Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Sick as Your Secrets
By Jacob Clifton | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Aired on 05.17.2010
Jackie jokes with Gloria about her Pill-O-Matix breakdown, and Gloria tries to keep that upper lip stiff. "I'd forgotten: When you're a nurse, if you say something in one part of the hospital, it will always trickle back to the station. Yeah, it's a piece of shit." Jackie tells her to get a new one, and Coop appears acting shitty and officious, so Jackie ignores him. Gloria says she's thinking of hiring a pharmacist, and has put in a call to Eddie already. Coop does a dorky backflip about that, of course, and says all the doctors will be "psyched" to have Eddie back.
Jackie, of course, fights with all her strength: "Wasn't this a budgetary issue?" quickly becomes "I'm sure there's lots of great candidates out there," so Coop starts yelling about that, and Jackie's disloyalty and whatever; Gloria explains that between the machine, the repairs, and the extra security, it's even more expensive than Eddie was. Jackie heads off to take care of Coop's patient, and quietly explains that this decision is not about making the doctors/Coop happy, because -- "nurse to nurse" -- it doesn't affect them half as much. Plus, Eddie "kinda lost it when the Pill-O-Matix came."
I love how the fact that she accidentally drove Eddie crazy is now a weapon in her arsenal. And you know her ass will do it again if she has to. Gloria acknowledges Jackie's insights in that way she sometimes does, where it's as important to her as it is to the show that we understand she's conveying respect for and confidence in Jackie. One of the nicest things about this season, how they keep pushing that particular pleasure button for us.
Sam approaches to ask for time off, and Gloria screams in his face because it's a full moon. Then Zoey appears out of nowhere, in the sitcom rhythm specific to this show, strewing rose petals and thanks in Gloria's path for deigning to work the floor with them today. Gloria tries to be nice about the weirdness onslaught, but once Zoey starts offering her warm Skittles -- "Thor says they're in bloom" -- she's forced to chase her off with eye lasers.
Coop whines to Eddie, on a park bench, about how the campaign he apparently launched could have saved them all -- "I was trying to give something back... There was so much promise in the Face of All Saints... It's just gone to shit..." -- and Eddie is distracted and sympathetic as usual. On the bright side, Coop says once he remembers that Eddie's there, Gloria's talking about bringing him back. Coop, because he always thinks that Eddie is his anti-Jackie ally, immediately starts stacking jellybeans in that jar, all, "I think your biggest roadblock's gonna be Jackie, she thinks things are fine the way they are."
Eddie engages in their usual pathetic man-games, laughing about how Jackie doesn't call all the shots and whatever, and Coop is sufficiently calmed. Asserting male power over threatening female figures is, for him, the opposite of a boob-grab; it perfectly encapsulates the diminishing, distancing effect of his fake-feminist chivalry boob-grabber nonsense: Women! Can't hit 'em, can't let 'em talk to you like that!
Coop asks Eddie out on a man-date, but Eddie's going out with cute old Georgia, which Coop finds to be "the ultimate irony." Since it's neither "ultimate" nor, in any real way, "ironic," Eddie's a bit confused. "Well, I want to hang out with you, but you're busy because of me. It's ironic... Trust me." Love that little ivory tower dig at the end. "Trust me, I get irony." Which is great because the total main thing of Coop is how allergic to irony he actually is, and if he ever acquainted himself with it, he would explode from the constant compromises and contradictions that make up his entire life.
At the All Saints newsstand, Sam offers Jackie candy before explaining it's his AA anniversary: "Six months sober today." She's like, so very excited for him. Sam asks if he can leave for like an hour, since he's working a double shift and wants to get the chip on the actual day, when his sponsor is there and stuff. She gives him leave to go, and nods respectfully. "You know... I respect what you're doing." Which I thought was like such a neat moment, because I thought it was the ultimate irony, because only Jackie Peyton could possibly reach down into her complicated self and recognize her own admiration for her greatest enemy's rehabilitation and the abstract importance of kicking your addictions without acknowledging the inherent hypocrisy there, and isn't that something.
But ha! No! Jackie just doesn't give a fuck!
Jackie drops by Eleanor's office and pretends or legitimately says that she just wants to sit down for a minute, not get the money. O'Hara offers to pay the school directly or just give Jackie a huge check, as expected, and Jackie of course demurs at first, but O'Hara thinks she's being proud instead of wily, so -- acting as a good friend -- assumes total control of the entire situation, so they can move on, by taking out of Jackie's hands any accountability for what happens next. Which is all, of course, exactly what Jackie wanted when she went in there, pretending it was weird for all kinds of reasons it isn't actually weird, like getting a huge check in the middle of a day. "It's not a sweepstakes, it's a normal-size check, for an amount that won't make me think twice. Have you eaten?" Jackie admits that her breakfast and lunch so far has been: Coffee, banana, Vicodin.
"Breakfast of champions," Eleanor says with a grin, and tells Jackie strongly, mothering her, to stop doing the heavy lifting: "You have Thor. He's a giant. Use him." And "for the love of all that's good and holy," she says, get an MRI. Jackie says the truest thing she's said all night: "I almost don't want to see the damage!" Having gotten as much mileage out of the check as she's going to be getting -- holding it in her hands while she says all of the protective, loving, worried things she could never say under usual circumstances, loving every second of it because it's the only way she can hold Jackie down long enough to love her -- she hands it over, briefly jerking it away from Jackie's hands (yikes) before letting it go.
"Closer to godmother by the second!" she laughs, leaning back, and Jackie's like, for the millionth time that literally cannot happen, because they can't rechristen them. Those gowns would never fit at this age. Jackie sort of lowballs her acknowledgement that Eleanor would be good at it, in an Auntie Mame kind of way, and Eleanor says she's willing to wait for Jackie and Kevin to die in a fiery plane crash. Which she then offers to pay for as well.
Zoey kids around with the college guy, and then O'Hara reports that he's looking at eight to twelve weeks of recovery and meds. Which is essentially a semester of being immobile. He begs her to call his parents -- "They'd feel better hearing it from someone older" -- and she stalks away with a sour smile. Zoey commandeers his iPhone in her funny, mysterious way, makes him make a very sad face, and snaps his photo: "Email that to five girls you know and write, Just mowed down by big rig. Truckers are dicks. At All Saints right now. What are you guys doing?" And then? "Wait."
I love Zoey Barkow, don't you? How she has sneaked up on competence without startling it. Jackie thanks Gloria for getting her hands dirty this shift, now that they're getting caught up, and Gloria compares it to riding a bike. But this is all just another in her unceasing plans to get her tiny kingdom back on track: "Would you mind sticking around for a little bit longer? Sam has been MIA for over an hour. I don't know where he goes. This is not the first time this has happened..." Gloria, stressed at the end of things, immediately gets pissed and snitty about it.
It's funny, because Jackie's also using Gloria's bureaucratic Coop mentality to help with this, because if Gloria took notice of nurses as people, even Jackie to a certain small extent, she would remember that Jackie was standing right there when they had that conversation. On the other hand