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A late-night haircut turns into kitchen-floor domestic bliss for Jackie and her husband; morning she crushes about a billion Percocets and glues them into sweetener packets so she can self-medicate and caffeinate at the same time. The first one gets used when a random dude comes running into the hospital and punches her out, the second one gets ganked accidentally by the engoofened Mrs. Akalitus, and she gives the third to a cabbie who's spent the day having a heart attack. Gang aft agley.
Other patients include a teen model whose mother let him jump a ramp without a helmet for Pottery Barn Teen, and ends up with aneurysm that Dr. Cooper can, bizarrely, hear. Though Jackie and Eleanor blow him off at the time, he ends up right. This nearly ruins Eleanor's worldview, but not as much as the concept of eating a street-vendor hotdog or wearing her clothes more than once. After bitching out the kid's mom, Jackie gives Coop a tremendous speech about how, though his entire stupid personality is compensation for his poor skills as a doctor, it's not necessary because he's actually a good doctor. This causes him to give her a great big goofy hug, which nearly causes her to fall down dead from horror right before a fucked-up Akalitus grabs her in a second horrifying clench.
The Libyan attaché's ear bubbles up out of a toilet, causing Zoey to barf some more; Jackie blames her for it in front of Akalitus, but takes care of it handily. Another patient gets some burns from an exploding oxygen tank, and bonds with Mo-Mo over their liberation from male oppressors, then says only a makeout session between Mo-Mo and Coop will make it better. Her name is Eileen, and she is a hero. We also meet Thor, a cabaret-singing piece of Grade A with a crush on Mohammad, and who in turn ignites a slight crush in Zoey. Jackie shows tremendous compassion toward the violent random that punched her once she learns about his mother's medical issues, which causes Zoey to realize that working in a hospital is intense, which earns her another tremendous speech about how doctors diagnose, and hospitals contain, but only nurses heal.
A conversation with Big Pharma Eddie about the Supercollider brings the concept of matter and antimatter -- and what happens when they touch -- to the forefront; it's only fair, of course, that the episode end with an anti-conversation about the Supercollider with her husband. "They're looking for the particle that allows matter to connect with other matter and become actual things," Eddie says: Couldn't have put it better myself.
week: Eddie might be replaced by a pillbot; Coop continues to be amazing.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously Jackie flushed the Libyan ear, awesomely. Then that boy died and she felt guilty about it because she was high, so she yelled at Coop and almost made him cry, but he grabbed her breast instead. Jackie has a student nurse, a boyfriend, two BFFs, a drug problem and a loving family at home. The credits are sort of weird and go on for a long time: everything flying in slow motion out of her bathroom cabinet: coffee, drugs, wedding ring, religious icons, intercut with her beautiful face and wise smile.
Then it's later and Jackie is cutting her husband's hair. Do we have a name on him? Kevin? Well, he's darling. And shirtless. So she's cutting the hair; her own, by the way, looks pretty much amazing. She looks like Starbuck. So he says he doesn't really care about the back, since he can't see it: he's behind the bar all day, et cetera. The back of the hair is the only thing we do for other people, it's like the anti-us. There's a lock of hair on the front, he says, that he's particularly interested in, so she comes around in front to check it out. Before you know it, they're making out and on the kitchen floor and he's rolling around in Fruity Pebbles. He says it felt more like Cap'n Crunch, and she tells him to focus! Focus!
Then it's later and she's making lunch for the girls and crushes about a hundred Percocets in a cute mortar and pestle and seals them into sliced-open Sweet 'N All packets: "Mid-morning, mid-afternoon, the long ride home." As she does so, she lays down some science knowledge for us: "Percocet should never be crushed, broken or chewed. Unless you want it to hit your system like a bolt of lightning. Which is only a problem if you're afraid of lightning. Which I am not."
