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Jackie suggests pot for a cancer patient, so of course Coop throws a huge stupid fit. This causes Jackie to obsess on the guy -- skillfully crafting apple bongs, setting him up with connections -- while everything comes down around her: By the end, she's cleaning out the guy's fridge and making him pot chocolate chip cookies while Eddie steals Kevin for their, like, 50th man-date.
He's really getting creepy. Well, "getting." This week's insane thing is doing the one-sided phone call on her kitchen phone with Kevin standing right there. ("Sure we'll have fun, but not too much fun, Mrs. Peyton!") But this only comes after she threatens him at work for the constant stalking, including a fierce little tantrum, and admits privately to Eleanor that she might still love him.
When Eleanor and Thor learn Nemesis Sam is a sex addict (in addition to the other things), Thor drops his crushy attempt to help while Eleanor fucks him in the chapel, despite the fact that they both claim to have girlfriends (?!). And Coop is still tweeting away his one-note joke that's now officially tired and super-dorky.
Zoey starts the day scaring the shit out of Thor by illegally intubating a cyanotic kid to keep him stable until Eleanor steps in. She spends the whole episode desperately emulating Jackie in every possible way, but when Eleanor brings her flowers for the secret intubation, only Jackie can understand the weird reaction that follows: Zoey's pregnant, probably by that cute EMT Lenny that liked her last year.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!No drugs this opening, just a very intense Jackie walking past construction and straight into Eddie's pharmacy like the hounds of hell. At least she waits for him to tell his customer Mrs. Feinberg about her medications, and helpfully tossing in a bunch of contraindications and tips without even thinking about it ("Don't take any antacids 'til morning. Be careful about getting up too fast. You might have some dizziness. Good luck") in a way that's hardcore and beautiful in exactly the way she always is. She takes care of other people without even thinking about it, just to get them off her plate. The lady stares at them for a second and Jackie screams, "Good luck!" Feinberg out.
"My house? My kids? Are you out of your fucking mind?" I'm not sure we've ever seen her this mad, I mean, she's always pissed about something, but this is a serious seething rage. It's totally terrifying. And he deserves it. "I miss you," he mealy-mouths, and she explains that showing up at her house is the behavior of a fucking psychopath. He says she's one too, then, because she has turned off her heart and he can't, and then he levels an even truer thing: "You want to know what your problem is? You're fucking greedy is what you are." Valid, and we're done. He says, pointlessly, that she has a lot of pent-up anger, to which she slow-burns that he has no fucking idea what he is unleashing, and then knocks over a whole pyramid of bottles on her way out.
Dude, if that doesn't scare you... I mean, this is a woman who will break her own finger with a hammer just so she doesn't have to talk to people about her problems. When you are the problems? You got ten fingers, bitch. She pastes on a smile as she's crossing the street away from the pharmacy, terrified enough to schedule a Date Night with Kevin complete with sending the girls to his sister's for the night. Kevin is overjoyed, because Kevin has no idea that this is just one more Jenga piece in the boardgame of today. But I confess I'm a little confused too: How will one Date Night keep Eddie from crawling all over Kevin's jock tomorrow?
Sam babbles at Zoey about how he loves not temping, because once he was like Jackie and didn't like to get close to people -- so he temped instead of inventing multiple families and backstories for himself -- but now he's into joining like softball teams or whatever's clever. We take care of people when we can't take care of ourselves; we take care of ourselves when we remember who we are. Zoey, for whom Becoming Jackie is something of a theme this week, finally blows him off with a "Sam? I don't do chatty." You can tell she's proud of herself. But the moment doesn't last -- a screaming lady comes in with an unbreathing baby, and Zoey takes control, paging O'Hara and asking if Jackie's arrived before laying the kid down in an ER bed and getting to work with Thor.
