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The (knockoff) Pyxis arrives, making this Eddie's last day at the hospital. Gloria promises to help him find something, but is distracted by Victor! Garber!, a grumpy film critic who comes in with a broken elbow and whom Zoey misdoses right into a coma. She's off the floor and in major trouble, and of course Jackie shoulders some blame, too. Especially since Gloria falls in love with him at first sight, as any sane person would.
Fitch Cooper breaks up with that girl Melissa, having decided he's in love with Jackie for the moment. He shakes Zoey down for advice about Jackie, but of course Zoey doesn't know the first thing about Jackie, because nobody does. Finally plying her with pink roses and gum, he nearly causes her to go insane and murder him... But instead she just takes the flowers home to her girls.
After she nearly kills Victor! Garber!, Mo-Mo and Thor take Zoey out to a late lunch and counsel her about her shambles of a career, and she finally makes the connection to Thor's intense gayness, which results in a lot of feelings-eating for Zoey. Less in love, with Jackie or anybody else: Grace, who has felt the sting of her mother's social dysfunction one too many times after a headbutting session with the lady from the parish gets them thrown out of dance class.
Eddie shows Jackie how to reset the pill dispenser's memory, thinking they can be together now. Of course, that's not happening, and he follows her to Queens in what he thinks is a romantic fashion, only to find her in the arms of her loving husband and daughters! Who have just bought her an expensive new wedding ring! One episode left, in which I'm sure Jackie will find some way to pull the entire borough down around her ears.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Grace is sitting at the bar wrapping up Jackie's finger for the day, while Fiona to her fiddles with the bandages. Grace shines like the sun, helping her mom and her sister. Fiona nearly spills the beans about her errand with Kevin -- going to a jewelry store to buy a replacement wedding ring -- but everybody stops her in time. The clouds gather over Grace's head, but Jackie nods. "It's hard to keep a secret," she says; she should know. She takes off with Grace for tap class, and after they're gone Fiona protests that she wasn't really going to tell. "Yes you were," Kevin says indulgently, and she grins. "I know." He laughs.
At tap class Kaitlyn's mom, the former homecoming queen, is trying to jumpstart a casual boilerplate conversation about how she wants another baby, don't you miss babies, because that's what moms talk about. But the thing that makes Jackie the way she is, the original ingredient that sets her and Zoey apart, is that she has no interest in doing what people do just because they do it: she flatly tells the woman she doesn't miss babies at all. The wheels of social interaction grind a little bit, unlubricated, but Jackie was always weird, and then class starts.
Grace is into it, still timid as usual, but paying her usual furrowed-brow attention, and not moving fast enough to the side that Kaitlyn doesn't bump into her a few times. Neither of the girls are worried about it, none of the other moms would notice, but to Jackie: that's other people in your space. That's an invasion. She asks Kaitlyn to spread out and stop crowding her a few times, but there's nothing really to be done: Grace moves slow, and Kaitlyn doesn't care. Her mother is no help, because her mother knows something Jackie's about to learn for the first time: "The steps travel, that's how it goes. If she's not moving..."
The first ring Fiona picks out, from the not-too-unctuous jewelry store guy, is a bit much. After all, he says, Jackie's not that fancy. "Yes she is!" Fiona yells, because fancy is awesome, and Kevin agrees with her, while silently shaking his head at the man, dramatically, to demonstrate just how radically unfancy his wife actually is. The hair alone! Fiona then decides they should get many rings, and Kevin talks her down to one, that they both love. Fiona asks if it's for Jackie's broken finger, which is a larger question than either of them understand, and she holds it up, in the light. It is just fancy enough.
Gracie's getting crowded by Kaitlyn, more violently now, enough so that Jackie intervenes, even against Grace's protests. Kaitlyn's mommy asks Jackie, in a warning tone, not to scold her kid. Her kid responds by asking Grace if she even practiced, sending Jackie into the early stages of berserker rage, and after a bit of this she asks Kaitlyn straight up if she's always been this snotty. She gets into it with both of them, embarrassing Grace, and finally tells the mom to fuck off. Before the teacher can get involved -- or Kaitlyn and her mom can team up about how Jackie "said The F" and "in a church!" -- Jackie's yanking Gracie out the door, shouting in a way that seems eminently reasonable to her but in fact is just tacky and weird and depressing.
While the guy who's come to sell the staff on their eponymous new pill robot machine, Zoey asks Jackie quietly how she hurt her finger. "I smashed it with a hammer," she says, not bothering to mention that this proceeded directly from Zoey's religious meanderings -- God doesn't punish us, so somebody's got to -- or that she did it to keep her worlds separate. She knows Zoey won't believe her, and in her Zoey way will say, "It's okay, you don't have to tell me."
