Shameless Season 11 finale: What happened at the end of Shameless?

It was last call at the Alibi Room for the Gallaghers and the Balls in the Shameless Season 11 series finale. After 11 years of growing up with these characters, it was time for fans of this dysfunctional family on the South Side to say goodbye. Here’s what happened (and what unfortunately didn’t happen) at the end of the series.

Warning, spoilers ahead for Shameless Season 11 Episode 12. Even though we didn’t have any cameos from former cast members, which may have been because of quarantine restrictions, the series finale brought audiences back to the pilot episode in several ways. The last scene of Shameless was a direct parallel of the show’s very first scene: the Gallaghers and friends standing around a car on fire, cheering and partying together as a family.

While celebrating Ian and Mickey’s one-year wedding anniversary, the group even started to sing “The Way We Get By” by Spoon, a song used at the end of the pilot episode. We didn’t expect the characters to have any kind of emotional connection to this song, but it served as a way to commemorate their final moment in time all together before going their separate ways. The final callback to the show’s premiere episode was the voiceover by Frank Gallagher, describing each of his children (with Fiona notably absent) and Kev & V, but this time, he does so as a ghost.

Finally, one of the strongest bonds in the pilot episode was the sibling relationship between Lip and Ian, and the series finale set aside a moment in the Alibi Room where Lip and Ian are together, talking about their future families. As they talk about having kids and possibly selling the house, Ian tells Lip that he was the closest thing any of them ever had to a dad, and the special moment took us back to their conversation in the backyard van 11 years ago.

What happened to the Gallaghers in the Shameless Season 11 finale?

The finale episode was sadly still missing Fiona, and we haven’t gotten a hint about where she is or what she’s been up to, which seems incredibly strange. After failing to overdose, Frank wanders away from the house once more, but when a dementia episode takes him from his childhood church into an ER, he later passes away alone, having flashbacks to his children growing up and then becoming a ghost who joins them at the Alibi Room for one final beer.

Lip is still unsure about whether he’s going to sell the house, whether he wants to expand his family, where he wants to live, and what he wants to do for work, but we were glad to see him have some kind of brief moment where his intelligence was able to come back to light. This character deserved so much more and we hope this was a hint that fans can imagine Lip finding his way back into a job where he’s valued for his full worth.

And after years of gentrification stories, the boy genius isn’t even going to put the house on the market and is considering a low-ball offer of $75k? Get out of here with that nonsense.

Ian and Mickey seem to be settled on staying in the apartment on the other side of town, and their hunt for furniture and cookware in the Shameless Season 11 finale led to a conversation about wanting to have a kid together. When Mickey became emotional in the conversation, we thought it would lead to Mickey wanting to see his own son, but the topic was ignored completely. Ian consoled Mickey, assuring him he’d be a great dad. The episode didn’t hint at whether they took the crib, but the door is open.

Debbie may have had the strangest, most bizarre ending of all the Gallagher siblings. We didn’t learn much about what Debbie’s future holds, and after being so incredibly set on wanting to stay in the Gallagher house, she may just end up leaving Chicago on a whim. We hope she doesn’t continue following Heidi and ignoring all of those major red flags, but this is Debbie we’re talking about, and she’s been making terrible life choices for years now. Hopefully her brothers can convince her to avoid hanging out with convicts who have a rap sheet as long as Heidi’s. Debbie and Franny both deserve a better future.

Carl seems to have found his groove as a police officer and has worked out how he wants to be able to support the community in his own way. The Shameless Season 11 finale also hinted at Carl potentially having a hand in buying the Alibi Room to turn it into a hangout for police officers. It looks like the boy who once used to electrocute dolls and melt them in the microwave might just be ok after all.

Liam, the only sibling who still cared for Frank, had an emotional arc over the past several episodes as he tried to take care of Frank and create positive memories with him doing “Frank things.” Liam never got closure in the episode that Frank had been in the hospital and he never formally learned that Frank had died (nor did anyone else), but his nod toward the ghost on Frank’s barstool at the end of the episode was as close as we got to closure between Frank and his children.

Finally, It looks like Kev & V are holding to their plan of moving to Kentucky after all. The Alibi Room got an offer from a buyer and they’ve signed the lease for their new townhouse. We hope they hold out and sell to Carl. And if you missed the mid-credits scene in the finale, make sure to go back and watch it — there’s a Shamelessly comedic moment that takes the series out with quite the bang. Cheers, Shameless fans.

Following the episode airing on Showtime, the cast reunited online for a panel to discuss the finale season and their time together over the past 11 years. Watch the full Shameless Last Call panel with the cast below:

What was your favorite moment from Shameless Season 11? What do you think was missing from the series finale? Let us know in the comments below.

All episodes of Shameless Season 11 are now available to stream on Showtime.