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Upset by a homeless diabetic patient's foot amputation, Zoey accidentally mentions that Jackie directed her to underserve the guy previously, and she feels guilty. Jackie calls her a liar and incompetent, then later finds the offending page in that diary she's always taking notes in, and rips it right out. Then she falsifies another patient's donor card and time of death, while his parents are stuck at Heathrow. But neither of these is the creepiest thing she does this week!
Usually the show's bright and acidic in equal measure, but this week it was pretty much just Awful People On Parade, with the working assumption that Jackie's going to start pulling her whole world down around her ears, which should be interesting as hell. The parents of Gloria's stolen baby finally come forward, and she tells them the baby is dead, but just to freak them out. She pulls him out of her desk, hands him over, and starts shaking down Mo-Mo to find out how the homosexuals get kids.
After Grace threatens to have yet another breakdown, Jackie's progressed to getting nosebleeds from the constant snorting, and when Eleanor mentions that she's giving adultery tips to her sister in Paris based on her admiration of Jackie's cheater skillz, Jackie tells her to fuck right off. It's pretty devastating. Also bearing the brunt of Jackie's rage this week is Coop, who is now hooking up with last week's pretty daughter and paying even less attention than usual to his pager.
Having betrayed Zoey and hurt Eleanor's feelings, Jackie snorts some drugs in the hospital chapel, stares at the Blessed Virgin for awhile, checks out a few minutes of a Shirley Temple tap-dancing movie, and decides to take a dance class with Grace. For such a seemingly happy ending, it sure was a depressing episode. week: Tap dancing, I guess. Probably on razor blades, or at least on HIPPA regulations.
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!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Jackie and Kevin have the kids at the park, and Fiona's posing on Alice's mushroom when one of her balloons pops. She's cool for a second, and then starts to wig out: she is not consoled by the fact that she still has one balloon, she doesn't want a replacement, she wants her original balloon back. Exasperated, Jackie asks if she wants another one or not, and in true Fiona form she's like, "NO." So Grace tries to give her one of hers, which impresses the parents. And if Fiona were going to take it, I'd be impressed too. But she doesn't, so Grace has no choice but to let go of one of her own.
Jackie nearly cries, watching Grace watch the balloon float up. Waiting for her to knit herself back together. She doesn't understand what that says, what it means: that fairness can only get you so far. That sharing doesn't mean anything unless you're sharing pain. If fairness doesn't work, because the person is still hurting, sometimes the only choice you have is to hurt yourself. I knew the second Grace offered her second balloon that thing was getting popped, or let go, or otherwise lost. I admit I crossed my fingers against it. We inherit our disguise.
Fiona's screwing around at lunch, blowing bubbles in her drink and annoying everybody, purposively, with mean eyes, even after Kevin and Jackie ask her to stop. "Honey, really?" asks Jackie, putting the drink in front of Grace, who starts to freak out because it's contaminated somehow. Jackie licks the straw from stem to stern, but Grace isn't having it, so she gives them both a dollar to buy candy with. Fiona runs away, Grace stays put. "I'll give you a dollar if you don't go to work today," Grace says. More important than candy, than pleasure, than anything: she holds it up, like a balloon.
They discuss it, Kevin tries to get Jackie to stay firm, stick with him, keep the girls in place, and asks Grace what she really wants. "I want the hospital to burn down," Grace says softly, and Jackie sighs. "Okay." In the bathroom she snorts some shit, lets it take, and then innocently flushes. At the table, Fiona shouts, "I'm practically rich!" holding up her candy. "The world's not gonna cave in every time she falls apart," Kevin offers, reminding her they've talked about. Jackie tries but can't explain that this isn't about Grace needs, but her own. "We can't keep changing the rules," he says, and begs her to trust him. Grace doesn't look at her when she kisses them goodbye. Then it's later, and a kooky homeless man named Gus Everett collapses in front of the hospital as she's arriving. Her nose starts to bleed as she gets him on a stretcher and inside.
