In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
Jackie's four nurses down, so Akalitus gets her Sam, a temp who is hotter than the sun and higher than even Jackie. Zoey's been watching TV again, so she's already obsessing on people's eyeballs, but a stern dressing-down regarding drug-seekers puts her into crazed narc mode. Eventually she discerns that Sam is totally effed up, and Jackie has to chase him off. But of course, he recognizes Jackie as a fellow frequent flyer, which throws a little glitch into what was already a shitty day.
Gloria's still got the mysterious baby from last week, which the nuns are apparently helping her conceal. Coop gets into a fight with Jackie out of nowhere, which leads to his discovery that she also has at least one secret kid, Grace, who is having a serious panic attack at school. Of course Coop runs straight to Eddie with this gossip, because Eddie is his only friend, which leads to an Eddie/Jackie showdown that goes ultimately nowhere -- Eddie being a codependent doormat, and all -- but is still sort of nightmarish for everybody concerned.
Eleanor meets Jackie for lunch even though it's her day off, and watches Jackie totally unspool for awhile before pointing out that however crazy Grace is going, Jackie has beat her there by a mile. Kindly, she leaves unsaid the fact that Grace's crazy is pretty much just her barfing up her Mom's crazy back at her. Which is underscored in the saddest, closing scene, when Grace requests that Jackie sing a karaoke song at Kevin's bar, only to realize something dark and grim halfway through and turn back into a pumpkin.
Discuss this episode in our Nurse Jackie forums, then see how Jackie's bedside manner compares to Meredith Grey's in TV is the Answer! And check back soon for the full recap!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Jackie and Kevin are walking to the train station with the girls, and Fiona's dropping sprinkles in Kevin's hair while Grace fills them in on the freakiness of saints, for example there was St. Lucy, whose eyes were plucked out but she could still see, and then luckily they gave her even prettier eyes in heaven. Jackie's like, "Nice story, sweetie," but how bizarre is it that the teachers would tell kids that shit in the first place, and then invent some kind of fake-ass Beauty Myth lie to take out whatever power the story has in the first place. Like, martyrdom is sort of bad, but not as hard as being ugly.
Unaware that she's going to be hearing about eyeballs all day long from every damn person, Jackie's sort of caught off guard by the grains falling out of her junkie drug pocket and mixing in with the similarly bright-colored and festive sprinkles on Fiona's donut. Now, if it were Grace I'd say let it slide because girlfriend needs a break, but it's Fiona: her ass is erratic without benefit of pharmaceuticals. So Jackie slaps the donut out of her hand and yells a curse word, which throws everybody off, and Jackie lamely says there was a bug on it. So on the other side of platform, she waves goodbye to her girls and Kevin, and snorts the rest of the drugs, and breathes until the train comes.
The ER problem this week is a nurse shortage, specifically four less than usual, so Akalitus has called in a temporary nurse, and Jackie's not impressed, especially once she gets a load of him. He's fine as hell, but clearly there are functions of which he is less capable than one might think would be strictly necessary. Like Jackie's all, "Press F8," and he keeps typing F and then 8. That kind of thing. Maybe he's distracted by his own white-hot hotness.
Meanwhile the car-accident lady he's trying to take care of has a stressed-out daughter, again, and she overlooks her own daughter's pain, again, to focus on ignoring her own, again, and I mean eventually there's going to be a blonde nurse with a butch haircut that's going to come in with a daughter named Grace having a panic attack and Jackie's still going to be like, "Man, these people and their fucking problems."
Zoey's rocking a cute braid around her head, like she's the queen of a forest somewhere, and she's all about the eyeballs because somebody let her watch TV again, and they talk about drug seekers and how Zoey misidentified Dave The Addict last time and gave him drugs. "You like pupils so much, you just make sure you're checking them." She underlines for Zoey the concept that being a wuss is not going to be acceptable today, because Jackie's ability to be five places at once is going to be less of a party trick and more of a way to keep the world from ending, today, and Jackie leaves Zoey in triage, where after she sweeps the room with a face like Gloria Akalitus she nods insanely and holds up one man's severely bleeding arm: "People. See this? This is what we're talking about." Nobody knows what the fuck Zoey is ever talking about, so they don't really react much, but it's cute.