They work efficiently and admirably, but the kid stops breathing and Zoey kicks into high gear, deciding to intubate even though they're not allowed to do it. Thor, of course, gives the words of protest but also snaps into gear, and Zoey does a brilliant job. It's funny that we've watched enough TV that even without ever working or being in a hospital the sight of watching Thor and Zoey intubate a little kid seems wrong somehow, no matter how quickly and well they do it.
The kid's color comes back, but then they lose his pulse, so Thor does the breathing while Zoey does compressions, and Thor's impressed -- just as Eleanor's walking in. "Zoey just saved his life... Twice. Also she intubated. Don't be mad. No one can know. She could lose her license." I think that's the most words Thor ever said. Eleanor stares at him for a sec after she bounces, and then tells him to just stop talking about the legal issues here. Outside, Zoey gives Eleanor all the credit for the save and goes, "Dr. O'Hara's here now. She's an amazing doctor." Zoey is pretty much neat as hell this week.
At the station, Jackie and Thor talk about how nasty Lenny is (Doritos, Mountain Dew and dip) and the second Zoey appears Lenny congratulates her on the save earlier. Zoey keeps her head down -- "I just made sure someone didn't die" -- and Thor tells it the way they've agreed to tell it, that O'Hara swooped in, "in her Oscar de la Renta skirt" at the last moment. "He's alive, that's what matters," mumbles Zoey a little more proudly, and Thor grins at her. Lenny tells a story about this one time he shocked somebody back to life, and Zoey is drawn in, but remembers to tell him his food stinks, so he leaves.
"Did you intubate without a doctor?" Zoey doesn't smile yet, but when Jackie says how risky it was, she grins hugely. "Just doing what you would have done." Jackie hands her a warning tone and Zoey, feeling her oats today more than ever, doesn't drop that sly crazy smile of hers: "Huh. I never would have pegged you as someone to give me shit for getting the job done." Jackie's surprised, and just kind of stares as she wanders away. Gloria wanders through with a barked drive-by to Lenny -- "Don't eat by the urine" -- before summoning Jackie to her office later for unspecified reasons, without either of them looking at the other.
There's something about Coop's satisfied "Here, good" when Jackie enters that lets you know shit is about to get bureaucratic. Good. Maybe if he's being a cocksucker he'll forget to talk about Twitter for like one second. The patient has Stage III lymphoma, which is bad, but his third-round chemo nausea is so intense that he's terribly dehydrated. Man. This show is so many ticking timebombs that you forget just how dirty your body can get on you. Jackie runs through all the possible medications he's tried -- while simultaneously holding the barf bucket and starting his IV -- and all the side effects that resulted. It's depressing. Coop completely tunes out how bad it is, and the guy's like, "I know you've seen worse, but maybe I should just die." Jackie suggests he try pot, and Coop's jaw drops to the floor.
"I'm a tour guide for the Red Line. I do crosswords and I sing in a barbershop quartet. And I'm single. Obviously. Where's a guy like me gonna find pot?" Coop finally jumps in there to interrupt before Jackie can offer him an actual connection, and she wraps him up so tenderly I will admit, a few tears sprung up. Outside, Coop flips out for a sec before Jackie even figures out what he's flipping about, and then she's like, "Oh God no," like, we're really going to go here. Coop instructs her at length, and she calls bullshit: "Is this part of the new image? The Top 25 New York Fucking Douchebag Doctors?"
Jackie points out that on any other Showtime show, or in lots of other states, he'd have already at least gotten to try medical marijuana, and she's really cool about it, talking to him like a man for once. Of course, Coop is officious and awful about it, and she stands her ground and says that she's going to go ahead and do her job, which is offering solutions to the guy's horrible situation. "No you're not!" Coop bitches. "I make suggestions, you listen and agree!" He offers to go over Gloria's head -- which is who, God? -- and Jackie snorts as if there's anybody more special or authoritative than Fitch Cooper, and it's fairly devastating even though she says it to the back of his head.