Then it's later and the girls are dressed, and Scott -- Scott? Kevin -- Kevin is all over the place because the bar he owns, they're getting a new ice machine and beer delivery so he's gotta get a move on, and Fiona wants waffles, in fact Fiona was promised waffles ("Honey, I lied.") while all Grace wants is to tie her shoes as tightly as possible. They aren't tight enough, never tight enough; it's stressing Gracie out.
I think the issue is that they physically cannot be tight enough. You have no idea how hard it is to watch your child falling, and you can't do anything to stop it. Jackie ties the shoes even tighter while Grace eats; Fiona hears the garbage truck and thinks it's the bus, so she knocks over the Fruity Pebbles, but Kevin tells her it's okay: Daddy likes Fruity Pebbles on the floor. They smile and wink at each other, and Grace knows they're up to something, but she can't figure what. "Don't worry about it, my darling." But she's going to. Add it to the list.
Then it's later and Jackie's coming up out of the subway and behind her there's a billboard, for some aspirin product, for "aches and pains," and then it's later and she's drinking a coffee outside the hospital when a cab drives up. Eleanor plops a Barney's bag on the street, old blouse hanging out of it, buttoning up the new blouse, stretching luxuriously one pointed toe into a beautiful pair of red pumps. Eleanor, what are you like? That's really odd. Nobody's like that. She's like a fantasy, a cartoon fantasy. She's like... Oh, she's what you call a Golightly: a phony, but a real phony, not like those assholes on Sex & The City. She's like a woman dressed as a drag queen. She's like Lorenzo Lamas.
"Jacks!" Eleanor shouts, handing over the Barney's bag and asking her to "recycle" it, meaning handing it to some crazy-looking bag lady who can't believe her luck. She pretends, or else this show is really weird and in which case she claims, to be acquainted with dry cleaning from having seen it "in a movie once" and to find it tedious. I don't know where to put her, because the fuck any of this would actually happen. What was that show where Bobcat Goldthwaite would go down to the basement and talk to the Muppet in the couch? Maybe Eleanor is Jackie's couch Muppet. I hope not, though, because A) I love her, and B) Coop and Zoey talk to her so they're Muppet-talkers too, but also C) You can't have a couch Muppet as your Chief of Surgery or whatever she is. It's against the law.* Eleanor reminds Jackie to take off her wedding ring, and they head inside, past some nuns. Drink!
(*And it will remain so until such time as those furry fucks prove they actually deserve and can fully appreciate and bear responsibility for the rights they keep demanding so outrageously and vociferously and rhymingly.)
Mo-Mo's talking about getting allergy meds from Eddie regarding his shitty boyfriend Randy's stupid cat Bonbon the histamine machine, and Randy's all over him about it. Yes, he faked a sore throat at Danny and Don's party, but only because he hates tapas. Who the eff hates tapas? And anyway, stop questioning Mo-Mo. Zoey runs up and he rings off, and she's got muffins and a weird chirping sound coming out of her... Right, that's her voice.
So Mo-Mo has the secret smile they all get around her, that she is never allowed to know about, and she holds muffins toward him like they're blankets piled with maize and, like, wampum, and he's Andy Jackson with a rifle pointed at her. "I know what you're thinking: geeky new girl baked, trying to get the kids at school to like her." (OMG is she psychic? I can't handle two of those all summer.) She shrugs, because duh: that's true. You know what he's thinking because it's the only thing you could be thinking because it's the truth. "I don't sleep much," she says with an inflection that tells us maybe she's more interesting than she lets on, "So I bake. And I noticed there's never anything to eat around here? So please take one? Before I die of humiliation." Zoey's affect is very specific to her, if you see what I mean, and it's nice to watch her talk, always. Jackie walks up just as he's feeling how dense and heavy they are, and goes, "Oh no she didn't!" But she did. Mo-Mo takes off without muffin in hand, and when Zoey offers Jackie gives her a brilliant, silent nooooo with a But Thanks smile.
