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While Eddie continues stalking/bromancing her husband Kevin, Jackie's rivalry with Fitch Coop suffers a blow when the episode-long patient arc resolves in his favor: By endeavoring to go over his head and prove how humane and competent she is -- and thus, what a jackhole doofus Whiteboy can be -- she accidentally oversteps, preemptively (and incorrectly) informing a family that their son doesn't have cystic fibrosis. (It's fun, because Coop remains a tweeting, whining jerkoff, but without tipping over into cartoon/whipping boy territory, which I was worried about last week a little bit.)
Gracie, she's stepped up her Defcon on the family home and is now saving her allowance to buy top-of-the-line fire and CO alarms. Grace playing out her end-of-the-world scenarios and attempting to save everybody at once, a really moving theme from the first season, moves back into position. At least now, with the fuckup at work, Jackie seems to be taking a leaf from her suffering kid. Oh, actually this whole episode was sad. Thor's secretly lost vision in one eye to his diabetes -- not even his BF knows -- which makes all the cake stuff last week like ten times more depressing. Jackie covers for him, and even lets him take out the fake for her. Man, Thor just kills me.
And then there's Eleanor -- who wanders through the episode on E, possibly dealing with her mum's death or, you know, just doing her usual shit -- who flirts with New Guy Sam, who decides that everyone in the hospital is on drugs. Which, he's not far off the mark, but Jackie gets him in two awesome ways: First, by telling him all unknown or found drugs go in a special locker in the Pyxis room (a.k.a., Jackie's new drop box!) and second, by going to Akalitus about his rehab-evangelist ways. While she's in there, Jackie asks for a psych consult for Grace -- of course, without revealing the existence of her secret family, not that Gloria's fooled -- and gets a tiny teaspoon of that legendary Akalitus tenderness when she admits her own son had psychological issues... Which complicates her whole Baby Crazy storyline, right?
Oh, and God gets nailed in the head by an insulted agnostic. Zoey (who's getting L-A-I-D) talks Him through His near-death-experience (and ensuing identity crisis), convinces Him that if He's not God, He's at least His nephew, and by episode's end He's right back across the street, screaming at people with Zoey by his side.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Jackie's downstairs ironing and nothing's happening, and finally she notices that it's not plugged in. Her phone buzzes -- Eddie texting to apologize once again -- and immediately she remembers the box of Easter stuff ("DON'T TOUCH") with pills in the little plastic eggs. She pops one, stashes some more in her incredibly tight scrubs, and heads upstairs.
Apparently, according to Fiona, Grace has been busying herself at night unplugging all the appliances. So, par for the course. "Faulty wiring causes more house fires than cigarettes and arson combined," she explains, and shows them a torn-out ad for "the best smoke detector they make" in the excited fashion you might show off an EZ-Bake or, in my case, a label maker. Well, "excited" for Grace is a relative term. Jackie points out that rather than saving up for devices and apparatuses, Grace should be spending her allowance on fun things like toys and stickers. And label makers!
"Let mom and dad worry about smoke detectors, okay? Put your money away," they say. Except Grace's whole point, and it's a point so insightful she doesn't even know she's making it, is that mom and dad aren't paying attention. They aren't worried enough. When she says, "I just don't want the house to burn down," she's not being neurotic, she's asking them to pull it together before it does. Before the world ends. Grace is the best smoke detector they make.
So it's like, Grace has to be crazy on a certain part of the spectrum for them to realize she's crazy -- how much crazier does she have to be than that before they realize her being crazy is their problem -- their faulty wiring -- and not hers? That they -- specifically Jackie -- are the ones making her crazy? If Jackie's the king of this tiny addiction kingdom, then Grace is Cassandra: Responsible for making sure everybody knows the kingdom is rotten. And since acknowledging or dealing with that would probably mean Jackie can't do drugs any more, the answer is: Infinity. Infinite crazy.
Outside All Saints, Eleanor looks fucked up and fabulous, sunglasses on, squeezing yellow mustard onto her hotdog and grossing Jackie out: "Wow. You know the #1 ingredient in hotdogs is cancer." Eleanor finally explains -- after cramming it in her face -- is that she scored E last night, and has been tripping for nine hours. "Still going strong. You know, I think my mother's death ripped something open in me! You have wonderful daughters, Jacks. Cherish them." She covers Jackie's face in kisses and then wipes them off again, babbling about the godmother thing, and Jackie's like, "Good Lord."