Eddie complains that they're not getting a Pyxis, and Gloria explains that this machine cost half as much. The nurses all quietly grouse and bitch, and the guy doesn't get it until Eddie explains that it's costing his job. Zoey meekly offers to the room at large that she thinks it's "totally inappropriate" to have this meeting in front of Eddie, and Mohammad agrees. He leans in close and asks Gloria how she can even sleep at night, and before she takes her leave she looks him in the eye: "I hired Eddie Walter ten years ago. This is the saddest day I've had. You want to try doing my job, you go ahead." I imagine there was probably a time when she expected people to hear that part, or to convince them of it, but she doesn't even try anymore.
Then it's later and Jackie's hanging out with Eddie in the chapel hall; "Fuck 'em," he says, and they laugh. She shows him her finger, the one Grace taped, as a small concession: "my kid" she says, just like that "my kid taped it." He kisses her finger and she tenses up, but he reminds her he doesn't work there anymore, after today. He says he'll miss her, and slips a bunch of high-octane oxycontin in her pocket. She gets teary, and he tells her he loves her. She stares at him for awhile and then says it back, out loud. She's sad to see him go.
Coop's stitching up a Hassid and grilling Zoey about Jackie's lovelife. Zoey's information is as follows: She and Jackie are very close, Jackie gave her a penlight, Jackie likes gum, Jackie likes coffee. Zoey likes hugs, dancing, rainbows and cake. Eddie shows up with Coop's pager, which he of course left on Eddie's desk, and without thinking Coop offers him his hip pocket. Eddie is weirded out as usual by the complete lack of no homo, and peaces; Zoey takes it and drops it in his pocket herself. "I think she's seeing someone," Zoey says, managing to only slightly wink-wink nudge-nudge eyebrow spasm at the place Eddie was just standing, and then they are squirrely some more, and then Melissa the Girlfriend shows up again wearing fur and causing a terrifying rictus of smile to burst out, like the coldest sun, over Coop's face.
Jackie's fully smoking now, outside with Eleanor as she instructs Jackie to omit the "getting thrown out" part the time she tells the tap class story, and to instead say that Kaitlyn's mom pulled a gun or something. I would believe it. Jackie talks about how fucking embarrassed Grace was, and -- thinking she's changed the subject -- Eleanor asks if she even wants to know how the finger got broken. "Nope," says Jackie. She's rented out all her secrets; somebody knows everything, even if nobody knows every single thing, but this one is too weird, and sad, and fucked-up and gross for anybody to know.
Half a block away, Coop is breaking up with Melissa; to calm her down he boneheadedly explains that she's totally his type and therefore this is totally his problem: "I've dated a hundred of you!" Her response is hilariously on point ("Oh my God that's worse"), but you can see how Coop would think that's a compliment. "Yeah, on Mars!" Melissa yells, and I keep hoping she will bash him with her giant purse.
"I'm trying to say you're perfect," he says, which to be fair is what he was trying to say, and she asks what on earth the problem is, then. The problem is that he kissed (was kissed by) someone else (Jackie) and felt something he never felt (a horny kind of mommy-hating reward/punish terror) that has changed his life irrevocably (for at least ten minutes). She's like, "So date other people!" He doesn't want to: only this person. "It's a focus thing," he says, which, I don't even know what that means but I feel it's offensive. Melissa explains that she's willing to stick around for him to figure it out, but that if it's over it's over. Once he goes into the (very true) "I'm a fucking mess" part, she realizes he really is this stupid, and shoves him. Purse! Hit him with the purse! Throw your fur coat over his head and toss him in traffic! It would be hilarious!
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 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
t makes little sense and may or may not be related to her current issues -- At some point her mother ran off with her boyfriend, and married him on her 25th birthday, sure, but is that the same guy who's the evil stepfather now? We know less about Eleanor's life than Jackie's coworkers do about hers -- and Eleanor's like, "Funny joke that also happens to be my life. Why do you think I shop so much?"
Eleanor's sister recently flew from Paris to London, where she was "turned away from mother's bedside by the wicked stepfather." Jackie makes a class-related funny about how similar their lives are, and Eleanor admits it's a whole big fucking mess. Then she takes off her shirt in the middle of the store, freaking Jackie out and causing her to chase Eleanor in her knickers all over the place. "But I figure if Stella McCartney can steer her way clear from a one-legged, gold-digging stepmother, and still make something this beautiful? I too can endure." (Don't forget vegetarian.) Exhausted, Jackie drops as Eleanor runs off in the direction of spring knits. "I HATE SHOPPING!" she screams. But at least you can do it with somebody as publicly inappropriate as you are, that's got to count for something.
Thor precedes Mo-Mo into the room with a tray and another nurse, and Mo-Mo tells the young spider guy to take off his shirt so it doesn't get wet. Thor lets him know that it's a spider, so of course he wigs, and then they flush it out with a big syringe. Mo-Mo is horrified, but Thor ("down came the rain and washed the spider out") handles the situation with aplomb. And that mother is anything but itsy-bitsy. Mo-Mo shudders, Thor and the other lady take off, and then the kid starts talking about a weird feeling in his other ear, to Mo-Mo's horror. "What do you, live in the woods?"
