In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
They've got these nearly life-size standups of Fitch Cooper The Face Of All Saints everywhere in the hospital, and giant signs in the subway and on the streets. This of course drives our ladies mental, and it's only a matter of time before one of them is defaced: I GRAB BOOBS. Gloria's response is eloquent, hilarious, and befitting her majesty.
Also grabbing boobs these days: Eleanor O'Hara, whose fervent lesbian situation freaks Jackie out at first. Seeing Eleanor giggly and romantic is weird and wonderful, but watching butch Jackie Peyton squirm between the two lip-stickingest TV lesbians in history is just plain wonderful. Eventually girlfriend Sarah's bedside manner -- with the husband of a doomed and suicidal soldier -- charms her into complacency, but we'll see where this is headed.
Other boobs getting grabbed include those of Zoey, by Zoey herself, as she tries to confirm whether she's pregnant based entirely on psychic powers. This in an episode-long stream of babble so intense than people actually comment on how weird Zoey's being. (Compared to what?) See the episode title for the answer to this little arc.
And finally, there's fuckin' Eddie, who has continued seeing Kevin despite Jackie's resuming their relationship. Over beer and ping-pong with the two of them, Jackie puts Eddie on notice. Yeah, that's what you should do: Taunt the obsessed psycho. Speaking of, Jackie snorts capsaicin and goes head-to-head with a rich dick guy, and Horrible Little Caitlyn Flynn, in remarkable but characteristically violent ways.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Fake-out drug image this week, accompanied by a wintry-sounding breeze and the drop of an old record, is the snow in a commemorative Shea Stadium snowglobe. Eddie brings Jackie her morning coffee, black with a little milk, and she sighs contentedly. His apartment is the bomb, painted brown brick and wrought-iron four-poster. She congratulates him on having "worked through [his] cotton/poly-blend phase," and then makes fun of his record player. "Now I forget, you have heard of CD's, right?" He tells her to listen to the lows.
"I pretty much stopped listening to music when the Teletubbies moved into my home," Jackie says, although given her (and this show's) terrible taste in music, that was sort of implied. He laughs, surprising her with his Teletubbies knowledge, but that joke in 2010 doesn't make sense anyway. It's not Teletubbies or Wiggles anymore, it's Yo Gabba Gabba. (And more than likely, that's already over and it's something else my spies haven't let me know about yet. Angel?) [Yo Gabba Gabba (and its sex toy looking characters) is still the hip, popular thing with kids. -- Angel] Sometimes this show doesn't tell the joke so much as describe the comfortable place a joke might reside, and I really hate that. ATeletubbies joke would have made sense when I was in college, which was like fifteen years ago.
Or maybe she's lying and actually has no idea what they're into. Maybe the last time she did, it was Teletubbies. Or actually, maybe Fiona and Grace are separately and together so fucking insane that you might as well say "Teletubbies" because it's easier than saying "Bumfights and Ingmar Bergman movies about playing chess with Death, respectively."
Fiona's like, "I don't have time for Teletubbies, Mom! I got a mumblety-peg tournament in half an hour."
Grace is like, "Teletubbies are stupid, Mom. When was the last time Tinky-Winky set himself on fire outside an embassy building?"
Anyway, Jackie feels weird about talking about her kids, both because they are weird and because she's thigh-deep in the swimming pool of perdition, talking to sexy Eddie in his sexy apartment about her whole other life in the other universe with sexier Kevin and their sexier mortgage. He teases her about that, making it seem like a love thing, and she finally breaks down and tells him, for once, about her family and how she sees her life.
"Tonight, Gracie is having a sleepover with her friend Kaitlyn." They agree that Kaitlyn is the worst, and Eddie asks about Kevin, what about his old friend Kevin, what's he up to, and all the smiles about Horrible Kaitlyn drain away. "Okay. That, I can't do." Seriously. Never talk to the one about the other, that's as bad as the cheating because then it's like laughing at them. She tells him, pursuant to this latter cause, that he needs to stop bromancing her husband: While it's cute, it's also mindbendingly terrible.