This guy comes in looking like ten miles of bad road and he's all I need to talk to someone now and Jackie's all, "I need you to calm down now" but calm down he does not, and starts yelling about WTF why won't anybody talk to him, and it's turning into a serious John Q situation for a second, only with a guy that looks like he came out of the Beauty & The Beast sewers long ago before furries even existed. Before our collective brains gave birth to that, is how far back the dirt on the guy goes. And then Jackie calls out, "Thor!"*
(*And okay, probably if you're me, at this point maybe your eyes go wide, maybe you sit up a little straighter, because there's only one kind of person that gets called Thor, right, and as it turns out that's kind of a hobby of mine, guys that might be called Thor, either in jest or because they are from Valhalla or whatever the case is, D'Onofrio maybe, but a Thor-type Thor that is also a male nurse? When I was just today saying that nurses are my favorite? That's pretty much like riding into Jackpot City on the back of your very own superhero millionaire who can fly and smells like Edward Cullen just like naturally. And this Thor does not disappoint, and is awesome in six different ways they don't even bother to mention on the show except in passing, is how awesome and possibly nepotized his presence here is. He's here and then he's gone; he floats like a 6'5" butterfly, et cetera. Oh, Thor.)
So Thor menaces the man away easily, because he's like up to here, okay, with a prominent brow, and Jackie thanks him, and Thor twinkles out an adorable "My pleasure!" Then he leans in quietly and asks if Mo-Mo is still seeing Randy. Oh, Thor. People who date Randy don't give up Randy easily, because Randy is the only proof they have for their secret belief that they deserve somebody like Randy. Jackie tells him to hang in there -- like the biggest ball-o-fluff kitten you ever did see, and imagine the pith-helmet elephant-dangling super-glue steel girder he'd be "hanging in there" from -- because he is a catch. Zoey offers him a muffin as he's going, and he praises her flawless skin, and she asks if he's available, and Jackie -- awesomely -- tells her to go get him.
Then the random guy, apparently sensing that Thor's off sprinkling pixie dust elsewhere, reappears and without preamble punches the shit out of Jackie. She's like fuck and the guys grab him and she yells at oh, just everybody, but pulls it together once the guy's gone. Of course, Zoey is having a wobbler at this point from the brutality and the randomness of it all, so Jackie has to concentrate on Zoey calming down; she runs off for ice, and Jackie opens the first packet of Sweet 'N All, and it falls like snow into her coffee, and she drinks it, and she can hear her heartbeat. If Jackie dumped her boyfriend and left her husband and married Fitch Cooper, her name would be Jackie Cooper. (Super duper.) Just puttin' it out there. (On the Ritz, what?) Just puttin' it on the Ritz.
So then it's later and there's a kid on the gurney, one EMT talking so fast at Eleanor it's all a blur, and then Eleanor points to the other one, asking him to say it all again, but louder and slower. It's still incomprehensible, but basically the boy fell from a medium-to-great height, he's not really breathing, he's having trouble is what I'm saying. Emergent medical trouble. So Eleanor is joined by Coop and Jackie, who come in and look down at the kid, and Eleanor says to call Neuro and prep an OR, and meanwhile Coop is listening to the child's abdomen and hears something and tells them both to STFU, which blows their minds because they are the bosses of all medicine, Eleanor and Jackie, and how dare you.
How dare he is because he has a magic power of listening that he is using to magically listen to the little boy's abdomen, in which something not-so-great has happened called an abdominal aortal aneurysm. I can't even spell aneurysm, much less hear them inside little boys, and apparently Eleanor can't either. She says that A) nobody is playing Aneurysm Whisperer in her OR, and if they don't open the boy's head up then he is going to be a vegetable. But, Coop counters, if he has this aneurysm then he will die. Eleanor pronounces this a case of the Too Many Cooks, and bumps him from the room. He is so miserable! His lip pooches out like this and he kicks the nonexistent dirt and won't meet anybody's eye and he would totally slam the door and then lie and say he didn't mean to, if the doors were slammable in this room, is how miserable. Jackie deals with sk8rboi, something happens or does not happen, things go white.
