The majority of the episode follows Frank's slow march toward death. After surviving an attempted suicide via heroin overdose, he wanders the streets in a dementia-induced haze. We get fleeting glimpses of how the world the show inhabited has changed — Patsy's Pies has been shuttered, for instance. Frank ends up contracting and dying of COVID-19 with no family members at his side. A lonely, fitting conclusion for a character who always put his own wants and needs above his family.
But Shameless doesn't satisfy itself with poetic justice, choosing to give in to sentiment. In Frank's dying moments, he flashes back to a family breakfast table tableau from the first season, then appears at the Alibi in his hospital gown as a spirit, sipping from a perpetually refilling mug of beer while watching his family. As everyone in the Alibi leaves to taunt a rich person whose car has been set aflame outside (an awkward metaphor for the class division that drove the show), Frank and his stool are lifted heavenward into a wide shot over the Chicago skyline in what is definitely the show's most bizarre visual, and the audience hears his suicide note in voiceover.
Frankly speaking, if any television patriarch has ever deserved to spend eternity in hell, it's Frank Gallagher. Ending his arc by having him float away to heaven on a barstool is both too out there for a show like Shameless, and far too sentimental a conclusion for a man whose presence generally meant nonstop misery to his family. The less said about him being so soaked in alcohol that the hospital's attempt at cremating him resulting in a percussive explosion that blows the oven's doors open, the better.