A mother of two adult daughters was in a car accident, and she flirts mommishly with Coop, of course, and when he suggests checking the fluid in her abdomen, she's like, "Um, I'm wearing Spanx. Let's not poke around." They send her for a CAT scan and the daughter reels off all her medications and allergies from memory, and the whole time the mom is staring at her making a bad-cheese face and whatever. Cooper clears her off his list -- "One hour, ten patients! Boom!" -- but once he's gone it's clear the mom is in about sixty times more pain than she was letting on. And why not? Because he was "busy" and she didn't want to bother him. Barf, says the daughter, because: barf. Jackie finds this as offensive/retarded as we do, and meanwhile mom's like, "Are you biting your nails again?"
There's a crazy woman who is clearly a nun staring down at us, the camera, meaning the baby is still around, thank God. So Gloria comes back to her office and tosses the nutty nun out and goes, "We're not sleeping here again tonight, you little shit. I'm not kidding." Then the baby looks around with this mixture of like sneakiness and world-weariness and is somehow even more adorable than previously. God, what an awesome baby! I would totally keep it hidden in my desk too.
Mo-Mo brings in the mom's younger daughter, who you can tell just by clothes is the favored child, and she throws a little hissy fit about her mother's injuries, and the mom's like, "I love your dress!" and Jackie is bored by them both, and meanwhile the other daughter is like slowly dying inside because she's so worried about her mom. Mo-Mo is entranced by her insane loveliness, so Jackie asks him to help her find some coffee, which is code for "Get her out of my face," and then of course, the mom's like "Stay right here, you have to meet the dreamy doctor." Just being around these three is way too much for Jackie to handle.
Then it's later and Jackie's trying to decipher a weird chart note that Sam the Temp wrote, and she yells at him a little bit, and the nurse shortage is getting to her, and this jacked-up looking lady hands her a cup of urine, but Sam took the last gloves, so she takes it with tissues in a really awkward way, and then grabs like ten boxes of gloves to wash the memories away, and the whole time Sam is playing with his phone while a patient's machinery is beeping loudly, like maybe the guy's dying, so she drags Sam over there basically by his ear.
She attends to the guy's line, and he's understandably upset, but she deals with him smoothly before asking if Sam's done anything for him lately. He gets panicky about how he can't take his pills without water, and in the middle of yelling for Coop, who nobody can find, she goes, "Sir, if you don't get everything you need in the five minutes, this man will pay you fifty dollars." She even hands him her wristwatch from last week, and he's like, "Tick-tock." The kid stares at Mo-Mo all wounded and finally he goes, "Honey, I know I'm pretty, but you just wasted thirty seconds looking at me." Valid.
Zoey bothers a man incessantly trying to figure out if he's a drug seeker, and asks him about eleven pain scale questions, shining a penlight in his eyes and basically acting like he's a spy or something. "What are you really doing here? What are you looking for?" Mo-Mo appears with an x-ray and explains that the guy has a fractured fibula and needs some Vicodin. The guy's like, "I know, right?" But Zoey, in the grip of her crazy, keeps asking him the questions, with this apologetic air like, "Sorry, but I'm too crazy to be effective right now. On a scale of one to ten..."
Jackie's carrying all this shit down the chapel hall and grabs Thor, telling him he can't leave, and he howls in this amazing way before explaining that tonight is his chance to see Wicked from Row G, which is closer than he's ever gotten. "You're cute when you're ruining my life," he says, and Jackie moves on to Gloria, who is also in the hallway, and asks her to jump in and do something, change sheets maybe, and Gloria says she doesn't "jump in" at this point in her career, but finally acquiesces, and then it's a whole yard Jackie gets down the hallway before Coop appears out of nowhere and grabs her arm, hard.
