'Shameless' Season 10 Episode 3 gives us some hope for Fiona's eventual return
This article contains spoilers for season 10, episode 3: 'Which America?'
The third episode of the ongoing season goes a fair bit into establishing how pretty much nobody in Southside, Chicago is a good enough replacement for the absolute goddess that was Fiona Gallagher. With Emmy Rossum quitting the series after nine long and wonderful years of entertaining us as Fiona, the expectations for the tenth season in a Fiona-less environment were pretty mixed, to begin with. There was simply no letting go of the hot mess of a matriarch who was the main crutch for the show even though the story revolved around her alcoholic degenerate father and five other siblings struggling to make ends meet. But while Rossum had made very clear that this exit was pretty final as opposed to Cameron Monaghan's one, which lasted all of half a season, the latest third episode makes it seem like we might get to see Fiona soon, after all.
So far, the only time we have heard of Fiona is in passing when the Gallaghers discussed the massive sum of money she left for them, before heading out for good, or when the youngest Gallagher girl Debbie complains about how she is not Fiona, even though she has stepped up to the role of the Gallagher matriarch quite effortlessly. There was that one time in the season 10 premiere where we saw a phone in the house go on ringing, while the caller ID showed Fiona. The call goes unanswered and that's the last time we hear from her of sorts.
Luckily, things change in the third episode, when Veronica talks about how much she misses her 'girl'. V and Fi were best friends, thicker than family. So it is natural that to assert how sorely fans and the show are missing Fiona, they would use V as an expository trope. The topic comes up when V has tickets to a game that she has no one to bring as a plus one for. Her husband, Kevin, keeps suggesting women that V is supposedly friends with, but none of them seem to make the cut for the extremely high maintenance, but practical V. In the end when Kevin asks her why she can't hang out with that friend who she used to party with every night and the two wear same sized shoes, V simply reminds him, that girl was Fiona.
At the end of the episode, it takes calling about 20 women in through Tinder to apply as candidates for being BFFs with V that they decide there simply is no replacement for the firestorm that was Fiona Gallagher. Sure, V bonds with a woman called Mimi whom she decides to 'go on a nightcap with', but deep inside we know that's not what V wants. Could it be that to just prioritize what V wants this one time that we could get to see Fiona back sometime this season? As it is, the season tends to overcompensate a fair bit to make up for the absence of Fiona, so they might as well just bring her back for old times sake, you know.
'Shameless' season 10 airs on Sundays at 9pm only on Showtime.