Jackie finally just tosses the roses in the trashcan under her desk, and tells Zoey she can give Victor 50mg of some pain medication I don't recognize. They fight with him about Kevin Costner, The Guardian, Ashton Kutcher, and when Zoey pushes the meds into his drip, he suddenly goes into respiratory arrest. Eleanor shows up pretty quickly and asks what they did to him, considering he came in with a broken elbow, and Zoey tries to be professional about her choice of meds, but Eleanor throws the bottle at her: she was meant to give him 50mg, but she put in 250mg instead. She goes off on Zoey, making her repeat the correct dosage twice and screaming ("This is the easiest part of your job! Do you understand?") before Jackie steps in and sends her away.
Zoey's crying in the bathroom when Jackie shows up, of course, but she listens well. Jackie is firm, and sympathetic but not to a fault, and informs her that she's off the floor and not dealing with patients for now. "This isn't good," she says calmly, and just as Zoey's about to pull it together Gloria comes in screaming at them both. She marches Zoey up to her office and Jackie lingers, popping a whole fucking handful of pills and groaning to herself as she chews them up.
The boys take Zoey to lunch and she looks sadly at her pizza while they watch her. "The first thing I think every morning is, 'I hope I don't kill anyone today,'" she says, and Thor grants that it's good to have goals, at least. "The only thing I want to do besides help people," Zoey elaborates, "Is not kill them." Mo-Mo and Thor both offer examples of their own major fuckups: Thor shaved a woman's pubic hair before her tonsillectomy; Mo-Mo missed an aneurysm on his fourteenth day, having left the room for ninety seconds. They assure her it's going to be fine, and on the other side she'll be a better nurse, and Thor says the alternative is to let it destroy you, but before they can comfort her past her Zoey Zone, she suddenly yells, "Oh my God, you're gay! I just got that." Good Lord.
She nods weirdly, and he's like, um? Mo-Mo tries to get her back on track and explains that she can get back into Eleanor's and Jackie's good graces, and Thor points out that Victor Garber is not yet dead, but it's too late. They have lost her. "You're like, out, right?" And it's sort of tragic because she's so weird that it would be hard to put this behavior together with her crush on Thor, and so weird that you might not even notice her crush on Thor, and certainly so weird that she's not part of our conventionally constructed consensual reality where it's beyond obvious that Thor is gay, and you'd have to know all three of these things to understand why she's acting this way, so instead they just stare at her weird ass for awhile and watch her eat her pizza. "Thank you for the heads up!" she says, cramming it in, and Mo-Mo's like vaguely aware of what she's even talking about.
Eddie shows Jackie a trick with the Pill-O-Matic where you unplug it and when it reboots, it clears the memory. Or some shit, I don't know. All I could hear was her junkie's heart pounding away. So she's incredibly grateful, which in no time flat has undergone its usual enzymatic transformation into serious affection for Eddie, which zooms into full-on romantic aggression once he starts talking about their future together and how he is going to meet her kid, and she'll meet his mom, and blah blah, and this makes her finger throb so bad she just fucks him there on the machine. But later, feeling creepy six different ways, she digs two roses out of the trash and takes them home, to her daughters.
Fiona's excited: her dinner is hot dogs, and peanut butter. Jackie kisses her and hands her a rose, but Grace doesn't look up when she does the same. Jackie puts it on the bar and goes back behind to kiss Kevin, as he's telling her Grace will forgive her. And outside, looking in, is EDDIE! Looking at the whole family! Which comprises one daughter and one husband more than he thought! That is an excess of husbands and daughters! He is going to hit Jackie with his purse or something. Or Coop's.
The ongoing breakdown in the credits continues this week, as an Afghan Whigs-sounding cover of "Love Is All Around," written by the amazing Paul Williams and best known as the Mary Tyler Moore theme, follows Eddie down the street. With one episode left, I think it's fair to say that this is the big thing. The big bad.
Jackie lives like a rat in the walls of her life. Things get too heavy, the love and its burdens get too strong over here, run over there. Love is all around, but as long as she has enough places to run, it won't ever be too much. Because it's the burdens that matter: keeping those connections alive. If she didn't love Kevin she could laugh in his face and say she lost the ring, but she couldn't do that, because her marriage means something. Run to drugs, and when that gets weird run to Eleanor, to Mo-Mo, to her feelings of parental anxiety, and when that is too hard run to Eddie, to his office that's been getting smaller and smaller week by week, and now has pushed her out altogether. Then run to Queens. Dance as fast as you can.
As long as nobody sees you, it's just a shell game you can play forever, and never be where people think you are: you can stay alive. Smashing her finger was the action of a caged rat, biting off its leg to stay free, keeping its hidey-holes available without anybody knowing. But keep playing that shell game long enough and that's what you become, and that's what she's learning now. If it takes Eddie coming all the way to Queens, Eddie who's lost everything now, then that's what it takes: Sometimes you have to burn the whole motherfucker down if you're ever going to build anything again. And sometimes God has to light the first match.
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!