Sam's still feeling chatty while Eleanor works on some unconscious dude, all about how he thought it would be weirder to be around the drugs. Finally he ends up behind her, both of them inspecting the chart, and the music tells you things are about to get hetero. "My sponsor thinks I'm a sex addict," he murmurs, and she doesn't look up. "Were you standing this close to her when she told you that?" He's a guy, but yeah. Heh. Sex addicts and their creepy ways. "We can't all be saints," she says loftily, and then we cut to them fucking in the chapel. (No! Yes!) During what seems to be like a jolly good time up against a pew, he goes, "I have a girlfriend!" So does Eleanor, apparently.
"So I was wondering if you had a chance to call that pediatric psychiatrist I recommended?" Jackie knows that Gloria knows that Jackie knows that they're both talking about Gracie -- her kids being something of an open secret I still don't quite understand logistically -- and she's like, "We're really going to talk about this." Gloria tells her to forget she asked, but she doesn't mean it: "Jackie, people put up walls for a reason. And from time to time the people around us pipe up. You need to tear down that wall." Jackie, who invented Being Those People, swears she's not one of Those People, but it only takes a bit of nudging for one tiny brick in one of the walls to come down.
"She's only ten. She fixates on the strangest things. She'd rather watch a fire safety video than High School Musical. We can't get in to see Dr. Bowen until month." Satisfied -- both that Jackie let off a little of the constant pressure and that Jackie has accepted her demonstration of caring -- Gloria assures her Bowen's worth the wait. "Apparently she's also on the list of the hottest doctors in New York," Jackie says, leaning back, which gets us to a better topic: "Is it my imagination or is Coop even more of a shit than he used to be?" Heh.
Gloria does her classic Akalitus move of talking the talk while making clear they're both just going through the motions: "I understand where he's coming from. Dr. Cooper simply does not want nurses to advise patients to use illegal substances to relieve pain or nausea. Advocating for a patient to pursue illegal drugs when they are under our care here at All Saints Hospital..." Jackie gets it, and asks to leave. At the door, Gloria swears she's not a prude -- "I was at Woodstock, for Christ's sake!" -- earns the only possible response you give one of those adorable Boomers when they say that shit, "No you weren't," while frowny-grinning. The more Jackie likes Gloria, the more I like Jackie.
Jackie can't believe that Lenny's still around, but he says he's been out and back twice already. He shows around a caricature he got somebody to draw of Zoey from his phone -- it's cute, and exactly what you think, considering she's already a caricature -- and Zoey shows up to scream at him to put it away. It's adorable. Eleanor appears and rattles off some doctor stuff, and Jackie stares at her and her après-sex hair for approximately one second before ordering her to go to lunch. Now.
Eleanor giggles under Jackie's walleyed stare and admits that she shagged a nurse, in the chapel no less, which is horrifying but not as horrifying as the part, which Jackie already has intuited: That it was Sam. Eleanor laughs about how he's a recovering addict, and Jackie says that's just one of the many, many problems she has with him. Eleanor says that without booze and sex and drugs it's a wonder he gets out of bed in the morning: Maybe a shag in front of Jesus is what will keep him alive. Jackie wants to barf, and Eleanor giggles about that because she knows how much Jackie hates him, and changes the subject to Eddie.
"It's over. It's done. It's... You know, whatever we had is now a big fat fucked-up mess." Eleanor points out that in addition to the usual obstructions we can have in relationships -- stalking, drug trafficking, suicide attempts, am I right ladies? -- there's also Jackie's whole marriage and family. Which, of course, Eleanor knows just how much of a bummer those things can be, considering Kevin always acts like it's Eleanor trying to fuck Jackie all the time. "I think the overdosing stalker in him was just lying dormant," Eleanor says, and wonders if he's maybe going to tell Kevin the whole thing. Jackie says no, because what would he have then? Which kind of tells you she's not done with him.