Both because of the danger and because of this thing which I am still unable to voice but am beginning to grasp about Jackie, and I try to figure it out every week, but it has to do with the very understandable need to compartmentalize these two halves of her life while at the same time bringing them into conflict, in her mind, so it makes sense. It adds up to her whole life. And I feel like I understand it but it's hard to talk about. Essentially, without Kevin existing and making Eddie an Affair, she would be dating Eddie, which can't happen. And without Eddie, her life with Kevin got way too real, way too fast. And she started caring and getting nervous and anxious and jealous and all the things normal boring people get. But because her feelings are more intense and more special and more important than everybody else's... No, see, I had it and then I lost it again.
Point being, the streams can't cross in real life, because that ruins the whole illusion. It's only Jackie that's allowed to be like, "Go see a movie without me? Fine, I'll fuck a pharmacist." But for those worlds to actually touch, that's not only way dangerous but also runs counter to the desired effect, wherein she's the king of both kingdoms and they both have to do what she says, or else she'll just pop over to the other one. The fact that Kevin doesn't know about Eddie doesn't matter: It's about the feelings -- superiority, revenge, triumph -- that happen in her. She gets to have those feelings whether or not Kevin ever finds out. And if he does, the game's over: If Kevin's feelings mattered, or even existed -- if anybody besides the addict existed -- then none of this would be happening.
Eddie gives a sort of blowsy agreement, but immediately distracts Jackie with some pills -- I feel like part of this is that he likes Kevin, actually likes him, because they are very lonely people and have a lot in common and have spent a lot of time getting to know each other -- and of course this is her entrée to say that A) Her back is fine and B) The other reason she takes pills is also fine because C) She's there sleeping with him and waking up with him because she likes him, not because he's a drug dealer. Because we want things to be one or the other, and Jackie's the only one of us who truly understands ambiguity and it makes her really nervous when you try to pin her down. "You like me, huh?" he asks, and she's like, "What do you want me to say?" Then she gets the eff up out of there.
Back home from "work," Jackie smells the smell of Kevin cooking and apologizes for forgetting to pick up some movies they were planning on watching. She offers to run out again for them, but he's such a good husband and she spends so much time on her feet at work that he tells her to just chill. Rather than leaving, again, some more. There's a tiny edge of resentment when he tells her to "just stay here." He calls the girls in while Jackie gets a guilty little text -- "miss u, eddie" -- and Grace is wearing some tween clothing, a big shirt over leggings, that spells imminent body issue disaster. She wants a Coke, she cannot have a Coke, Jackie thanks her for asking so politely, Grace could give a shit about Jackie's opinions, etiquette or otherwise.
Fiona comes running in, and Horrible Kaitlyn fully trips her. Just sticks out her big mean leg and sends Fiona flying. She's a bitch to the point that it is amazing. Fiona screams and Kaitlyn mentions that the Peyton kitchen stinks, and acts horrible some more. Meanwhile, Fiona's wishing she had a broken arm so she could wear a cast, because that's exactly the sort of thing Fiona loves most. Kaitlyn pronounces this retarded, and Jackie's a little shocked at how brazenly horrible she is. They discuss juice choices, Fiona also would like a coke, and out of nowhere fuckin' Kaitlyn is like, "Hey, do you still wear diapers?" Alone in the kitchen with her, Jackie leans down sweetly: "Kaitlyn, honey? Listen to me. Shut the fuck up." So awesome.
Down in the basement, the Easter box is all empty of drugs, which makes Jackie sigh kind of sadly. Up on the couch, Jackie stares hatefully at Kaitlyn, and Kevin watches her hate the evil child for a bit, and then tells her to lighten up. Which, considering Horrible Kaitlyn's horrible mom would be sound advice, except Kaitlyn is still awful on an epic level, and frankly, none of the Flinns should be involved in our lives ever. I get that Kevin wants Grace to have like one friend -- and keeping the Flinns around as a constant reminder of Jackie's jealousy is a smart move too, if this is a war -- but you can't let your kids dictate who comes into your home. You're the grownup. Maybe Grace wouldn't be so awful if she didn't hang around with monsters like Kaitlyn Flinn. (Just kidding, it wouldn't matter.)
