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Totally weird or super-ambitious? Considering the show was renewed after its first airing, I'm going with "awesome in a way we can't tell yet," because anything else doesn't jibe. But I am having a pickle of a time figuring out what's going on. Everything is in a state of confusion! People maybe committing suicide, boys kissing boys like they're girls who do girls like they're boys, hallucinations, Eleanor cries! Tears! I mean it's a mess.
Jackie and Zoey spend the episode keeping Akalitus prisoner in a broken elevator, hoping Victor Garber wakes up so they won't have to deal with the investigation into his coma. He eventually does, but with major chunks of his brain and/or memory missing, so Zoey gets the funk out of there, without even a how-do-you-do to the cutie-pie EMT that's crushing on her.
And then Jackie's double-booked for tonight, because on the one hand she has a date with Kevin to get her new wedding ring, but on the other she has to help Eleanor kidnap her mother, who is also in a coma, but on the third hand she's a huge drug addict and maybe just committed suicide, but on the fourth hand Mo-Mo just found out that Coop's obsessing on Jackie... Right after he takes a picture of himself kissing Mo-Mo in the nurses' station. Half an hour of this kind of thing, people.
Oh! So Eddie spends the episode hanging out with Kevin at the bar, learning all about Jackie's home life and ignoring her panicked, drug-seeking calls, until he eventually gets drunk enough to storm into the hospital and make an ass of himself. The latter scene, while not socially damaging exactly, certainly shakes Jackie enough that without even confirming that the jig is up, she pulls out three vials of something scary from the fake Pyxis and swigs 'em like old Paula, going back to the scene from the beginning of the series, where she's on the floor staring up. Only this time, she hallucinates this weird Camazotz version of her family, sings some Creedence to herself, and then breaks the fourth wall to ask if we've noticed all the rats in the light fixture above her head. And scene. I mean, seriously, what do you do with that?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Finale time! This is the best show. In the bar this morning, Jackie's complaining about that mean mom from dance class, telling Kevin he's lucky he didn't have kids with her. Kevin's confused and she's like, "I know about you two!" But he points out that they dated for like two weeks when they were sixteen. And then he met Jackie. They talk about how tired she is, and she wonders how to make it up to Grace. Kevin lies and says all Grace will remember is that Jackie tried to protect her. Although he's right that she'll end up in therapy, just not because of dance class.
There's a surprise waiting for Jackie after work, Kevin says, but she has to come to the bar at midnight if she wants it. She giggles about how intriguing it all is, even though she knows exactly what he's talking about: the replacement ring. "Who is luckier than me?" Jackie crows. "Not Jenny Flynn!" Well, almost everybody. As she's leaving the bar, Eddie appears like from an alley or something -- did he lurk all night? -- and heads inside. Jackie's nurse powers get to tingling, but when she turns around there's nobody there. Who's luckier than Jackie? Like everybody. Kevin lets Eddie in, even though they don't open for another hour.
Gloria talks to Victor Garber on his breathing machine, about how much she hates it in movies when people talk to the coma patients, but now here she is, asking him in his coma to sign something clearing All Saints of any neglect or malfeasance. "Just a thought," she says, holding his hand. "We'll talk more when you wake up." Zoey watches this go down, mind blown.
Jackie gets some Tylenol out of the Pill-O-Matic and grumps, "Blow me." Out in the hallway, Gloria pauses getting on the elevator to tell Jackie that she's going to be investigating Nutterman's coma before he goes to ICU. Jackie's like, "Whatever, let me know what you need." Gloria yells that what she wants is Jackie and Zoey's murdering ass in her office in five. Jackie rolls her eyes, and then the elevator goes immediately nuts with Gloria inside. Jackie giggles and thanks Jesus as the alarms go off, and inside Gloria shouts, "UNACCEPTABLE!"
Zoey introduces herself to the prone Mr. Nutterman, inspired by Gloria, and Jackie yells for her, so she closes the curtain and goes back to the nurses' station. Inside the elevator, the phone's not working, so she pulls out her cell phone. Zoey deals with the very busy incoming calls, and Jackie finally looks at her: "What's up with your scrubs?" They're grey. "Yes I can see that. I don't like them." Zoey tries to explain that she also doesn't like them but she's forcing herself to wear them, as a sign of remorse. Jackie laughs. Her ring finger throbs. /p>
Zoey finally gets to Gloria's rolling call and tries to put her on hold, but when she starts yelling -- "THIS IS GLORIA AKALITUS I AM STUCK IN AN ELEVATOR DO NOT HANG UP ON ME" -- she totally hangs up. Jackie asks and she admits, "Mrs. Akalitus. Or not! Think she's stuck on the elevator." They talk about how there's going to be an investigation into the coma, and that probably the elevator repair service should take a little more time than usual in responding. Zoey almost answers the call twice, before immediately hanging up again. Jackie doesn't meet her eyes; Gloria has a shit fit in the elevator.
