Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 12 | Aired on 08.24.2009
Coop thinks he's got it figured out. She was covering her ass for that forged donor card, and so she broke her own finger and came crying to him so that he'd feel sorry for her. Which is tangential at best, but the right train of thought. "But what you didn't count on was that you and I have amazing chemistry! You kissed me, right here. In this exact room. Right where we're standing." This room, that's getting smaller all the time.
"So I: Broke my own finger? So I could have alone time with you. Because we have amazing chemistry?" He goes, "You said it, not me," which is douchey when it's true and even more so when it doesn't make sense, and she just grins and explains that he is a moron before kissing him again and leaving.
Well done. As long as nobody knows which part's healthcare and which part's cinema, they both get to be both. Keep them guessing and you never have to explain: you can just run to another room in your life, and leave them behind. Rats aren't crazy, they are survivors. Your tragedy is always your strategy, and vice versa: she does this shit because it works.
Addicts are like little kids in that they have the narcissist's sense of other people's carelessness. We spend all our time worrying what people will say, what people will think, but what addicts and little kids know is that a shocking amount of the time people won't say or think anything, because they're too busy indulging themselves -- mostly in their own fear about this same thing -- to really take notice of what you're doing. If somebody's watching you, make 'em guess; a little razzle-dazzle. Because five minutes from now they're going to be back contemplating themselves, and you can go back to doing what you want. Even Coop, who feels weirded out for about two seconds before looking around himself and yelling, "Aw, man! I thought we were getting a Pyxis!"
"Okay, but how unflattering?" Zoey asks the boys about her ugly scrubs, and Thor compares her sadly to a donkey. "What if he wakes up and sees me wearing kiddie scrubs?" she asks, and they point out that he could just die. Or what if he's blind, and the rest of the world are the ones watching her mope around in the grey scrubs.
What if the thing she did to herself, to punish herself for her own crimes, ended up hurting everybody around her instead? Wouldn't that be shitty?
"It takes a village," Thor says, and is willing to fight for that interpretation of the saying, but then a hot mess walks in. They all want her: that tantalizing mix of supermodel, insanity and bus crash. Thor calls dibs and Zoey -- who can't do patient care anyway -- whines, but Mo-Mo says the chick would eat her alive. He's not kidding. Thor goes, "Hi, how can I help you?" and without prelude she shouts, "Fucking DOMINICAN!" Thor is, of course, Norwegian. She continues: "Hop off the raft and New York state gives you a flatiron and a salon on Essex Street, no questions asked?" She flips back her hoodie, revealing a horrible burnt-looking bald spot down the right part in her hair.
Mo-Mo asks if there was a fire in the nightclub, but Zoey knows she just got her hair straightened. The woman turns her wild eyes on Zoey. "My neighbor is Jewish? Very fro-ey? She goes to a place on Adam Clayton Powell, I can get the number if you want." The woman points at Zoey behind the glass and chooses her, but Zoey sadly goes, "I'd love to but I've been stripped of my powers." The boys stare at her, begging.
Eddie drinks his beer and points at the picture of Jackie over the bar. "She's beautiful!" Kevin gives him his next beer and asks if he's married. "Nope. Seeing someone, but you know. She's married. Two kids." He dares himself to go further, but the immediate sympathy in Kevin's eyes stops him. "Rough road," Kevin says, and Eddie assures him he doesn't know the half of it. He drinks more so he can say more. He's a shark in a cage.
Gloria is, of course, going crazy: giving the elevator a whole white glove treatment, needing to administrate. "Oh, no," she says, staring up at a tragedy. "Oh no, is that gum?" She pulls out a pencil. As much as Gloria is hated, she's needed. It would be a day when Gloria was gone that the world went to shit. We crave boundaries, addicts most of all because they can't see them for themselves. Today it doesn't matter what we do.
"Did I mention tonight I'm breaking the law?" Eleanor asks, over Victor. "Well, I am. And I need your help." She's having her mother kidnapped and shipped in from London -- "much like a pair of shoes," Jackie grins -- and she asks Jackie to help admit her when the time comes "as a Jane Doe found down in Gramercy Park," just so she can get a look at her. Jackie points out she's already on the hook for one coma, might as well take another one on. She tells Mo-Mo to talk to Gloria and tell her the repair guys have arrived, to save more time to see if Nutterman wakes up: "I don't need this shit Mohammad, really I don't." I love it when she calls him Mohammad, it always sounds so serious and loving at the same time.
Gloria has reached that part in being bored to madness where you pretend to be on a talk show. In her case, Letterman. "My very dear friend Neil and I... You know him? We were just remarking how momentous this year has been, both in healthcare and in cinema. ...Me and Neil?" she giggles, swearing they're just friends. Fellow bad guys.
But of all the things I love about Gloria, this is the most: she equates the two. Her passion, her art, and Neil's passion, his art. The art of healing and the art of cinema, and the two of them were put on this earth to administrate their beauty. Once were Zoeys, thinking that art sprung into the world fully formed, that idealism matters, that creation is possibly ever peaceful. That there is ever a time the bottom line doesn't matter. Now they're too far the other side: they know it's an ugly business, that transforms the ideals of its art into ugly responsibilities and desperation. They're not both life or death, but Gloria is still human enough to treat them as equals. To pretend that art, that cinema, matters
And then you've got Jackie, who is more rooted in the real world than anyone I've ever seen... And more willing to dwell in fantasy, and her own obstructionist perversity, than anyone I've ever seen.
Jackie tries to reboot the Pill-O-Matic, but nothing happens. She taps the keys, repeating the same thing over and over, but it does no good. She calls Eddie, finally, and he ignores the call since he's chatting with her husband. She thinks she's doing something wrong; she tells him she loves him. It's not Eddie's pharmacy anymore, it's Plato's.
They bring in a guy with a hernia, intestines outside his body like a horror movie. Thor is none too impressed. There's a cute EMT chatting with Jackie when he arrives at the ER, talking about how he's planning on going to school to become a mortician. "I'm just tired of people yelling at me when I'm trying to save them," the guy says, which Jackie can identify with, and he tries to flirt with Zoey, but she's not having it. "Heard you put a guy in a coma," he says, trying to be sympathetic, and she's mortified. "I can be near patients," she clarifies, "I just can't treat them." He tells her to keep her head down: "And don't get all mea culpa with the nuns here. They're the worst!" He asks her out, but she's punishing herself, so she goes, "No. No, no. Nooooo." Of course, he has no idea of how she works, or what that means, so he slinks off.