"Are you seven? Don't grab!" Coop yells at Jackie because people keep paging him, and tells her to get everybody off his back, but she points out that his whole job as the attending is to, you know, attend to things and stop turning his stupid pager off. So he snaps a rubber band around his wrist, explaining that it's a new technique so that he won't accidentally grab her boob. She tells him to put those boob-grabbing hands to work on not turning off his pager, and her phone rings.
Grace is having a shit fit at school, can't even breathe enough to explain what's going on, and one of the Immaculate Virgin teachers is trying to calm her down while she's begging Jackie to come save her, it's an emergency, it's fucking dire, and the whole time Coop is yelling at Jackie and hounding her all over the place telling her not to push him around and whatever, so now she's got two hysterical kids yelling at her, and Coop goes off on her about chatting on the phone when she could be saving the patients from his horrible judgment and she finally asks him to shut the fuck up, because her kid is wigging out.
Coop's freaked out enough by the yelling and the sudden kid that he tries to run away, but she comes after him, and he admits he's a little scared of her right now, but she needs to impress upon him that her child is part of her private life, which needs to stay private. Especially considering the fact that Coop's invincible loneliness keeps driving him to Eddie's side, who is the one person who doesn't need to know about Grace and all that she implies. They bitch at each other for awhile and then he finally rips off his rubber band and tells her, very angrily, that he is a doctor and couldn't give a shit about her sad, weird little secret life, and stomps away.
Which is fine, because now Jackie can call her secret husband and tell him to go get their secret daughter out of hell. There's something so ominous and domino-effecty about this moment, like, you can almost see how all it would take is for Coop to run to Eddie with this information -- because that's what he does, because so far Eddie is the only thing that gives him any kind of power over Jackie at all, not that he knows why -- and then, somehow, Eddie and Eleanor and Gloria and Coop all sort of fall in this heap and it catches on fire and Jackie's drug abuse somehow gets discovered and then I don't know. It just seems like we've been standing on the edge of something scary all this time, and now it's like this one moment of lost control is the thing that could take it all apart. Like you can feel the beehive before you see the beehive, sort of rumbling in your sternum.
Zoey drives her very large non-drug seeker victim through the ER on a gurney, eventually rolling over Sam the Temp's foot. She's like, "I just rolled a huge man over your foot. Didn't that kill?" She shines her penlight into his eyes, confirms that he is out of it completely, and nods to herself. When he asks her what the heck that was for, she thinks fast and says, in a very Zoey fashion, "Flashlight tag! You're it!" Zoey makes me feel like I'm on drugs when I'm not on drugs, so I can't imagine how confusing she'd be if you were fucked up. Or maybe she makes more sense that way.
Eleanor meets Jackie at a restaurant -- "and on my day off no less; I am marvelous" -- and when Jackie explains the day she's having, Eleanor's first response is to once again offer her a cigarette. Jackie asks her not to tempt her, and points out that you can't smoke in a restaurant, but the Eleanor Effect comes into play and she explains that they're all too afraid to call her out on it. Because New Yorkers are a timid bunch when it comes to second-hand smoke.
Jackie tells the story about Gracie on the phone, scratching at herself like a madwoman: "I can't stand when she cries like that. This whole thing is scaring the shit out of me." Eleanor points out that she seems really angry, too, and Jackie gets a scared and scary look in her eyes, but Eleanor's impassive enough that Jackie actually finds the time to take inventory, and is surprised -- and grossed out -- to learn that Eleanor is correct. "Fucking A. What kinda mother gets angry at her kid for crying?"
Not to mention that Coop knows more about her life than either of them are comfortable with, to which Eleanor makes a very appreciated yee face. But out of all the women, Eleanor's the only one currently not hiding a baby from her coworkers, so how could she understand?
