Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Find The Lady
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 11 | Aired on 08.17.2009
Jackie and Eleanor watch from the doorway, finishing their cigarettes, and talk about how he's probably breaking up with his girlfriend so he can take Jackie to the Prom. "I ... kissed him," Jackie says, feeling warped and ridiculous and more than a little amazed. "Oh my darling!" Eleanor shouts delightfully, "What a wildly entertaining mess you've made!" Melissa gone, Coop stares around for a bit before he spots them, and gives a tiny dorky little-boy wave that probably melts knees in other company. While Eleanor laughs her ass off anew, Jackie storms inside.
Then it's later and Coop is putting a vase of roses on the nurse station counter. "No," she says, and he nods: "Yes." A pack of gum appears. "Don't," she says, and he just winks and struts away, and it's devastatingly cute on one hand and on the other larger hand just devastating. Jackie considers her options, which include at this point fleeing the country, and Zoey arrives. "Dr. Cooper?" she says knowingly, and instead of shutting it down like usual, Jackie honestly just shrugs, eyes wide: "What the hell."
There's a patient coming in who, on sight, causes Zoey to wig completely out: he's the movie reviewer from Good Morning New York, a Mr. Nutterman (played by intergenerational sex object and former Spy Daddy Victor Garber of the Stage and Screen, who frankly would cause me to go a little bit Zoey if he showed up in my personal ER). His arm is all fucked up, and he's got chest pain from some broken ribs. See what had happened was, he was waiting at Ninth and Second with his laptop, and then stepped off the curb. Jackie confirms: "You were working on your laptop and trying to cross Second Avenue at the same time?" He agrees that it sounds stupid when she says it, but the laptop survived without a scratch. Zoey, unable to contain herself one second longer, asks if he was working on a review, and welcomes him in her unnerving way to All Saints.
While Jackie does his vitals, she casually asks if she can ask him something. (RUN. These people do not want to have conversations with you, they want fucking pistols at dawn, because the only activity more solitary than writing is reading, which means every morning or twice a week he goes into people's living room and sits down with them and offers an opinion, which they've been trained to treat as some kind of expert testimony instead of what it is, which is an opinion, so if he says something that doesn't jibe with their personal take -- even though he hasn't met them and could give a rat's ass -- that feels a little bit like somebody in your living room calling you stupid for having your own thoughts, which hurts even worse when you've somehow gotten the idea that this person, whom you have never met, is your friend. Just be glad you're not on the internet, Victor Garber. Those bitches are insane.)
"Hotel For Dogs. Worst movie of the year? Srsly?" And he's like, "You loved Air Bud too, I bet." Which she did. "That's beside the point," she says, which it is not, "You go around insinuating that people are stupid for liking the things they like. What's that about?" That's about an old friend of mine named Eleanor Roosevelt, who said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, and you need to grow a fucking backbone and stop needing some random stranger to validate your opinions for you. That's what that's about.
And stop watching crap like Hotel For Dogs, and that way people won't call you stupid just because you're doing something stupid. "Need I remind you that you insinuated I was stupid for walking and typing at the same time?" Um, which is also stupid, so she hands him off to Zoey and gets out of there. Victor is none too sure about being left in Zoey's care, and as we'll see that's one more thing he's right about: "In your professional opinion, why are cats so underused in the film industry?" They're too busy being carted to and fro, Elmyra. He admits that he hates cats, just when I thought I couldn't love him more, and asks for a pillow. Zoey Zoeys around for awhile and then makes a Zoey face and then Zoeys in her pants and whatever.
Jackie plonks the vase down on the bench next to Coop in the chapel hall: "No." He gives her a silly grin and reminds her that she kissed him. "You reached out to somebody safe," he says, smiling all lovingly, and she tells him to never, ever do that again before she walks away. Boy is not down for the count just yet. Down the hall, Gloria tells Eddie to hold off on the exit interview because she's still looking for a satellite pharmacy, maybe in All Saints or Bellevue, and her mouth is so unaccustomed to being sincere that it sounds like glad-handing: "Hang in there with me, Eddie." She scoots and he's just more frustrated than ever, because how can you ever know for sure? "Hang in there" is the kitty-cat poster hanging above his entire life.
Garber's freaking out, but Zoey -- taking perhaps a bit of bitter pleasure in it for the moment -- reminds him she can't give him anything for another hour. She offers him water, he hates water, and she's like, "You probably hate rainbows too." Heh. She offers him something else -- "perhaps something furry that purrs and gives nothing but love" -- and he gives in, accepting the water if it has lemon. Gloria approaches and introduces herself as the ER administrator, and he says it sounds like a fun job. "Not all our jobs can be fun," she says, clearly trying to make a connection, but the relentlessness of Zoey has taken its toll. "My job is to hold people to a higher standard. Do you know what an un-fun, thankless job that is?"
Gloria assures Victor that she's familiar with the price of expecting quality, and he tells her not to just agree. "I expect good. I expect smart. And if that makes me the bad guy, well..." (It only makes you the bad guy if it's the fucking series finale of Battlestar Galactica. I have never seen bullshit like the bullshit I saw that day. Well, the illiterate Taylor Hicks freaks came close, but even they had some sense of decorum. From what I could decipher.) Gloria underlines the fact that they are "fellow bad guys" and they make a formal introduction. "If it weren't for you and Foreign Film Fridays I would've never seen The Bicycle Thief," she says, and thanks him. (I never would have seen The Bicycle Thief if it weren't for Brian Krakow, so I feel that.) He is charmed. She suggests trying Babette's Feast again, because apparently they are in the early '90s when this is a conversation film lovers might have once had, and he admits he was in a "bad place" when he screened it. He was going through a divorce, you see, which brightens her right up. Um, you should both watch Sommersby because this is about as awkward as watching Richard Gere and Jodie Foster fuck.
There's something very much alive in a young hot guy's ear, as told to Mo-Mo, and it happened in his sleep. Mo-Mo asks if he has any roaches, which causes the guy to flip out, and Mo-Mo tells him to chill. He takes out some sort of ear instrument and stares in there for awhile, and then jumps back, causing the kid to unspool. "Um, oh my God as in, I'm relieved! As in no cockroach!" He tells him not to move, and runs out into the hallway hyperventilating and shaking and generally going bugfuck before saying the one word you were praying he wouldn't say: spider.
Jackie's shopping with Eleanor, stressing over how one blouse costs a hundred times the class she just got kicked out of. Eleanor informs her that A) she is officially dwelling, and B) reminds her of this timeless wisdom: "Beware of any class that touts the mother-daughter relationship as carefree." Jackie brings up some backstory of Eleanor's tha