Eleanor crazies all over about how she wants to bypass the Kevin part of that equation as usual, become their godmother, kidnap them from school and go to lunch at the St. Regis: "Love is more important than reading!" she exclaims. So true. Eleanor tries to wander away and Jackie grabs her just as Zoey drives up in a taxi, recapitulating Eleanor's entrance last year with the switching shoes into her clogs and shoving morning pastry in her face. Weird!
Zoey in a taxi implies that Zoey exists somewhere outside the hospital, like, she has an apartment or something, with walls, pinned to which you might find a poster of that cat, just hangin' in there, or an entire bookshelf filled with nothing but dolls' heads and superhero action figures modified to look like various heroic Barbara Streisands. Or self-portraits of herself as Van Gogh, a Picasso nude, and American Gothic with two Zoeys, both of whom have cat heads on their shoulders. Or an intense farm animal motif on every surface decorative or otherwise. I'm thinking roosters, or maybe cute little piggies.
"Hey guys," she mumbles happily on her way in, and Eleanor immediately recognizes that girlfriend got laid. "Do we think Zoey got her pipes cleaned?" Jackie suffers a full-body shudder, including an awesome death-rattle barf sound -- which the closed-caps translate correctly as dyahh -- and says the thought of Zoey's pipes is like "seeing Santa naked." Yep. I mean, Zoey's awesome and her body is entitled to whatever it wants, but damn. Meanwhile, Eleanor's squeaking and chomping on the wrapper her hotdog came in. I wish she was my doctor!
Patient is adorable little Harry, who may or may not have cystic fibrosis. His parents scheduled a sweat test at Lenox Hill, but they can't get in for a month, and he woke up choking today. Jackie immediately bonds with the kid and charms the parents by agreeing that doctors suck, and promises to get the kid a lo-fi sweat test from Coop. Out in the hallway, Eleanor is dancing around with an Hermés scarf. She bumps into a forward-charging Zoey, who screams like she's been stabbed, and giggles: "Zoey, ma petite fleur!" Jackie grabs Eleanor, who has tied the scarf around Zoey's head like an Eastern European refugee, and drags her away. Guess what? Zoey gets super weird.
Zoey closes her eyes, alone in the hallway, and breathes like she's meditating. "Dear Dr. O'Hara, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the lovely scarf." She then makes an amazing noise: "Ooh! Stationary. And stamps. Mmmgh," she growls, "Stamps!"
Jackie's got Eleanor on I guess fluids when Sam comes in to see what's up. Jackie tries to chase him away because she is mean, and Eleanor immediately gets all over his hotness. He correctly identifies her accent ("London with a touch of Sussex") and explains that he spent Junior year in England: "I'm kind of an anglophile." Eleanor chuckles and says, by way of a startling but titillating coincidence, "How convenient. I'm an Anglo!" She eagerly admits that she's dehydrated and feels "like humping the world," and Sam is adorable with her. Of course, he immediately wants to know if Eleanor has a drug problem, and Jackie explains that her mom just died and she just went clubbing a little hard... And then remembers that she hates Sam, and interrupts herself to tell him to fuck off.
They are a joy to watch. I hope their relationship evolves past this, because it's super fun and makes the point really well -- and I love how he's completely right about everybody even though he's rehab-evangelist guy, and the enemy -- but "Jackie is mean to Sam again" seems like the kind of thing this show might check off in every episode all season long and never do anything with it.
Jackie heads back to work, but not before getting some magazines for Eleanor -- who does an interpretive dance to make her request -- which means heading for Thor's secret stash of tacky celebrity rags. When she points out how gross they are, Thor's all, "Please don't amplify my shame." Eleanor, of course, zeroes in on Goldie and Kate, and gets right back into mommy weirdness: "Mother and daughter, together, just... Loving each other. I should've called my mother more often. Did you know that when I was at university we used to speak to each other every day? I'd forgotten how affectionate she was on the phone." But it's Eleanor, so wait for the punchline: "Speaking of, I can't figure out how to delete her from my contacts." Heh. Eleanor's constant struggle with what she thinks normal people are like.
Sam sludges his way on over to the bar, where Kevin is replacing a window AC unit, and calls him a "strong man," reigniting their bromance, and they talk about Jackie mostly, of course. Kevin's impressed that he remembered about the replacement ring last season, and they are right back in each other's orbit. For his update, Eddie explains about his sad stalkery suicide attempt, but the hoped-for freaking out of Kevin goes a little too far -- he actually looks stricken -- so Eddie turns it around into a "joke" of sorts, and they clink beers, toasting love and women and Jackie, and everything is fine. The slow burn of Kevin and Eddie is really effective because whether Eddie is crazy or not is as invalid and pointless a question as whether Jackie is crazy or not, so every scene together you're like, "Maybe he will freak out, maybe he won't. Maybe he'll kill Kevin, maybe they'll have a snack." It's exactly as creepy and quiet as every other ticking bomb on this show, for the same reasons.
