To Catch a Predator

GRADE: B

The third episode in season 3 called, "May I Trim Your Hedges?" has all the prerequisite sex that fans have come to know and unwillingly fall in love with about Shameless, but this time there's a whole lot of creepiness thrown in the mix.

Firstly, Fiona's little sister, Debbie, who has been put through enough emotional trauma in past seasons to do serious psychological damage, catches a pervert masturbating to her at the back of the bus. Even though, Fiona throws a can of soup through his face as the criminal runs off, the experience leaves little Debbie rattled enough to take up self defense. Then, we have the feisty Fiona who enlists her friend V to help her bribe a male grocery-store manager with allegations of sexual misconduct, after he offered Fiona a job in exchange for another sort of job - handling his "deli meat."

After thinking about what kinds of people actually come up with this stuff, I started thinking about how to explain it without sounding like a deviant myself. But, the truth of the matter is that all of the events that take place in this episode come from real life, and the saddest part isn't that these things actually exist in our society, but the ones that they are perpetrated on are often the unwitting and the innocent.

With that sentiment in mind, after hearing about Debbie's episode on the bus, her brother Lip decides to serve up a bit of vigilante justice to every pedophile in the neighbor and is shocked to see just how many red dots actually pop up on the pervert map. But when he and a formative "perv posse" go to the house of a Blake Collins, they find that Blake is actually a nerdy-librarian-type middle-school teacher, played by Amy Adams, who fell in rapturous love with her eighth-grade student. While the posse disperses, Lip vows to seduce her in an attempt to prove that beautiful, blonde women can be pedophiles too.

But that subplot rings hollow at times when Lip tries every cliche in the 'How To Seduce a Pedophile' handbook. But, what's worse is that Ms. Collins actually falls for it and after finding new uses for peanut butter, actually uses the hair-removal product, Nair, to make Lip look like a little boy again.  

The most emotional moment was again provided by our competent heroine, Fiona, who overcomes her fear of trusting others, and tells her boyfriend Jimmy so, which "means more to me than love." This would seem like an emotional breakthrough for the couple, but of course, nothing is simple on Shameless: earlier in the evening, Jimmy's ex-girlfriend used his hand as a sex toy. I know it's complicated.

I might be amiss not to mention the patriarch Frank, if only as an aside, but his antics have ceased to impress me and I've become less and less shocked at his pitiful ploys to better his situation. In this episode, he convinces his young son, Carl, that he has cancer in an attempt to make a profit off a Make-a-Wish like foundation. Good luck, Frank.