"Do you know what happened to my Joni Mitchell albums?" Jackie asks, apropos of nothing, although it does tell us that once she liked good music. Kaitlyn nearly flicks Fiona in the back of the head, looks up at Jackie -- whose eyes are bugging out with hatred and danger -- and then, hilariously, pets her hair like a dog instead. Fiona is just as disgusted by this as she would have been with the flick, and it's excellent.
Walking to work, Jackie spots the Face of All Saints: "If looks could cure," and can't decide whether to laugh or barf or punch somebody. In the ER, Zoey's being truly obnoxious and screaming at everybody to get it together, and yelling about how only she and Jackie are on their toes. It's a very Season One kind of awful today, Zoey-wise.
Kid with a messed-up arm needs to go to the bathroom, number two, which means somebody's got to help him wipe. Fitch nominates Jackie, of course, and she nominates Zoey, of course, and Zoey nominates Sam, of course. It's a funny moment. The kid recognizes the Face of All Saints, and things get unctuous. "You're a doctor? I thought you were a model. I mean, you look like a model..." Jackie is horrified by this, about which Coop naturally assumes that she's jealous. She snots at him about it, and he explains that he's "doing what it takes to bring the sick and the injured into this hospital, so that [he] can cure them." He tells them to call Ortho and notify them that "the face of All Saints is just about done here," and she tells him to help the kid in the bathroom. Coop whines, but Sam jumps to her rescue -- that's gotta smart -- and reminds him she's got the code coming in that Zoey was screaming about. Jackie gives Sam the point, this one time, and they run off to the other thing.
34-year-old female, lost control of her motorcycle on the FDR. She is effed up majorly, and there's a lot of talking over each other and O'Hara being magnificent, and everybody working together. Medical talk, medical talk, Zoey's putting in lines weirdly, Eleanor refers to the woman's leg as "a bit Humpty-Dumpty," and the woman, Jennifer, is clearly upset that she's still alive. She begs them not to treat her, and when Jackie promises to get her out of pain first, she nearly laughs. "Good fuckin' luck."
This lady is broken. Zoey notices a tattoo on her arm -- "All gave some, some gave all" -- and spazzes out about it. Zoey says you don't really need your spleen, Jackie disagrees, and Coop snottily ("She's right. Incredibly.") explains that we've just learned your spleen produces all your monocytes. "Hugs for the continuing education, Dr. Cooper. You'll let us know the big thing, won't you?" screams Eleanor, and he's miffed. "At least I get my information from medical journals, not from AOL like Jackie." Jackie shrugs. Out in the hallway is Trey, the person of the suicidal cyclist. Jackie explains about the ruptured spleen, promising not to sugarcoat anything for him. He almost passes out, and she attempts to comfort him as poorly as possible.
Out at the station, Jackie spots a pharmaceutical rep, and it gets really awkward -- it's his first day, and he's still all lit up with salesman spirit -- as he leans down to check out her badge and call her by name and talk over her multiple requests for him to get the fuck out of the ER, as he explains all of his drugs that he's got, and the whole time she's trying to physically evict him out of there. "This is an ER, Tony. People don't come here because they're sad. I mean, they do, but that's not..." He interrupts with something that catches her interest: "Um, you know what's exciting? Capsaicin. Studies show that it treats neuropathic pain better than any barbiturate in its class." Stops her right there.
Which I found confusing, because that's a chili pepper and not a narcotic, but on review it seems really neat. She's always given her back as the official reason for her drug use, and we're not about to suggest that she doesn't have a seriously fucked up back: That's the first line of this entire show, that she takes drugs so she can keep working. That's always been a part of it. So you tell her you've got something that treats nerve pain better than barbiturates, that's going to get her attention, because that's half the equation. Taking capsaicin for the pain separates her from the drug abuse.