Coop douches around with the little boy Harry, and explains the sweat test -- bundle him up and then measure the chloride in his perspiration -- but of course Jackie already explained it. Coop and Jackie start their usual dick-swinging competition about who's in charge and who's the authority and who's more competent and whom the parents should love more -- again he says "nurse" like it's a swear word -- but the whole thing is curiously amped up and overt this time. It's sort of intimidating, actually, I think partly because the parents are sitting right there but also because having it this early in the episode means that little kid is totally doomed.
Coop wanders away tweeting, explaining Twitter and whatever, and Jackie's like, "You're online talking about that little boy?" He says it's all anonymous, except for the important part -- him -- and asks her if, as a reader, she'd know "cys fib" means "cystic fibrosis," because he's only got so many characters to play with. She explains that "eff you" means "eat shit," and disappears, and Coop decides to send another tweet about how she's a bitch. I love Twitter because it's retarded, but -- like Twilight, or the word "foodie," or 3-D movies -- it's happening. And that is precisely why I love Fitch Coop. He's like the human equivalent of Twitter.
What is everybody? If Zoey were a website she'd obviously be LOLcats or Cute Overload. Eleanor would be somewhere between Goop and Gawker. Jackie is like some kind of role-playing game with giant hammers you swing and kill people. Gloria would be, like, the Drudge Report. All-caps martinet. Or fuckin' Jezebel. Eddie is the cheap bachelor stuff in psycho-looking apartments that defines Craigslist. Kevin, he has something to do with fantasy football -- Deadspin, maybe. Thor is somewhere between TWoP and IBDB, he's too nice for Datalounge. Fiona is easily 4chan or Something Awful, and Grace is utterly totally and completely Livejournal. Sam is all the porn that exists in this world, and God is the comments on IMDB and Youtube. And I guess Mo-Mo is Myspace, now. Awww.
Outside, Zoey dumbly mispronounces Hermés, which humor I thought we all agreed is over, when Sam approaches to bug her about everybody's obvious drug problems. She google-eyes about O'Hara for awhile, doesn't give Jackie's issues a second thought, and then explains that, in case he was wondering which he wasn't, she's not on drugs either. "Although when I go to Great Adventure, I do take Dramamine. Because once on Rolling Thunder, I yacked. And it was a huge bummer." That's pretty funny, but the various gestures involved -- the vomit coming out and then flying back in her face -- push it into genius territory. Bummer indeed. That's when God starts screaming.
Zoey points out God to Sam, explaining that she used to be scared of Him, but now she doesn't mind. "...Oh, and He's crazy," she says, like it's an afterthought and not the main point. Sam, of course, immediately falls in love with Him as He screams at passerby after passerby, and they're treated to the first person ever to react to Him directly, besides Jackie, when a "pizza face" who "shall never marry" picks up a bottle and slugs Him from the street. But I gotta say, honey, with a body like that nobody's going to notice the face. While Sam stares, Zoey runs inside with her hands going all wild, yelling, "God's down!"
They wheel God into the ER as He screams at them about the usual, how they're all pimps and whores and are moments from being smitten, and they order Him up some Vitamin H. I love it when they call it that. Jackie hands Thor the syringe of Haldol, but he doesn't see her on his left side, and she finally has to pat him on the shoulder. (Oh, damn it. Diabetes reveal last week and no peripheral vision this week? That's serious. The cake addiction thing wasn't just a joke, it was a legit parallel. That fucking sucks. I love Thor.) Jackie fills everybody in on how God's schizophrenic and off His meds, and Coop breaks out in a huge smile when he sees Him.
"I know this guy! He told me I was super handsome, like Clark Gable!" God stares up at Coop's ridiculous grin and retracts the statement, which causes Coop to actually swallow his smile, like Rizzo with a cigarette. Zoey winks at God while she's taking His vitals, and is very cute. He tells her she's an angel, which -- since His opinion no longer means anything now that He retracted -- Coop finds funny enough to tweet. Jackie tells him to knock it off, and he starts a new one: "Bitchy nurse being bitchy again..." Which, this is a woman who won't even tell people she has kids or a husband, which is nuts on its own, and you're going to talk about her on the internet? Oh, Fitch. She freaks out, of course, and makes five funny mean faces at him.