Later she's with Eddie in the Harmacy, bitching because the Supercollider cost eight billion dollars and twenty-three cents or whatever they have over there, you know, guilders or florins or whatever, and he tells her that actually it's cool. He tries to nutshell it for her, and she waggles her brows at him about "ooh, nutshell!" and he's like, well, okay. You have matter and antimatter, and when they meet they annihilate each other. Boom. She pronounces this depressing.
However, though, but, that means there's no reason for us to be here, or pencils, or God. So: The thing in France, or wherever, shoots a proton at an antiproton and smashes it at the speed of light. (He leaves out the whole doomsday situation where we party in the black hole forever and ever, because Jackie's got enough stress on her plate. Or I have no idea what I'm talking about, or he doesn't, or none of us do. Who really knows. Well, somebody. The people in France, or wherever. But not me. Nobody in this room, right now, with us.) But eight billion dollars, she reiterates. Really?
Yes really, because they are looking -- and I love this, I love Eddie -- they are looking for the particle that "allows matter to connect with other matter and become actual things." You, me, pencils. "It's fucking magic, Jackie! It's the God particle, that's what they're looking for, they're looking for God." I think if God were a particle of anything, it would be like a nice cheese blintz. Something that will stick to your gut but not make you sick, something warm, something a little sweet but with a lot of other flavors going on in there too. Or else Silly Putty because that shit is amazing.
She kisses him in his excitement, and he vibrates like a Hadron Supercollider and she goes, "You had me at annihilation!" He smiles, because he remembers when we were goths and listened to really hardcore shit and would totally say something like that and not even feel dumb about it. You had me at annihilation. You had me at annihilation. You had me at annihilation.
Zoey heads into the WC, but stops short as Mo-Mo's coming out until he explains that the Men's Room is of such quality that he doesn't use it. I was like that when I was little. It just makes sense. Not like at school, or the mall, but other places. I'm trying to think of what places I'm talking about, but I got nothing. Where do you go when you're little? I was not out on the town very often. Rest stops on the highway? Like I was a trucker when I was five? No idea. I do remember feeling like I had to have my story straight, and knowing that "Because that is fucking disgusting in there" was not going to cut it.
Zoey stands in a stall, standing to her credit very still and not with a lot of quaver in her voice beyond her usual insane intonations of words, and she calls her mom, and explains that she cannot actually be a nurse because you get punched in the face sometimes, and the whom to whom this relates is her boss Jackie, not that Jackie punched her in the face but was herself punched in the face. "By this man. Hard. It was awful." Plus, they hated the muffins, which is mesmerizingly embarrassing: "It was... A Totally Bad Idea." I don't know how you fix that up, though. It's such a naked Love Me play you'd have to like pull a Sloane Crosley and make them the face of each person or something similarly cracked.
"They're cupcakes in the shape of the Top Ten Most Recognizable Faces. Thor, you get Mickey Mouse because of your eerily high voice. Mrs. Akalitus, you get Hitler but only because a little birdie told me you like licorice icing, not for any other reason. Jackie, you get..." (I have no idea what the other faces are, do you? It's always just the two.) "Jim Nabors, because of your beautiful singing voice, Marine tactics, and slightly ambiguous sexuality."
Right then the toilet starts a-bubblin' ear and the Libyan attache's ear appears and Zoey's mom is still talking as Zoey horror-movie can't get out of the stall with the ear for a second -- like that shitty Stephen King story where he jumped the shark forever and ever, with the finger coming out the sink, the Lovecraftian horror of the impossibly long finger coming out of the sink, just fingering away -- and she finally gets out of there and then she barfs her brains out in the adjoining stall.
Then it's later and Akalitus is holding up a biohazard bag with a familiar body part in it. "Ears don't just jump into toilets, do they?" (Starring Elizabeth Taylor.) Zoey asks if this is a rhetorical question and I so want people to answer this question with a non-rhetorical answer, when they say this on TV. "No, I'm asking. Because sometimes, Zoey, they do. And it's important. Especially because sometimes, when you least expect it, or when you're too sleepy to turn on the bathroom light, in the middle of the night, and you just want to doze and drop trou and take a leak without actually waking up all the way, Zoey, and you're sitting there with your feet on the cold tile and wishing you were wearing your slippers, sometimes they JUST JUMP OUT AGAIN."