She could even say to herself that with this organic compound she might be able to stop using. (She would say this quietly to herself, and not even hear herself, but the relief of physical pain is as real and necessary to her as the drugs are for her other kinds of pain. They are smokescreens for each other.) If she could get clear of the neural symptoms she might clear a space to look at the addiction head on. But that's not the point, the point is keeping everything separate: If this guy's claims are accurate, capsaicin would be like cheating on Eddie, with Kevin. Which has always been part of it, too.
He shovels pills into her hands, and she accepts them with the practiced nonchalance of a true user. In the bathroom, she pops a bunch. I hope she doesn't snort them! That seems like it would hurt. A lady comes in as she's getting rid of the packaging for this first dry-run, and she's caught uncharacteristically flat-footed, fussing with the paper towels and stuff like a kid caught with porn. "You believe this? Who knew women could be such pigs?" The lady darkly grunts, "Me," and Jackie leaves. I don't recognize that lady but it seems like such a weird, off moment that maybe there's a level I'm not getting here.
Zoey approaches the station and drops off the cyclist's chart, leaning on the counter and being super-duper weird. "Poor spleen. Minding its own business, then: Bam! Call it a day. Life as you know it is over. Ovah. C'est la vie. Wa-waaah." I can't really relate what's amazing about this moment, but it's a mix of strange accents, repeated rhythms, brain-dead staring, Catskills-esque mugging, and general weirdness. She wanders away with an additional weird noise, and finally Jackie calls her back, advising her that the Zoey Weirdness has reached its all-time. First of all, has had a pregnancy test? No, because she knows, because she knows her body -- "pretty well," she says, in a sort of naively suggestive way -- and particularly her breasts, which are acting weird. Jackie wanders away from the tender breasts, but Gloria sweeps through and grabs her for a meeting, and they leave Zoey cupping herself with strange posture.
Carrying a cardboard standup of the Face of All Saints, Gloria explains the good and bad news. "The good news is our endowment's intact, even though our revenues are down." The bad news is under her arm. "Listen," she barks. "If anyone knows what a crock of shit this is, it's me. But the hospital needs this to work, so get behind it." Jackie points out that advertising inside the hospital makes no sense, but Gloria doesn't care about that, because Gloria is used to assuming other people know what they're doing when they tell her to do stuff, because she is old and broken and has no hope.
"This is not our field of expertise, Jackie. Our PR people have a multi-pronged strategy. This is one of the prongs." Ba-dum. "They may not look like much to you, but each of these costs $286. Vandalizing or disfiguring any Dr. Coopers will be met by a shitstorm. Don't test me." I love that her first thought with the prongs was that Jackie was going to burn them all in effigy, because the first thing Jackie wants to do is burn them all in effigy.
O'Hara appears and laughs about how "all this" could have been hers, speaking of breast-cupping; Coop arrives and acts like a total prong until Eleanor points out that the cardboard Coop is just a tad smaller than the regular one. "It's a tiny little travesty," they joke, and he takes the high road before jabbing himself playfully on the shoulder and bouncing: "Fortunately, the face of All Saints is not petty."
As if enough things have not already coincidentally just happened in this hallway, what with random people showing up to say a line or two, Eleanor gets a text that makes her whole body freeze. Without looking, Jackie notices, and Eleanor whispers, "Turn around." Standing there is Sarah, her girlfriend, and Eleanor shows more emotion just looking at her than we've ever seen. They fall into each other's arms, laughing and crying, and Jackie stares.
"This is Jackie?" Sarah immediately recognizes her, and the idea of talking about your friends and loved ones is so foreign to Jackie that she can barely believe Eleanor talks about her. (Especially considering the last time she did that, when it caused a rift that seemed like it went on for ten years.) They immediately want to go to lunch and drag her along, but the whole situation brings Jackie's hypothetical openmindedness into conflict with the actual weirdness of seeing Eleanor with a woman, which conflict opens up a further conflict about whether or not she's an asshole for even blinking, which makes Jackie want to run quickly away from the whole situation, so she babbles about getting the fuck out of there because of all the sick people everywhere in this hospital, but then before you know it she's been kidnapped by two willowy brunettes and dragged to lunch.