Later, Hermés scarf cutely tying her hair back, Zoey thanks God for calling her an angel. As usual it's nutty and beautiful and strange: "When I was younger, I actually thought I was an angel because I had a round face. And I thought about becoming a nun -- Sound Of Music -- but I really like boys, so I didn't. Not all boys, there's one boy. More man. Man-boy. He's totally... Picka picka picka picka." This last with a happy little shrug that I guess implies that he's all over the place, or gives her certain feelings, or something between the two. She realizes talking about boys with God is sort of weird, and he stops swallowing long enough to speak up.
He saw something, when He hit His divine head. "Like what?" she asks, understandingly: "Like a bottle whizzing towards you?" Her delivery here is excellent, as usual. But no, it was a tunnel with a bright light at the end, and at the end of the tunnel was God. But isn't God God? "I mean, I thought you thought you were God." They work through this idea together, because doesn't that mean that He's not God? Yeah, he immediately starts flipping out and screaming, and she screams too, hopping like Paquin, and she runs out to Jackie, who sends her right back in there to handle it.
Brilliant scene transition. So now that Zoey's back in with screaming God, Jackie drops the Easter pills from earlier, which Sam immediately picks up and as
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ks her what to do with them. Of course, she says to give them to her, and he says no, because they're not hers, and she gets more and more stressed as he keeps asking what he's supposed to do with them, like officially, and her wheels are turning and his eyes are watching her and his wheels are turning and he asks why she's acting desperate and she offers to kick the shit out of him, and then she pulls a classic Jackie out of her hat: "Come with me."
There's a little locked locker on the wall of the Pyxis room, where there's a little slot you drop them in. Of course, seconds later she comes back with the key and retrieves them, but it's awesome because of all the pill-heads on this show constantly scanning the floor for drugs, only Sam is going to trot over to that little box every time. So now whenever he finds something, she's going to get them there, and that's brilliant.
Out in the Virgin Mary hallway, a guy is replacing the smoke detectors, which reminds Jackie of how her daughter is insane. Something about today, maybe Harry, has reminded the king of her kingdom. She calls Kevin and tells him to get one of their regulars, a firefighter named Luis, to visit Grace and explain to her that the house is not just randomly going to burn down. They already have the best smoke detector they make; she can stand down for a little while. She can breathe.
Kevin's impressed, because that's very smart and also means that Jackie was thinking about her kids. Meanwhile, Eddie's still at the bar being creepy and then immediately changing the subject: "Is that your wife? I fuckin' love beer nuts!" Kevin is so easily played. Lucky for Nurse Jackie!
Gloria is having an adorable fight with a piece of tape from her desk dispenser when Jackie drops in. "First of all, Coop will not stop twittering. It is interfering with work and it's pissing me off." Gloria tells her about the formal complaint -- for "insubordination and general bitchiness" -- and Jackie sputters hilariously: "Insubord... Fuckin'-A Twitter tweetering fuckin' dickhead." Exactly.
The second thing is Sam. "Like every newly-sober person, he's convinced that everyone around him is an addict. It's like the born-again guy we had last year." Which, wouldn't it be funny if he were some kind of narc or sleeper and they chose him for that purpose? I mean, I don't think that's the case, but it's funny that we have a zealot at the same time as Jackie's drug-stealing has caused a crackdown.
"Also, one of my nurses needs a pediatric psych referral." Wow, Jackie. Way to step up, finally. I guess Grace got crazy enough that it started threatening her a little. Maybe the metaphors are getting too hard to ignore. Gloria isn't really interested at first, just starts asking demographic questions about the kid, but Jackie's immortal resistance to anybody knowing the facts about her life immediately turns Gloria on like a switch. Jackie finally gets so anxious that she tries to leave, but Gloria relents and gives her a name. Jackie leaves, and Gloria says quietly, "She was tremendously helpful with my boy," and Jackie doesn't quite look her in the eye, but thanks her again.
Which is a great scene, except how does that relate to the baby thing last year? I'm willing to believe, with this show, that they honestly just forgot, but we can just impute at this time that maybe her baby-crazy thing was a result of losing touch with (or just, you know, losing) her own crazy son. Either way, I love it when their history comes out in these begrudgingly sweet ways.
Jackie heads down to check on Harry's test results, and the lady -- politely, firmly -- says like ten times that she can't release them, but Jackie works every angle with those Addict Skillz until finally lighting on the woman's incredibly cute three-month-old. "Smiling yet?" You can almost see the woman start lactating, and you know Jackie's in: "It's really awful when they get sick," she says, which gets the job done, but is also about Grace. Smoke isn't fire. And the opposite is also true: The lack of smoke does not denote a lack of fire. Finally the woman tells her that, though the whole run's not complete, the prelims look good. Jackie leaves with an air of friendliness about her, like they're complicit, and when she's gone the lady picks up her baby's picture and stares, mesmerized by Jackie's powers.