Sometimes all you need is a moment of silence: Maybe clarity will come. Maybe something will change. Maybe the problem will fix itself, or new information will come to light and it will turn out you didn't do anything wrong. Or you sit with the problem long enough to see a new angle or find a new word, and it stops being the thing you're trying to escape from. The secret is told, a lightbulb turns on, the guy wakes up from his coma. Sometimes you just have to wait it out in a silent moment and see what happens.
While Eleanor and Jackie are discussing the neuro consult, Coop appears and says they need to talk. She assures him that they don't, while Eleanor doesn't even try to hide that she's watching his every move. "You broke your own finger," he says, and she sighs, and nods, and Eleanor thinks it's just teen highjinks so she laughs as they leave together: Oh my darling, what a wildly entertaining mess you've made.
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 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.
"Zoey. Just go to your locker and put on your happy monkey scrubs, please. Truly. Nutterman is going to come out of this thing, I promise. So just go." Zoey rolls her chair over and says she never wants to administer meds again. "You fall off the horse, you get back on," Jackie says, taking off her finger splint as Zoey complains that she nearly killed him. "Okay, keep that to yourself." Zoey wants to tell him the truth, even if he never wakes up, and Jackie gets very intense for a moment: "You know what, Zoey? Clearing your conscience is not going to make him feel better. It's going to make you feel better. You feel like you're doing the right thing, but you're not. It's selfish." You can see how she got there, certainly, and in some cases -- even this case, maybe -- she's right. But she's not talking to Zoey. "Honesty is the best policy," Zoey singsongs, and Jackie assures her that it is not. She takes off, telling Zoey to stay put. Gloria is now sitting around on the elevator floor, playing with an invisible thread, making her skirt hem dance. It's pretty weird.
Kevin unloads about Jackie's night shifts, and Eddie tries to be sympathetic about that, but Kevin is too in love. "You know what she does? She asks me what I want for breakfast, no matter how fucking tired she is. Rubs my back, makes me eggs." Eddie grins sadly: "Life of Riley." Kevin says he hasn't heard that expression in a long time, and Eddie nods: "Yeah well, hang around me, you'll hear all sorts of shit." They toast, and Eddie drinks, looking terrifying. Today, it doesn't matter what we do.
While dealing with the hernia guy, Coop informs Mo-Mo that he deserves more than an open relationship. Although, of course, he's a mess with this stuff. The guy on the table stares up at them as they compare woes: how Coop is so messed up right now it's embarrassing, and Mo-Mo is all "I keep thinking, if he knew how much it hurt," and Coop takes a look at the guy's intestine and he jokes, "My ex used to bitch that I never talked. Look at me now. I'm spilling my guts here!"
Mo-Mo offers to call her, and Coop says maybe he'll get sympathy for his injury, because that's what Coop is thinking about today, but the guy says that's blood from a stone. He looks up at Mo-Mo and tells him to make the guy jealous. "What kinda guys does he like?" Straight ones. The guy shrugs, but Coop smiles: "Give me your phone. Trust me."
Eddie ignores Jackie's call again, this time with a little bitter smile. How bad is this going to get? Eddie and Kevin do a shot of Jack together. They're making friends on the Titanic. Kevin pulls out the ring to show his new friend, and Eddie swallows. "It's the ring I could never afford to give her. Still can't, but what the fuck, right?" They talk about surprises, and love, and the surprises Jackie's getting tonight. They do another shot. The cage is getting smaller and smaller, and she doesn't even know it yet. She's spilling her guts, here: what was meant to stay hidden is forcing its way out again.
Jackie's coming down the chapel hall when Gloria's finally released. "Not prompt," she grunts administratively to the elevator guy, who probably just showed up a second ago, and fixed it. Thor and Jackie bond over how much they hate the Pill-O-Matic, and Jackie swears that she hates it more than he does. She would win that bet.
When Thor is gone, Jackie tries resetting the box itself, and it starts going off with alarms, screaming INVALID RESTART. She shivers for a second and then runs away. That's twice. The time, she'll probably pull the thing out of the fucking wall. And now Gloria's out, and Eddie won't call her back, and Eleanor's mom's on her way, and her ring is broken, and she's committed to help Eleanor and to meet her husband at midnight, and she needs some fucking drugs. There is no cinema left.