Jackie approaches with trepidation, since she is the ear flusher, but also because she doesn't want Akalitus to start telling the story about the impossibly long finger coming out the sink that she always tells first-years. So they fill Jackie in on how Zoey was just whining about her effin' muffins with mommy and then: ear. Zoey calls the Libyan "that guy [Jackie] treated yesterday," which obliges Jackie to point out that Zoey was technically the last person to handle the ear. "I handed it to you, sweetie? She got sick," Jackie explains to Akalitus. And of course, it's Nurse Jackie, so it's not like she's scared of getting arrested over yelling at an attaché's ear. He totally threatened to cut her up, I mean, it's not like she's making a habit of this. It's, as usual, about making sure everybody, including Nurse Jackie, gets out alive. So just go with the flow, Zo. But with the flow does our Zo go? No.
Akalitus wants to launch an investigation, Zoey tries to start twenty sentences and finishes nary a one, Akalitus starts talking about firemen who set their own fires just to be heroes, and then just when Zoey's about to climb up on a chair and give a speech or something, rip the biohazard baggie out of Akalitus's hands and devour the ear, whatever's weird, Akalitus ganks Jackie's second packet of drogas and empties it into her coffee. "I've been looking for sweetener all over this place for three days!"
(It's these assertions, they don't make any sense. How is that possible? I think the person who wrote this episode has a chip on their shoulder w/r/t reality, that's what I think. These things they keep saying, it's like Gilmore girls or something, it's hard to follow what's real and not because they keep asserting these things that cannot be true, but are just there for the joke or whatever. Infuriating. Insupportable! Un-American!)
Anyway, that's the story of how poor Mrs. Akalitus, by being exceedingly rude -- and again, credibility-strainingly, come to think of it -- as I say being impossibly rude, and taking sugar out of her inferior's hand and putting it in her coffee even though apparently there is no sweetener left in the barren wasteland that is Manhattan, managed to dose herself with multiple Percocets, which were broken and then crushed and are now heading toward her brain like a bolt of lightning. She brandishes the ear and walks away to Get Experienced, and Zoey's like, "Am I going to be arrested?" It takes a second to register and finally Jackie's like, "...What? Oh, God no." She drags Zoey off, offering to let her do a catheter. She's excited. Nurses are not like you and me.
You know what's exciting? Thor. That book And Then We Came To The End. James Remar is and has been very exciting for a very long time. Do you know how many things you have to be excited by in this world, before a catheter? Like, all of them. Unless you're a nurse and then... I don't think the whole list gets flipped, like I don't think nurses hate James Remar, I'm not accusing them of that, but so I guess it just means, once again, that nurses are better than you and me, because their list is long enough to have everything on it, from James Remar to catheters and things infra-Remar and ultra-catheter besides.
There's a sooty burned old lady who apparently felt like smoking a bit nearer her oxygen tank than perhaps was, in retrospect, a properly respectful distance. Mo-Mo asks her why she's so misbehaved, patting her shoulder, and she tells him that she stopped doing what she was told the day her husband hit her for not vacuuming. Mo-Mo says "Me too," and at this point I don't even know anymore. Is he saying he was in an abusive relationship? Is this the incredibly awkward, like Jenji Kohan-awkward, way of reminding us and telling this lady that he is a homosexual? Because that joke's not really funny, and it's also not really a joke so much as ... A lie, as far as we know. Except they both laugh, so who the fuck knows.