"Everyone's life in ruins? If-I-can't-have-her-no-one-can kind of thing?" Jackie's sure -- and she knows people, it's her magic power -- that he's not that guy. She says that he loves her, no matter what, even if there's a little bit of hate in there now. Eleanor asks the big question: Does Jackie love him? The answer is yes, but answering the question is a bridge too far for old Jackie, because that would make it cheating instead of an exquisite demonstration of denial and Addict Skillz. Eleanor says she doesn't judge either way, and that she expects the same from Jackie, even though it's Sam. I say: Look at Sam. There's your alibi. Just look at him and ask yourself if the normal rules apply. Not wanting to talk about either of their adultery boyfriends, Jackie decides lunch is over. Eleanor stays behind, to do God knows what sneakiness. It involves a bouquet, we'll see.
Eddie comes to the bar to woo Kevin once again with some kind of sport activity, but Jackie has cockblocked them with Date Night. Eddie starts applying pressure in his mysteriously unpressuring, passive way, and you know that this will somehow be going his way, because Eddie is becoming the wife Jackie could never be. She's his hobby now, and Kevin.
Sam wigs and freaks and feels like a failure so volubly that Thor offers to be his "workplace sponsor" despite not being in recovery (not even for his wedding cake addiction). We take care of other people when we can't take care of ourselves. Especially if they're epically hot. It's very sweet and tender and Sam wraps him in a gorgeous hug before admitting that he slipped: "I slept with a doctor." Thor immediately and hilariously turns off every cute and kind part of himself and goes icy and cold and leaves with an abruptness so wild you might think he was channeling Zoey channeling Jackie. I love how firstly Thor is like Nation of Islam when it comes to doctors versus nurses, and secondly how even on this show, which is literally about these issues, sex addicts are still treated like the eating disorders of recovery. Boo-hoo.
I mean, I'm not that callous about it now because all that shit is self-harming and I don't understand treating yourself poorly, but even sex addiction -- and eating disorders, to a lesser extent -- eventually I stopped rolling my eyes about. I was not a believer until I saw the first few seconds of Sex Rehab with that wonderful Dr. Drew and had to change the channel and go throw up forever when I heard the intake questions: "Have you ever masturbated to the point of self-injury?" I was like, I'm out, motherfuckers. In that moment, sex addiction became all too real to me, because WTF did you just say?
In the same way, I think Thor's storyline is the most relevant of all, because if everybody's in some way a mirror for Jackie -- like how on Nip/Tuck there wer
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e only two or three characters, no matter how many faces you saw -- then looking at the whole Things That Feel Good/Comfort Food trap is a great way to get there. If the things that make us feel good are the things that are doing the damage, then you're right back to DFW's Addiction 101: Making the long-term choice over the short-term choice. With serious drugs that's a choice you make every few days or months or whatever the cycle, but if you're talking about the food that's killing you, killing your actual body, that's a choice you're making every second that you're awake. And everybody around you is also addicted, and the ones that aren't are much more annoying about it anyway.
I mean, I'm fairly liberal about drugs in general, like, I don't see a reason to regulate them because sugar and caffeine are used the same way other drugs are used, and kill people more often than real drugs, and are more readily available to feed an even larger host of creepy needs than the drugs we're told are evil and whatever. Not that I'm opposed to their use, in either case -- well, meth is tacky -- but in general, it's a personal issue, and it's only an ethical issue because of the Prohibition mobster situation we've created.
So to me, Thor's falling-apart body is more touching and more terrifying than the six miles of hell Jackie's putting everybody else through all the time, because the real face of addiction is not some crazy-eyed spun freak, the real face of addiction is lots of the people around you, slowly doing themselves in. Not to mention that the addiction and the psycho behavior come from the same root -- they aren't causal one way or the other, but symptoms of the actual problem -- and Thor's stuff demonstrates that better than anybody else on the show. I respect the show, and Stephen Wallem, for going there so intensely and fearlessly, because that's when it stops being a cautionary tale and just becomes a tale.