Waiting with Eleanor, she asks lightly for a Xanax, and Eleanor assures her she's not sad enough to be squirreling away pills in her pocket quite yet. "Don't make me beg for moral support," Eleanor says quietly, and Jackie swears she's right there. Zoey mopes by in her scrubs, looking like the Voice of Huckabees, and Jackie screams, "Goddamn it, Zoey! CHANGE YOUR SCRUBS!" She plugs her ears, as Eleanor shouts after: "They are really grim!"
Coop takes Mo-Mo's picture with his phone, and then waves him over. He holds up the phone to the two of them, and then kisses Mo-Mo. It's awesome. But not as awesome as the fact that Jackie's walking by when he does it. "Nice rebound, Coop." He starts to sputter and bluster, and she laughs without pausing: "Oh my God, kidding!" Mo-Mo stares at them and realizes that it's Jackie he was whining about. This makes everybody sad.
Victor Garber wakes up, to Zoey staring down at him insanely with pink bunny rabbit scrubs on. "Mr. Nutterman! I was actually wearing grey scrubs before you woke up. Proper coma attire. Guess it was a little depressing, but I had to do something. Anyway, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?" He says he's thirsty, and asks how she is. "SUPER RELIEVED! AND VERY SORRY!" He remembers her addressing him earlier in his coma: "My name is Zoey Barkow, and I'm really really sorry." She sighs, because the fix is in, so why not get chatty before they send her to the guillotine.
"You know, Mr. Nutterman, I'm not so crazy about Kevin Costner either." He cocks his head. "Do I know him?" She sighs to herself and prepares to deal with this, looking down. "Um. What movie won the Oscar for best picture last year?" He asks her when Showgirls came out. "That was a good movie!" Today, it doesn't matter what we do. She pats him on the shoulder and quickly exits; outside the curtain she whispers, "Oh my God, I broke him."
Eddie finally comes into the ER, drunk and yelling. I imagine that was one interesting ride from Queens. He screams at them and says he's there to check on the robots, and asks Jackie how she's enjoying them. She admits, quite honestly, that she does not care for the robots, and tries to get him to go outside with her. Which would be a bad enough scene, but then Gloria shows up yelling at him about how drunk he is, and he's like, "So what, are you gonna fire me again?"
He goes into some kind of Wonder Woman routine about magic bracelets, but the only bracelet I can connect that to is the one he gave Jackie/Coop/Jackie. Which I guess makes sense, because he thought that was going to put him through the Looking Glass with Jackie, when he thought that the only reason they couldn't be together was because of All Saints, and now that he's gotten fired it was supposed to be perfect. So he followed Jackie down the rabbit hole, and found out the real reason they were always going to be apart. So now he's alone, on the other side of the Looking Glass, and all he's got are the magic bracelets: Jackie asks him to go get some coffee, and he screeches to the world at large, "Think about the possibilities! Jackie and Eddie, Eddie and Jackie, having coffee!"
You can't expect anybody to understand what he's saying, so Gloria offers to call security, and he takes off -- "save your bullets!" -- but not before leaning in and delivering a silver bullet of his own: "Oh, I met Kevin. And that's a very nice bar you got." He strokes her neck, and takes off. Left alone, Eddie chased off by security, she stands in the middle of the room. Mo-Mo can tell she's very thrown by all this, and worries very hard at her. She runs to the bathroom.
That stall, where she gets punished. Eddie's gone. No more drugs. No Pyxis tutorial. No more Eddie. No more anything. She doesn't even call Kevin to find out what's going on, because she's out of her mind. She paces, freaking out, and goes through her pockets one more time. Just in case there's something that she missed. She charges out of the stall and out through the ER. To get to Plato's Pharmacy you have to go down the chapel hall, every time.
Eleanor stares down at her mother, on life support. The EMT guy says they picked her up at the airport. "Sad. Probably somebody's mother. Fucking depressing, that's what that is." She doesn't cry until he's gone, and she says Jackie's name softly, and stares down at the smallness of her mother.
Jackie rushes down the chapel hall, spitting at the Virgin Mary: "Look away!" Standing before the Pill-O-Matic, she looks for another way in, repeating the same things over and over, but it's not working. She kicks the machine, shakes her head at herself, and then punches in her own code. Three little vials of morphine sulfate. Just like Paula. She grins at them, nearly kisses them, and runs off to find a room to drink them in. The first one, there's a guy with a bloody hand -- "Keep that hand elevated," she says after a moment, still doing her job -- and then she heads into another room.