Nurse Jackie comes in looking for Dr. Cooper, whom Mo-Mo paged twenty minutes ago, and introduces her to the patient, Eileen. Eileen's pretty awesome. She's like, "I bet I look like Wile E. Coyote!" with her sparkling old-lady eyes and generally Mad Science smoked-face thing happening, and Jackie's like, This is a bet you would win. Coop comes in and shoots for arrogant, taking over, dxing the first degree burns, whatever. Mo-Mo and Jackie look at each other with such a look. He finishes up and Jackie's like, "Seriously? Twenty minutes?" She is appalled! She must away! Coop takes out his pager and bucktooth-hahas to Mo-Mo, "Forgot to turn it on!" Mo-Mo gives him nothing. Cooper asks how they, All Saints, can make it up to Eileen, and she goes, "You two? Kiss?" They look at each other, and are separately adorable and cumulatively and collectively bashful, and it's like a party with ponies you didn't even know were coming.
Thor rushes the dude down the hall past Nurse Jackie with a substance smeared across his face that he's quick to explain is pudding, because this time John Q's random attack was in the caf. So the guy informs them that they are fucking monsters, and Jackie barely registers all this, because she's dealing with family. Specifically, sk8rboi the aneurysm kid's mother, who is it seems doing that weird perseverating-on-details thing we're told we do when grieving, i.e., which shirt do I wear, or in this case: did they have to cut his hair, because he loved his hair, they popped his lid so the hair had to go, OMG the hair he loved the h
air and other statements in this lexical vicinity.
Mom's worried he's going to be mad. About the hair. With at least two things, by my count, exploding in his body. Literally exploding, at any time. Not that I know what I'm talking about, obviously, because if you asked me I'd say "abdominal aortal" anything is a problem, because either you've got a heart in your stomach or a stomach in your heart, and either way the Visible Man says that's a no-go, sister, says he ought to take me across his knee for suggesting something so geographically undesirable, but I saw the kid and he didn't look like he had a stomach in his heart, he just looked like a kid, so that's my lack of knowledge totally exposed. Just raw slapping ignorance, up in here.
"I was there. I watched it happen. You have no idea how hard it is to watch your child falling," the Mom says, "And you can't do anything to stop it." And Jackie nods, because she doesn't. Not yet.
Eleanor and Jackie separately and collectively cannot handle the fact that goddamned Fitch Cooper, M. Fuckin' D., was right about sk8rboi's aneurysm in the wherever place of him that Coop found it, and Jackie takes Eleanor for her walk, and then it's later and she's all "what kind of a lucky monkey" and "he's nothing but a big girl's blouse!" She cannot handle the begrudging respect Jackie suddenly has for FCMFD, or at least his instincts, and has a meltdown, telling her it's throwing off her whole like weltschmerz, no, the other one, maybe both. Weltanschauung, he's fucking that up for her. Because he's meek and a fraud and fulla bullshit, this last said in that nonexistent accent Brits use when they're impersonating Americans impersonating Brits or otherwise doing a triple lutz, accent-wise, that sounds like no person on earth actually sounds. Be-yul-she-e-art, thereabouts, is what Coop is full of. Maybe she's actually speaking German now.
Jackie whines that the soufflé Eleanor always orders always takes too long and they don't have very long for lunch, and Eleanor continues to wig out about her weltanschaunng and how the pecking order is already established and thus the order of her universe and after you destroy the illusion of his incompetence, what , he becomes Head of Surgery? Better him than some goddamn Muppet, that's what I say.
Jackie asks a "quick hypothetical" regarding a "student nurse" who was "busted" flushing a patient's "body part" down a toilet. Eleanor thanks Jackie for trying to take her mind off her (nonexistent Coop) problems with the stories of misdeeds that are obviously about Jackie, albeit in student-nurse clothing in the stories. "Penis?" No, an ear. Eleanor congratulates her on blaming the new girl and assures Jackie Zoey won't be fired. She's just a student, and besides, if Jackie needs backup she can just say Eleanor ordered her to flush it. Which, whatever, sure. I can buy that, I guess.
e one that gets up and walks away; Zoey sits very still in the chair and thinks about Jackie and about saints and about goodness and the movement of finite suffering, and behind her Mrs. Akalitus suddenly appears, on the other side of the reinforced glass, smooshing her face across the window and laughing raucously to herself; waves to Zoey; keeps laughing.