With Sarah on her left and Eleanor on her right, constantly grabbing and snatching across her plate to touch her girlfriend, Jackie listens in her scrubs to them telling the story of how they drunkenly talked their way onto an American military base in "the Bavarian fucking Alps" by telling the guards they were the wives of colonels and generals, but then got caught because they couldn't keep their hands off each other, and eventually ended up explaining to "this gawking sergeant" that their husbands were in Kosovo and they'd ended up consoling each other. The whole time Jackie's getting more and more weirded out, as giggly-weird Eleanor crawls all over her like a licking puppy.
Neither of them really notice just how weird Jackie's feeling with this radical change in Eleanor, because they're making eyes and discussing Sarah's move to the Washington bureau. Eleanor gets a text about the latest ER case -- a man having been shot by an arrow, in the lung -- and they clear up. "Cupid's having a bad day," Jackie jokes. The women disagree. They fight over the bill, they caress each other's hands, Jackie makes some jealous-much joke about how Eleanor usually cleans her plate, and they don't even hear her because they're staring at each other so hard. Jackie is once again more awkward about this than we've ever seen her.
Which I guess is the other main thing, which is that Jackie and Eleanor are the strongest couple out of the three couples Jackie is involved in, and seeing some other lady come ripping into Eleanor's life and making her act puppy-dog and cutie-pie and not focus entirely on Jackie -- this glamorous woman who casually opens Eleanor up to talk about real things and not the fake things that keep Jackie and Eleanor afloat, like ice skaters flying by holding hands -- is a whole other kind of betrayal. She uses the ideas of Eddie and Kevin to keep her lives and pieces separate, and to see Eleanor doing the same thing, having merely fallen in love, is a mirror to her own stuff.
"Some rich douchebag drank his lunch and then decided to shoot an arrow off his roof," confirms Lenny the EMT, and Eleanor goes, "You're going after rich people who drink? I don't think I like that very much!" He enjoys this as much as one can, which is a lot, and they send Thor up to Radiology, and Lenny quietly tries to ask Jackie about Zoey, but that's like rule one. The patient tries to say, several times, that "it" is brand-new, and while Coop admires the arrow (he knows about them because his roommate was in Archery in college) and Eleanor tells him a million times to get the fuck out of there and stop talking, they finally figure out what the patient's talking about: It's not the arrow that's new, it's the lung.
Fitch makes the funniest pouty face in Gloria's office, having hauled in a cardboard standup of himself that says proudly, "I GRAB BOOBS." There are nipples on the O's. His hilarious sad-face is really quite heartbreaking, in a funny way, because you can tell this is exactly the kind of thing that gets his goat: Not only are people not praying to his icon, but they also mentioned the most embarrassing thing about him. "Heavy is the head that wears the crown," Gloria offers, and props to her for not laughing right then. Fitch Cooper begins to cry.
Thor offers to take Zoey's maternity leave shifts in a few months, if she covers him while he's in Holland, Michigan with his mom, for the Tulip Festival. Zoey throws one hand up and reminds him that she only told him about her "condition" for his support, not so that he can plan his vacation. He prefers to see it as putting a better spin on things. I love tulips the most, but I would not consider that fun, exactly. But it's Thor, you can see how he got there. She ignores him and he is sad, but then Sam offers to take his shifts instead.
"Are you close to your mother?" Thor gratefully asks, w/r/t the vacation time, and Sam straight-faced says, "Not really. She sold me into slavery when I was four and I lived on the streets, until a mission intervened." Thor's panicked, gorgeous response? "One year for a Halloween, I went as a slave!" Wow. Sam laughs and says really he's from Jersey and went to Rutgers, so Thor says he's also kidding: "By slave I meant Princess Leia." Mortified, Thor executes the classic Thor Grapevine Exit.
Jackie attempts to put Trey, the husband of the suicidal serviceperson, at ease. It doesn't go well. He asks what he's supposed to tell the kids, if she dies, and Jackie says she doesn't know what to tell him, but they're not crossing that bridge yet. Poor choice of words, lady. He discusses her depression symptoms and how he thought buying her an expensive motorcycle might help. Jackie knows what that's like, and also how it doesn't work: He feels like he gave her the gun, when all he was doing was trying to make her happy. She tells him that they're called accidents for a reason, but they both know this wasn't one. She's Trey and Jennifer at once.