At the nurses' station, Thor's reading the names of the dead, and Mo-Mo is guessing their ages. Gertrude gets a 65 from Mo-Mo and 85 from Thor. Darlene is up. "Honey, her mother hated her," Mo-Mo says. "Thirty. Unmarried. Worked in HR, or retail." Thor disagrees, noting that it's a "total '60s girl-group name," and guesses 47, correctly. Zoey grins at him. is Quentin. "Could be wrinkled old apple farmer... Or a young, untalented artsy-fartsy type..." Thor checks: he was ten. They stop playing.
Jackie appears with Gus, shouting out that he is diabetic and a drug-seeker who times his passing out to land on their doorstep, undomiciled, alcoholic. Zoey runs to meet her at a bed, and the boys stare at the flurried, disturbed space she's left behind her, full of information. Zoey notes at Gus's bedside that he's still wearing the socks they gave him last time; Jackie tries to get Gus to acknowledge her, but there's nothing. She tells Zoey to check his head for bumps or lacerations, and she bends to the task with her usual dedication, to the point that Jackie reminds her of the difference between checking for a stroke and giving a brother a scalp massage. Eleanor arrives, joking about "the aroma of gangrene in the morning," and informs Gus loudly that he's ischemic and will be losing his foot once they get a CT on him.
Gloria arrives later to yell at them about how All Saints is a hospital and not a shelter (Um, or a baby dispensary, Akalitus!) and Mo-Mo gives a weak-sauce, "Your hair is fantastic today!" She tells him straight up that he's better than that, which is pretty awesome, and Zoey tries to put some mojo behind her assertion that Gus's losing his foot makes him a priority. "Big attitude from someone wearing panda earrings," Gloria says, and stomps away. They shiver.
Mysterious baby. Which Gloria loves. She puts on Billie, and dances around with him in her office, and it's darling! And so, so crazy. Three episodes this crazy lady has been a kidnapper, and now she's singing to him in a whisper, dancing with him on her shoulder, halfway to hitting the asthma inhaler and calling Isabella Rossellini "Mommy." The song is called "I Love My Man," but sometimes it has a parenthetical: "(Billie's Blues"). It's about all the things our mothers give us, bad and good: it's about the disguises we inherit and the ways we learn to dance.
The Other Sister from last week, Melissa of the fur collar, brings Coop a massive bag of lunch, bigger than my apartment, including cookies, which my apartment is also lacking, so they flirt. His pager goes off and he's all, "Fuck patients, and fuck fucking nurses for real. I have been on call for ten entire minutes." They talk about whether she's had surgery before, which brings about six jokes to mind that I won't bother you with, and she's like, "A hammertoe," which was corrected by a podiatrist, which is not even an MD, so score two for Fitch Cooper.
Jackie spots them and runs, but he waves her over and actually tries to introduce her to Melissa, and she's like, "Yeah, we treated her mom?" Meanwhile he can't even remember where he found the mass or how he met Melissa or anything about her, because she doesn't actually count. He proudly holds his massive lunch out to Jackie, who laughs at them both, and reminds Coop about how work exists before leaving. He's not so sure. Melissa can barely remember Jackie because they are two of a kind, and on the way to getting totally gross and giggly, Coop fully goes, "She's just a nurse." Even the Holy Virgin is like, "No you didn't!"
The paramedics bring in a braindead stoner guy, and Jackie's like, "I'm glad he was stoned" because he died in some terrible way, and she says something about alerting the transplant team. Mo-Mo asks how she knows he's a donor, and she's like: Ivy League pothead, PETA stickers, et alia? They call him a Trustafarian -- "saving the world one bong hit at a time" -- and honestly, I didn't know they had those outside of Austin. I never thought of myself as so provincial. Especially about fucking hippies. I wish we only had them in Austin, so I wouldn't have to apologize so often. Jackie decides to just lie about it and say he has a donor card that is imaginary, and then out of nowhere Akalitus appears to summon Mo-Mo in a very scary way.
Gloria: "You're gay."
Mo-Mo: "Yes?"
Gloria: "I'm not."
Jacob: "I'm so sure! You're the Headmistress of Beauxbatons! Go write a play. Go make out with Victor Garber and write a play, Straight Lady."
