Maybe I'm wrong to expect the obvious from a show that's granted Tommy more than one narrow escape - yep, he survived last season's shooting, assuming this year isn't a "Lost" flash-sideways - even as it picked off those around him.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, he's lost a cousin, a son, a brother and his father: Why would Leary, who created the show with Peter Tolan, hesitate to kill Tommy, too?
Unless keeping him alive was the nastier choice.
Because the first four episodes of the new season are less annoying than most - beautiful women seem to have stopped, for the moment, falling at Tommy's feet - I find myself giving thought to appropriate endings for "Rescue Me." And, no, they don't all involve Gavin Flambé.
I'm thinking of something more along the lines if last week's "Saving Grace," an explosive finish for the TNT show that, despite the regular appearance of a guardian angel named Earl (Leon Rippy), had more than a little in common with "Rescue Me."
Starting with an unconventional main character in Holly Hunter's police Detective Grace Hanadarko, who, like Tommy, was haunted by an act of terrorism that killed someone close to her.
In Grace's case, it was the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building 15 years ago that killed her sister, and it was to the bombing that "Grace" returned in its final moments as the woman who claimed, after years of resisting, to have finally given up her life to God sacrificed herself, as she apparently was meant to all along, to prevent another such horror.
A week later, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it, except to say I didn't see it coming and yet can't really imagine it ending differently.
"Rescue Me" isn't "Saving Grace": Tommy and Grace may both behave badly, but they come from very different places and very different writers and not even Tommy's superstitious brand of religion would allow him to give head space to the likes of Grace's Earl.