The drums are drums of war. She locks the door behind her and shakes her head. It's happening. It's coming: That rushing in your ears. You've heard it. I've heard it. I hate it. She rolls her eyes, terrified, watching it all come down, and she sits on the floor and stares blankly for a moment, then downs the bottles, one by one. They splash across her face. She shakes her head, woozy, and almost starts to cry, but then her eyes get wide. And glassy. And then she's gone. She falls back on the floor, pale as a sheet, staring at the ceiling. Eddie, Kevin, Grace, Eleanor. A million voices. She's wearing that perfect white nurse's outfit, costume, uniform, crucified on the floor. She begins to sing, just for us.
Someone told me long ago/ There's a calm before the storm...
Sometimes you just want a quiet place. A moment in the silence. When we met her, her life was like that: exceedingly compartmentalized, every box providing respite from the box before. You could live your whole life that way: The sun is warm, the rain is wet, the day is bright, the nights are dark. Everything according to its season.
She sees a vision of what that meant: Grace, tapdancing in pigtails, a suburban plot of land in pastel colors, Kevin dressed like Father Knows Best and Fiona, hopping on one foot with her blue balloon. A sun you don't have to color in; a sun like daffodils. That's what it was like, when she was here. And when she was there, what it was like at All Saints was immensely powerful, and clean, and strong. Pressed whites, sainthood. One of them was healthcare, one of them was cinema, and it didn't matter which. And when the gears ground together, that's what the drugs were for.
But it wasn't natural. What's happening now is natural: Her complete addict control of everything is going to shit. Eddie knows about one life, Kevin may know about the other. Her family is less of a secret every day. She's telling Zoey to treat 'n street patients, and pulling the pages out of Zoey's memory. She's kissing randoms and scratching at her only friends. That's her reaction to real life, when she's spent so much time avoiding it. She goes nuts. Imagine how rude she was at school, or tap class, but all the time: imagine if the world intruded so much that she actually had to deal with it? How unnatural that would be?
I want to know: Have you ever seen the rain coming down on a sunny day?
The song's getting vague; she's leaving words out and humming them. She's losing her place. All of this reality getting through, breaking up her icy control on everything, seems like uncontrollable chaos, when what it is, is actual order setting things right. What she's done, with all this leveraging, is the equivalent of going upside down on a loan.
Sometimes all you need is a moment of silence: Maybe clarity will come. Maybe something will change. Maybe the problem will fix itself, or new information will come to light and it will turn out you didn't do anything wrong. But you can't find that moment if you're dying. And right now, Jackie is dying. She needs drugs. What she's done, with all this leveraging, is turn Maszlow's hierarchy upside down. The medicine becomes the disease becomes the medicine. So if she's going to work this thing out -- and I think she will -- she's going to need to do some fucking drugs.
Yesterday, and days before/ Sun is cold and rain is hard
The song is about rain out of nowhere, the grace that comes after the storm that comes after the calm, but it's also the misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, right? Cold sun, hard rain. Serious fucking vanity:
Tonight there's a man waiting at the bar for his wife to come home, so their life can start over again. There's a woman looking down at her mother, on the edge of death, weeping and more alone than she's ever been. There's a girl who dreams of clockwork men, and what she did to break them. There's a woman dreaming of her lover, of healthcare and cinema. Coop will dream, with Jackie and Mohammad on his lips, of his mothers making love; he will wake sweating and more confused than ever. There's a girl who can't stop dancing, and a budding arsonist, and a man without a foot. And Jackie doesn't care about any of them. Not really. Not today.
When this old world starts getting me down/ And people are just too much for me to face/ I climb way up to the top of the stairs/ And all my cares just drift right into space...
They chased her from room to room like a rat, until the world was tiny. Until it's just this room, and Jackie, alone with her drugs. Finally alone.
Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table The nun who taught Jackie to recite Eliot also taught her that the people with the greatest capacity for good are the ones with the greatest capacity for evil. Smart fucking nun.
"If I were a saint," she told us once, "I would be like Augustine. He knew there was good in him, and he knew there was not-so-good. And he wasn't going to give up his earthly pleasures before he was good and ready. Make me good, God. But not yet." It's only a problem if you're afraid of lightning. Which she is not.
The washed out light goes, and she's back to just being Jackie. The tap dancing sound was just a rat in the ceiling above her, scrambling back and forth, and now that she can see it plainly, she asks if we can see it too, as she's staring up. Up, up, up. Soon, it will be later. For now, we're on the roof.
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!