Puking lymphoma guy is checking out, with some new prescription and the name of a biofeedback clinic (rimshot!), and Jackie's sad about that, but even sadder when she sees how slowly he's moving. He's in terrible pain and completely sickened, and All Saints has not done its job. She wheels the guy past Coop -- snatching a pen from his pocket as he brags to Zoey about his goddamned Twitter some more -- and Zoey grins and wanders away from him, and then out past the food trays, snatching an apple before recruiting Lenny and heading out to his rig. Episode title, you've got me all excited.
Jackie puts together a righteous apple bong in about two seconds, in the back of Lenny's EMT van, and walks the guy through his first experience with weed, and it's great. Lenny's like, "How'd you know I have pot?" Mountain Dew and Doritos. She tells him she learned to make the apple bong at Jones Beach, during a Toto concert, and he laughs at her, and she laughs it off, and it's awesome. She sends Lenny -- he's just so cute! -- to take him home, hook him up with some munchies, and tells him to turn on the sirens once they hit Park Ave. So great! I don't think that marijuana is automatically funny, and so I think my threshold for pot humor is even higher than a normal person, but a well-done pot scene is so great because it's like the secret life of people.
Coop is a little less high-handed but just as much a little boy playing dressup as he sort of tries to curry favor while simultaneously declaring territory: "Hey, Jackie, I think I'm gonna personally follow up with Mr. Vobernick. I'm gonna call him week, see how the medication's working..." Jackie knows he'll be happy as hell to hear from Coop, who downshifts to try and condescend a bit. "I know I seemed like a tight-ass earlier, but you do understand with the List, and the Twitter following, I have even more of an example to set around here now." I would run. I would just drop my shit and yank up my pants and bust ass away from there.
Coop mentions his strong feelings that "we need to use what science and medicine" -- and Big Pharma, and the incredibly corrupt insurance lobby -- "Have given us to treat patients." Jackie gets it, but also believes in Mother Nature. Her smile is surprisingly indulgent at this time, because he's being so cute. Coop tries to convince her that he's "tried the reefer" before, and it's pathetic and adorable, and finally she's like, "Are you... Trying to whistle?" She "gets it" and grins until he walks away, at which point she makes a total death face. Well, I would have given him that one.
Eleanor drops a seriously lovely pink-and-white bouquet on the nurse's station counter, keeping her eyes off Zoey as she explains they're for her. So, so sweet. Zoey drops her head and immediately heads to NICU; knowing something's up, Jackie jumps into the elevator just behind her, and they stand unspeaking at the window for awhile, looking at the kid she saved. Finally Jackie asks if that's the kid, and Zoey says yes, and without looking up admits she might be pregnant. We take care of other people when we can't take care of ourselves: Addiction or not, it doesn't invalidate it. Jackie touches her hair, for just a moment, and stands with her in silence, looking in. We take care of other people.
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Kevin calls to see if they can postpone Date Night so he can go on a pre-date with Eddie to a Mets game. Jackie lightly asks to say hi to Eddie, and Kevin giggles and drinks beer while a seriously creepy conversation goes down. Jackie's like, "Don't you fucking dare, don't do this, quit romancing my husband, you're so scary," and Eddie grins and acts like she's being a battleaxe -- "Don't worry, I won't keep him out late. I know tonight's a special one for you! Promise, no beers!" -- and you can feel like the grains of her entire life slipping maybe through her hands. She's so in control of totally everything in the universe that you can just feel the fingernail-chalkboard sound of this going through her head. It's sort of terrifying just to think about being Jackie for this moment. Usually, it's just sad and gross and kind of awesome, but for a second you really buy the horror.
Jackie mixes up a few batches of pot cookies -- not brownies? -- loads 'em into some Tupperware, and takes them to Lymphoma Guy. He's like, "A nurse that bakes!" It's sweet. She hooks him up with Lenny's dealer, who has been made aware of the situation, and takes the cookies over to his fridge, which he hasn't used in a good long time. While he watches the very Mets game where her life may or may not be falling apart, Jackie cleans out his fridge for him. We take care of people.
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