Coop, of course, runs straight to Eddie to tell on Jackie. I can't believe that he still doesn't understand how Eddie and Jackie work, but he always does this: Jackie's too powerful over him, so he tries to build those creepy man-bridges over her head. Or maybe this... It's sort of grossing me out to think about it, but maybe this is connected to him telling Swoozie that he loved her more, like, as an end-run around Blythe's power over him. Maybe if Eddie, who clearly has an intimate if not romantic relationship with Jackie, can be on Coop's side, then she won't have power over him anymore, because they'll have a secret that Mommy doesn't know about. Yuck, right? But there's something there.
Well, Eddie doesn't know what to think. He knows she's got secrets, and he knows Coop finds this information tremendously important, and he's like, what, she just told you this? And then Coop, God love him, is like, "No, I was being a dick, so she was yelling at me, and so I started yelling at her about being on the phone, so then she told me." Which is exactly what happened, and props to Coop for not even trying to front about what he was pulling there. Awesome. Then, just so you remember who we're dealing with, Coop freaks out because his takeout has the wrong kind of noodles, or rather the right kind but he ordered the wrong thing, so he pitches the whole thing in the trash: "Fuck! Well, my day's ruined."
Jackie's now smoking in the restaurant, after only like five offers, and talking creepily to herself in half-sentences until Eleanor literally goes, "Whatever this is? Huffing and puffing and muttering and ashing? Is terrifying. Slow down, eat your gnocchi." Sometimes a line is good because you can feel the rhythm in it, like, this is a thing that somebody once said to somebody when they were acting this way. I love when you're in the car and it's been quiet for a while, and you notice the person's hands on the steering wheel are flopping around like that, because they're having an argument with somebody who's not there, and then you can make them feel silly about it, and it takes the pressure off them. Slow down, eat your gnocchi.
Jackie pinpoints that the problem for now is that though she is trying to be a good mother, she can't nail down what the hell Grace is so freaked out about. Eleanor asks if she needs a doctor, or a friend, and because Jackie knows well enough to know that whatever the answer to the question is, it's too close to her addiction to be looked at, she says friend, please. And the truth either way is that it's not Grace Eleanor is worried about.
Which is correct. You've established a home for your daughter that does not feel safe. The person eclipsing the sun is you. It's not that children are "resilient," that's bullshit: it's that children, no matter how badly you break them, are closer to remembering what wholeness felt like. Work your shit out, and Grace will be fine. We inherit our disguises, but only as long as we need them. Then the work is letting them go again. It's flashlight tag, when you look somebody in the eyes and hope they know you love them enough to hear the truth.
A massively gay waiter approaches to tell them off for smoking, but sees that it's Dr. O'Hara, and scampers away again. Meanwhile, Eddie is taking Coop to task for gossiping, but Coop points out that he's not really, since Eddie is like his only friend, and Eddie does that slow-burn hostility thing that gives me the meemies and tells him to get his feet off the fucking furniture.
Zoey walks in on Jackie snorting the grains from that packet earlier, and then pees and moans and gets chatty in the stall. "Don't worry, I didn't see your vajudy or anything," she says, and Jackie goes, "Zoey. You can't talk to me while you're peeing." Heh. She chews the rest of the grains so Zoey won't hear her, and they are bitter. At the sinks you can see their choreography, the way Jackie hands her paper towels to dry her hands without even looking, and asks if Zoey's eaten anything.
Zoey brings up Sam, who she thinks is on a bunch of valium or halcyon. Jackie tells her to never narc unless she's absolutely sure, and there's not a lick of that creepy pride Zoey gets sometimes, just a professional assessment: "His pupils are contracted, glassy and nonresponsive to the light I shined directly into his eyes after I rolled over his foot with a large man on a gurney. He didn't feel it." Jackie admits that was a nice catch, and swallows her drugs. I know the whole point is that Zoey's not seeing the thing in front of her face, but it's still nice to see her blossoming into herself, and see Jackie acknowledge it.
