re-open its own investigation of 9/11.

That whole final sequence was backed by The Clash's "Guns of Brixton," which is significant in that the song was a prelude to the race riots in Brixton. The song's lyrics are a challenge to authority, the neighborhoods not accepting police authority, and it wasn't that long after the song was released that the riots happened. That kind of makes the song a poor man's version of the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," a song that's used in film and tv to signal that sh*t is about to get real.

Song: "Guns of Brixton" - The Clash

Line of the night: "It's the law of nature, you can't have two Walter Matthaus and no Jack Lemon."

Previously: Yankees vs Red Sox (Rescue Me season four finale - episode 4.14)