"Long road," Eleanor says, looking down at sk8rboi. It's the quietest this show has ever been, especially this week with the awful music all the time bing-bing-binging, but now it's just silent, with the sound of the machines breathing for him. Eleanor is quiet, and Jackie is quiet, and the only people who see them like this are them.
Then it's later and she goes to sit with the mom, give her the update that the kid is critical, but at this point, stable. Her voice cracks at the end, there. Mom knows this is good, right, but does she understand that this is going to be a long haul. And also, you already know this and it's hard to make them do it, but you gotta make him wear a helmet. It's comforting, a lecture and a litany we all know, something we can say back and forth; it's a way to get her thinking about the future, the day when things will be normal. It's a comforting story, then it changes.
"I know, I know... It was only one ramp," mom says. "And it wasn't that high. He booked the cover of Pottery Barn Teen and I asked the photographer to get a couple without the helmet..." Jackie's jaw drops. "I wanted them for his portfolio," mom blathers on, "Now that he's got longer hair. Took him a year to grow it out." Nancy smiles so she won't hit her, a thin smile, and heads for the door. Loses another bet with herself, and turns.
"It's gonna take him a year to learn how to walk again." Mom takes that in, and Jackie smiles hatefully at her: "You took his helmet off. It's your job to protect him." She shakes her head, mom is speechless. When she leaves, she slams the door. Hard.
(Which seems really self-righteous and pretty silly, I thought, until I started thinking about how maybe my mental image of the ramp's size was not sufficient to the danger thereof, like the lady talked about him falling as though it were a descent, like out of the sky, in which case I am now imagining a ramp from my second-floor windows, even, and yeah, should have given him a helmet, you dumb lady.)
Then it's later and Jackie is outside staring at the sky, still perturbed, so she doesn't throttle that woman. She notes Eileen, the burned-face budding slash-fic writer, sitting in her wheelchair trying to flag a cab. She cannot. "Passing me by!" she admits to Jackie, who runs off toward a stopped cab and starts screaming at the driver: "The fuck? Pretend you didn't see her sitting there?" But oh, the guy's having a heart attack: wheezing and clutching and moaning, the whole bit. "Are you fucking kidding me?" she asks, then rolls him out of the taxi onto the street, on his back, where he says he's been having the chest pains all day.
"You're going to be okay," she assures him, and uses what's at her disposal: "Eileen? Could you wheel yourself in there and get me some help please?" Eileen doesn't question this or milk it, she just rolls her ass on inside like a total champ. I wish she was in every episode. When Jackie asks if he's got any allergies, he doesn't answer: he's in arrest (maybe that is the word, cardiac arrest, I like the sound of it anyway, and were one a most romantic cop, one could put people under cardiac arrest oh, just every day) so she starts compressions -- just like that, she starts his fucking heart beating again -- and he wakes up, and she takes out the last of the three Sweet 'N Alls, pouring it into his mouth, toward his brain, like a bolt of lightning.
And in the bar, the bar the Peytons own; after she's put on her ring again; after walking home through the rain, to the girls, with Daddy and the sundaes, and the new ice machine; and after Fiona ties a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue thanks to a regular down the bar, and her parents laugh and woggle eyebrows at each other because it's so innocent even though it's not supposed to be, and vice versa; and after he pours Jackie a coffee and shows her the ice machine and she says hi to the barflies; just before she pours regular good old Sweet 'N All in her coffee, and it falls like snow... The Hadron Supercollider will show up on the screen.
And Kevin will say, "Eight million dollars? Fuck me." And Jackie will be coming from a new direction now, where just this morning she was with him, on the same page as him, until it was explained to her. So she will paraphrase for him, about the God particle: matter and antimatter, pencils and Big Pharma Eddie and Jackie's wedding ring and the medal around her neck. She'll call it the God particle, she'll paraphrase, but he'll know what she means:
The things that stand against annihilation. The things that keep us together, when by all rights we should be flying apart.
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