Point being, she wants to know all about gay adoption, nonstandard adoption, what to do if you've accidentally kidnapped a baby and need to act like you're thinking of adopting it by cleverly employing your time machine to the moment immediately prior to your kidnapping the baby. So has Mo-Mo ever, um, heard of that? He's like, "My friends Kevin and Kevin adopted?" (Dealbreaker, P.S. That's like matching-shorts weird. The only one I'd even consider is Jakob Lodwick, and that's only because trust-fund kids are freaky in bed to like a nihilistic degree.)
Mo-Mo says the Kevins went through a lawyer, not an agency -- probably best when you've already taken the baby for a test drive -- and then he sits back, thinking they're all friends and shit, and Gloria stares lasers at him until he peaces. And then all alone, she looks down at the awesome baby, whom she is now keeping in her desk. I know how this show works and I love it just as it is, but how crazy would it be if A) something grisly happened or B) there was no baby the entire time. That is two serious situations!
Looking for Coop, Jackie comes across a fake Jackie O/Audrey type with a seriously hideous stripe in her coif, who jams about a ton of paperwork in Jackie's face and asks like, why she hasn't even gotten her appetizer yet, and Jackie notices that she lives at 83rd and Park, or thereabouts, and so why is she at All Saints? And additionally, "lice" is not an emergency. The awful lady points at her innocent-for-now progeny, whose scalps are bleeding, and Jackie's like, "Take care of this at home, or call your pediatrician, WTF."
The lady's like, "You know what I would love? If you could take care of this instead." Not only because she's entitled and frankly a bitch, but also because the pediatrician is a family friend. And you know, I've been writing about UESers for so long it's just a natural response to sympathize. Because honestly, if your friends are doctors and your doctors are your friends, that's it: no more getting sick, ever. Lice, abortions, none of it. You're Roy Cohn all of a sudden. What a sad life. Especially in this post-Madoff landscape in which we find ourselves living, if "living" is even the word.
Jackie calls her an asshole, but of course she's going to take care of it. Mo-Mo grabs her as she heads out with the kids, to tell her the dead kid's parents totally oppose organ donation, and are on their way. Jackie tells him that the kid's an adult and can make up his mind, leaving out the part where she will be playing the part of "his mind," and Jackie kind of drops a thread as far as finding Coop at this point, because he's not answering his pager, because that's like the one authentic thing about Coop: hates that pager. After a "can we move this along" piece of bullshit, Mo-Mo tells the snippy lady to chill because he is watching out for her. I just wanna see Jackie with her flats on one of that lady's kids' asses, trying to force it down a toilet.
While Jackie shampoos the kids' heads -- which is of course the entirety of the "treatment" this bitch schlepped her kids all the way to All Saints to get -- she gives them a pretty hilarious and unending monologue about "you floor me, you really do, this is precisely why I bought you your own helmets" and stuff like that. Jackie congratulates both kids, quite audibly, on their compassion and willingness to share, and tells the mom that she needs to do the same thing tomorrow. She's like, "Can't we do this all now? I don't want to touch them." Which is admirably honest, but Jackie hasn't been able to touch her daughter, or reach her, in just long enough that now it's later and she's calling the woman's local drugstore, telling them to deliver some of their biggest boxes of Quell -- or whatever says LICE on it in the biggest letters -- and to leave it with the doorman, no bag, to make sure she doesn't miss it. She hangs up and smiles.
Gloria meets with the lawyer, but not to legalize her kidnapping: they've found the parents. If you wanna use that word. She's like, "Um, I am not handing this baby over to just anybody," and the dude's like, "That's why they are called THE PARENTS. It's a distinguishing characteristic." When Gloria points out that they left their baby on top of a random filing cabinet, he says they're just young and overwhelmed. "Barack Obama's mother was eighteen!" Gloria says, amazingly. Plus, to add insult to injury, the baby is named Dalton. I was going to say, if he was a girl that would make him a stripper, but honestly it still does.
