Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Why All Nuns Hate James Remar
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.15.2009
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