Jackie tries to be even-handed with the parents -- "You have to keep in mind that the doctor has not seen the results yet..." -- but their fear and subsequent relief feels so good that she drops the act and tells them to go home. They cry and weep and thank her, and somewhere over her head a little tally mark appears: Jackie one million, Coop zero yet again. They treat her like a tiny God. And on a normal week, that would be fine -- the king's in her kingdom, all's right with the world -- and Coop could piss himself and do whatever white male stuff he's gonna do. But not this week. Not the week that God took a look at Himself and started screaming.
Something replaced Shea Stadium, and Eddie wants to take Kevin there so they can make out man-style under the blinding bright lights and eat hot dogs and watch whatever sport they do there and continue to stare into each other's eyes forever. I mean, there's a way in which Eddie's Addict Skillz are interfacing with Kevin's Codependent Skillz -- the faulty wiring all around -- that make this whole thing believable and not just straight-up stalking, but it's still funny to see how hard Eddie goes for it. I mean, last year Coop was on everybody's dick and it was funny because of how lonely he is, but with Eddie, it's like he will come to your place of business and sit there all day asking weird questions that make you feel special, and has that thing he has that makes you like him -- that made Jackie fall for him -- and it's like lasers coming at you. Like, everything that Jackie can't do for you.
Jackie sits in the chapel breathing to herself, but overhears Thor secretly eating donuts and rustling the packaging. He swears it's not what she thinks -- donut dust all over his entire body, lying back hidden in a pew -- but she immediately comes after him about the peripheral vision. "Today in trauma with God, I had my hand to your face for about twenty minutes before you saw it. Also, I just kind of used my Spidey Sense?" He admits that it's done, and that she's the only one who knows -- not even his new boyfriend knows about this particular breakdown. He thanks her for covering, and then offers to show her his shell: They hand-paint them to match. She's amazing about it, of course, and sits back. Clearly, Thor understands the degree to which his habits are fucking him up. No more nagging, now that she knows they're the same. Their faulty wiring.
Thor's opinion on Sam, when she changes the subject: "Well? I think he's really smart. And incredibly cute. And I think he's probably an excellent nurse..." And when Jackie says she doesn't like him, he nods, "Yeah, he's dead to me." Very cute. I wish everybody liked Sam. Or else that he is evil. I like Jackie hating Sam, but not anybody else. I just want to see her to get claustrophobic and limited again and it seems like Sam is the best way to do it. Surround her with smoke detectors, like a magic circle, until something starts beeping.
God's wearing some kind of ridiculous silk robe and Zoey's just hanging out with him in His window, like you do -- just go home with a screaming schizophrenic -- and talks God into screaming at some people. Like, maybe His life isn't a sham, and He's like Jesus: Not God, but somebody "really important in the religious hierarchal stratification." Maybe he's God's nephew, or His brother-in-law. By the time she's back downstairs, she's fixed God's wiring and He can see her soul again: "Strumpet with the thinning hair! I can see your soul! You whore!" It doesn't even bother her anymore. She just nods and thinks about her man-boy and heads back to work. "Lather, rinse, repeat! That's how they'll get you!"
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Coop comes looking for Harry and Jackie gets pissy immediately: "I sent them home. Why don't you run to Akalitus and lodge a formal complaint?" But this is the one day a year where Fitch Coop stops acting like a "doctor" and starts acting like a human: He jumps over the dig and right into freaking out. Jackie talks down to him like usual, like every day -- "What don't you understand? They were sitting here for over six hours while you were dicking around somewhere!" -- but today, it doesn't work. The final results were positive. Harry's got CF. Twenty years or less of breathing treatments, and then a transplant or death.
Ice runs down Jackie's spine, like you can practically hear that blood sound in her ears, and he pulls out every Jackie trick he's ever seen, the high-handed righteousness and all, and storms away to call them. Jackie, of course, asks if she can be the one to call them, and he throws down the chart. And it sucks because Jackie's amazing, but it's awesome because she's so rarely wrong and Coop's so rarely justified that the fact that he got pissed in such a professional way is sort of a charge somehow.
So what do you do? Jackie goes home, back stooped, and sits at the kitchen table, and starts unwrapping a gift: The best smoke detector they make, so Grace can breathe. For a little while.
Discuss this episode in our Nurse Jackie forums, then debate why men like a woman in scrubs in TV is the Answer!
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