Sam's "making up a bed," which means skating his hands across the surface over and over with a fascinated, trippy air, and Jackie nods and goes to take care of it, but Mo-Mo appears with coffee in hand and gives him one. She takes Mo-Mo aside and bitches at him for bringing coffee to a very fucked-up nurse. "Shh!" he says. "Like you've never seen that before?" He reminds her about a cokehead girl they used to work with from Lenox Hill, and she's like, "Whatever!" He talks about how addiction's a disease, and she waves that right the fuck off -- "No. Cancer is a disease." -- and finally says she's just jealous about the coffee, to make Mo-Mo laugh.
Mrs. Greenfield finally gets the chance to introduce her better daughter to Coop, and the daughter blushes, and Coop flirts, and they talk about where they live in the city, and finally the other daughter is like, "Do you have any actual information? Or are we all moving in together?" Melissa and Mom team up on her, a team of two, and then they get the bad news: there was a mass in Mom's bowel, and it needs exploratory surgery. Jackie tells them they'll get somebody down from oncology to discuss it, and the good daughter starts freaking out and asking exactly WTF this means. Melissa tells her to take a Xanax and chill out, and Mom tells her to knock it off and go outside if she's going to cry. God.
So Jackie goes outside the curtain with the other daughter and is like, "Clearly you've been eating shit on their behalf for your entire life?" Yes. "So here's the actual information. Find Laura in oncology, she's the best. Do not write 'oncology' or 'exploratory surgery' on any paperwork, so that all the tests will go on the insurance of the guy who hit her and you won't have to deal with her HMO. And also, bring blankets from home because they cut you off after two." The daughter is moved, as usual, by the acknowledgement as well as the useful information, and gives Jackie the sweetest smile.
Out in the chapel hall, the good daughter is trying to get reception, and Coop takes her down a ways before telling her that she's "a no-bullshit kind of girl," and she betrays herself with a smile before the shoe drops, and he asks if Melissa would go out with him. She nods to herself, curtly, and tells him to ask her himself, "right after my mom gets out of exploratory surgery." Seriously! He panics and realizes he's being a dick, and tries in a begging tone to explain that he's not a dick, but just then she gets full bars, and turns her back on him. I like her.
"You're done," Jackie says to Sam, and tells him either he walks out right now, or she sends him to employee health to pee in a cup. Either way, she doesn't want to see him in her ER. He feels bad for a second, and then gets pissed: "Takes one to know one," he says, and her jaw drops like she's going to karate-chop his face, and he wanders off. Jackie commences freaking out.
Jackie runs to Eddie in the Harmacy, but before she can even begin to unload about her day, he's like, "Yeah, so how's your kid?" She nods and admits that Grace is doing better, then apologizes for keeping her a secret. She goes into serious damage control mode and tells him they need to have coffee, whatever, let's get together and talk about what a huge withholding liar I am, and he begs off. She asks if there's anything else he wants to know, and he says honestly that he doesn't. Apparently her life is Need-To-Know. She kisses him and he tastes like doormat. "There's nothing else I should know, right?" Um, like how she's married and unbelievably in over her head? No, more like maybe she's secretly a cat burglar. That's one word for it. "Believe me," she says with a smile, "My life is not that interesting."
It's karaoke night at Kevin's bar, and when Jackie arrives it seems clear that both she and Gracie have gained a little equilibrium. Jackie's name comes up on the karaoke list, and she is in absolutely no fucking mood... Until Kevin nudge-winks that it was a special request. Grace sits at the bar, smiling hugely at her mother, and of course Jackie has to go for it. She just wants to see her mother sing.
"When this old world starts getting me down/ And people are just too much for me to face..."
She smiles, and Grace watches her, and she feels stronger for a second. She's home.
"I climb way up to the top of the stairs/ And all my cares just drift right into space..."
Grace stares, joyfully, and then something occurs to her. Wrong song, wrong life. Her smile slips down off her face, and she looks away. Jackie sings harder and harder, trying to pierce through the shadow, get her to look up again, roll back the tape just that one second before she lost her again: nonresponsive, glassy. She'd sing forever. She pushes against it like a wall, until her voice breaks. Grace doesn't look up, but she keeps going.