Zoey stares up at the Virgin Mary, and sees a pregnant woman with her kid walk by. "I'm not ready for this, being a mother's hard. You know that already," she says, with a hands-wide gesture like they're buds. Awesome.
O'Hara comes out, having lost Jennifer, but before they can even shake their heads sadly, Zoey appears out of nowhere: "Bleeding!" They wheel Jennifer out, and she apologizes. Outside the waiting room, watching Sarah comfort Trey in the way that she couldn't, Jackie asks Eleanor if Sarah's always this... (Awesome, smart, caring, empathetic: All the things Jackie can't give her.) Eleanor's eyes flutter: She always, always is.
Zoey informs Jackie, back at the station, that she does regret her behavior. "But can I just say that miracles can happen every day?" Jackie tiredly snaps, "Yeah, like the day they invented rubbers? Try using them." Well done! Zoey grins, and saunters off, on her strange way. Kevin calls to say that he's going to Susan Sarandon's ping-pong club, dutifully reporting in -- Post-Flinn Meltdown -- and when he mentions he's going with Eddie, she gets cold. Pieces touching. She heads out, but Zoey runs up to explain that arrow-lung guy has sent his driver into the hospital, instead of coming himself. Jackie sighs heavily and goes off to throw down some justice.
"Your boss nearly kills my patient, and he sends his driver in? There's eight million people in this fuckin' city. What kind of a moron shoots an arrow off a roof? The man he hit waited three years for a lung transplant. Guess where he got hit?" The guy finally gets a word in, explaining that he's well aware his boss is a dick, and asks if Lung Guy is okay. Miraculously, he is. "Why isn't your dick-of-a-boss in jail?" Because the guy's connected, obviously. So the driver's here to apologize? No. "I'm here for his arrow." Amazing.
Jackie heads out to the car, arrow in hand, to yell at the dick. Needless to say, he's not sitting in the car, so a mean little lightbulb lights up over her head. "This a Mercedes?" A limited edition, one of fifteen ever made. She walks slowly around the entire car, scratching a long line with the arrow, as she admires it -- "Nice car, really gorgeous. Heated seats?" -- and when she gets back to him, the driver points out a spot she missed.
Ping-pong is the devil's work. That's all I'm going to say. My childhood is a ravaged horror of ping-pong, mini-golf and bowling. The triumvirate of hateful, forced fun. I was a bit of a Grace, I don't know if I've yet made that clear. So Jackie walks into this horrible place and sees Kevin and Eddie living it up, and goes over there with a harsh, cold face. Eddie slaps it at Kevin's mouth, and she plants a kiss there.
They send Kevin off to get a pitcher of beer, and she's like, "The fuck?" Apparently, he never agreed to stop seeing her husband. "Why, Eddie?" She's actually confused, at this point, because it's so monstrous. "You lie to me again, I tell him everything," Eddie says, snapping back into creepy again. So it's war. Kevin comes back and she kisses him, hard, and they get back to it. Everybody's brittle and scary, except Kevin, who -- except for the fact that he gets something out of this marriage that neither we, nor he, understands yet -- is a total sweetheart. The temperature changes, and they go back to the game. Jackie stands between them, feeling like the ball.
Jackie wraps her daughter's arm in bandages, having brought them home as a special treat. "You know this is pretend, right?" Of course Fiona does. She asks how long she can keep the cast on, hopefully past her birthday, and as she's finishing up Jackie asks if Fi's seriously into this. "This is gonna harden up, and you're gonna be stuck with it for a little bit." You'll find yourself drinking a pitcher of beer with it, watching your house of cards shiver in the breeze, and wonder if it was ever worth the effort of putting bandages on something that didn't need healing. Fiona gets it. "Nothing's really broken," she says. Jackie knows that. And Jackie knows better, too.
Want to immediately access TWoP content no matter where you are online? Download the free TWoP toolbar for your web browser. Already have a customized toolbar? Then just add our free toolbar app to get updated on our content as soon it's published.