Then it's later and Eddie's giving Jackie another one of his cosmological speeches, which always give his voice a reverential air nobody really ever gets, besides Coop when he's talking about, like, hamburgers. This time -- spurred on by Eddie's imminent departure, as tomorrow is Pyxis Day -- he's telling a "brain-exploding" story about parallel universes, using some Billy Corgan-level slippery-slope logic. It would seem, in the Harmacy, that everything is made out of atoms, which contain electrons. So far so good.
I love my man
I'm a liar if I say I don't
But I'll quit my man
I'm a liar if I say I won't
But an electron can be here and also over here, he says. Which, I know what he's talking about, it's entanglement and I've written about it more than once, but his conclusions are that if an electron can be in more than one place, then an atom, as it contains electrons, can also be in multiple places, and since Eddie and Jackie are made out of atoms, they can be in two places at once. Which she is, but he doesn't know that.
Two full Jackies, maybe more, giving 100% wherever they find themselves, and even though he's the one telling the story he won't believe it when it comes true. He thinks he's talking about their story, about moving forward into another universe, another parallel, in which they can finally be together, without secrets. He thinks his life is ending tomorrow, but a new one can begin, because they won't both be working in front of the All Saints crew, and there won't be a reason to hide. He's thinking, whether or not Gloria saves him from this, finds him a place, it won't matter because he and Jackie will have skipped through the looking-glass, into a world where they are safe, and free. He'll never understand she's already both: she's like an electron already, living in both places. Entangled.
I've been your slave
Ever since I've been your babe
But before I be your dog
I'll see you in your grave
Zoey grabs her in the hallway, worrying at the thought of Mr. Everett's foot like a dog, feeling they should have done more at his last visit than give him clean clothes and a meal tray. Jackie assures her he wouldn't have been any different in the long run, but Zoey's not convinced. "Yeah, but it was just a gross little blister before, and now it's like gack. Well now it's gone, but before they cut it off it was dead. I feel terrible." Zoey reminds her that she suggested they have a doctor look at the foot last time, and Jackie straight-up denies it. Oh, Jacks.
Zoey goes through her notes and Jackie -- awesomely, but wrongfully -- says, "Zoey, I remember everything I have ever said." It's right there in Zoey's bubble-writing: "Greet & Street." Jackie leaves Zoey there with her notes, to go find Coop, whom Zoey tells her is in Exam Room #3, door locked. "That is why I don't date doctors," Zoey says firmly to herself, and Jackie forces her way into the room, where Coop is pantsless. "All fuckin' day, Coop!" she says, laughing at him in her rage. He starts to ask about the case, but she just blows him off and leaves, yelling at him about how useless he is and not even worried about the total fraud she's in the middle of perpetrating. She leaves like a hurricane and Melissa's like, "Now I remember her!"
Jackie lies to the transplant team about a thousand things, assuming it'll work out somehow, and when they ask for the attending's signature, she tells them he signed off on the time of death and whirls away again. And I mean, it's one of those nine-times-out-of-ten things where the Jackie Rules and their bendiness -- while stupid and not good -- shouldn't bite her in the ass. But you add that to the nosebleed, and the stuff coming up with Eleanor, and you see a pretty clear picture of how bad it's going to get.
The Virgin Mary, the universal mother, stares down at Jackie, snorting a line right in front of her in the pews, and she's like, "Girl, you are straight through the looking-glass," but Jackie can't hear her. She looks vacant. She looks vacated. She needs a freaking nap. She starts to bleed again, and wavers as her eyelids flutter. It's much harder to dance without feet.
Jackie makes it to Eleanor's office, who checks out her nostrils and laughs in horror. "Good Lord! What are you sticking up there? It's completely raw!" Jackie laughs and says she's already asked Kevin to get a humidifier; Eleanor tries to go back to their favorite game, where they impress each other with their naughtiness and thereby liquidate it. "Family at home, boyfriend at work, home in time for the husband!" Jackie tries to be proud. Eleanor pushes for more excitement, talking about Jackie's mad skills, and says for example that her sister in Paris is having an affair, and is crippled with guilt. Jackie nods, because her strength isn't strength and it's failing her.
"You've been very helpful," Eleanor continues: a brilliant example of how to succeed at adultery without even apparently trying. "You talk to your sister about me?" Jackie says in a deadly tone, and Eleanor gets... Not defensive exactly, but on the defensive: it's not like she talks about her by name, and anyway, they're just having fun. "This isn't fun, it's fucking hard," Jackie starbucks, and she says very strongly that Eleanor needs to keep it zipped: "What I say to you stays with you." Eleanor, finally offended, hands that tude right back: "Yeah, first of all? It does. And this is my sister? In Paris?"
Jackie says it's not the point, and I guess in a way it isn't, but Eleanor continues to say that second of all, there is no judgment here, at least not from her direction: "I made an observation to my sister who needed a boost. And believe me, I was not gossiping. My God, I think of you as a sister." Her eyes search Jackie's face for the reason here, this rabid heel-turn addict bullshit, but she can't figure it out. Jackie tells her to rethink that, and bounces. Damn, girl. I'd say "Why not call Mo-Mo a faggot and tell Eddie he's just your dealer," but she kind of already did those things last week. The boys just weren't listening.
The abandoners are brought to Gloria's office by a security guard, and boy they are young. And beautiful, and clearly very stupid. She puts on her best scary voice and tells the guard he can leave them alone for a bit, but he says he's not there for work: he's the guy one's dad. He pulls up a chair and she fixes her eyes on them: Joseph and Lisa. "You came back for your baby..." she says, in that terrifying infinite-ellipsis way she says everything, and they apologize for their mistake. Things get stupider.
"It was just for the weekend! We haven't gone anywhere fun for, like, months!" OMG. I hope she keeps a gun in that desk. (Separate from the baby drawer, obviously.) As though it's helping, the other one is all, "Like for a year!" She confirms that they're saying they left their child in a Safe Haven so they could run away for the weekend, and the dad's like, "Fucking Atlantic City!" Joseph says they couldn't leave D with him, because he's not good with kids -- smack comes the ironic hand upside his head -- but also it was Lisa's idea. They sell each other out for awhile before Gloria looks them both in the eye and goes, "I hope you had fun, because I have some bad news. Your baby is gone. Your baby is dead!"
For just a moment, I loved her more than Eleanor. They shit their Dickies, and she's like, "j/k, but you're both assholes." She pulls him out of her desk like a bunny in a top hat, and they gasp. The baby, who clearly loves it in there, bursts into tears the second she produces him, and hands him over to the baby children, just as soon as they sign off on a waver releasing All Saints, its employees and subsidiaries from any liability. Which is loco to the same parentis as Jackie stealing the other kid's organs, but cleaner to take care of, so maybe Gloria actually is better at being Jackie, just like she said. She and the dad lay down some tough love and promise them they'll go to jail time, and they finally leave, having had the shit Tyler Durdened out of them for the day. Which feels good, but not as good as that baby felt in her arms, so once they're gone she's lonelier than ever.
Jackie's lost, maybe lonelier than that, staring around the nurses' station. Her eyes light on Zoey's little book she's always making notes in, and finds Zoey's page from the last time Gus was there, when he still had a foot: New socks: Yes. Doctor? No. She rips the page out of the book and slips it into her pocket. Jesus, Jackie. This is like your worst day ever. I have to say I don't really like Jackie today.
Some men like me because I'm happy
Some because I'm snappy
Some call me honey
Others think I've got money
Some say Billie, baby
You're built for speed
Now if you put that all together
Makes me everything a good man needs
In the lounge there's an old Shirley Temple movie: Jackie watches the people on the other side of the screen, dancing as fast as they can. Just like her. They dance like they've forgotten their feet altogether. For a second she thinks about perfection, and innocence; thinks about entanglement, about crossing through the looking-glass and what's on the other side. As she heads home, she asks Grace if they can take tap-dance classes together. Grace can't know what it means to her mother when she says yes. Somewhere in the complex, Gloria remembers dancing, too. It goes up like a balloon: up, up, up.
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!