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So last season ended, you may remember, with a big intervention on Jackie by her husband Kevin and her BFF, Dr. O'Hara. Instead of leapfrogging over the consequences like happened last year, we pick up where we left off: With Jackie having a minor meltdown in the Peyton bathroom and eventually deciding she's not interested in rehab.
She sweeps all the contents of the bathroom cabinets into a big bag and throws this at Kevin and has some kind of fucking addict fit about god knows what and finally she makes enough noise, and makes it enough of his problem, that he gives in. It really should be harder to distract him than just yelling and lying, because she does those things anyway, but then, their marriage has never really made sense. So anyway, in order to prove that he's a man or something, Kevin enrolls the scary daughter in that same Catholic school that the weird one goes to; he is a total dick to a nun. Good thing he's crazy hot, because what an unappealing person he was this week.
At the hospital, mostly all they can talk about is the finale last year, specifically how Sam almost died of drinking and they tap-danced for him, and how Zoey slept with that hairy fellow. I mean, that's literally all they can talk about; there are like five scenes of them revisiting this information, over and over. Zoey is still awesome, Peter Facinelli's character is still a douchebag tool, Sam is still pretty, Thor is still comforting, and Pharmacist Eddie still looks like a pervert.
The major patient story in this episode has to do with this hot dude whose moving company accidentally moved two tons of books on top of his kid and now the kid is dead or dying, and it's very sad and all kinds of dramatic and with long pauses. O'Hara tosses around all kinds of metaphors about how their relationship will not survive, and I think she's going to feint at quitting work at this particular hospital just to get away from Jackie. Since their relationship is the best thing about the show, that's kind of tough.
Also it is too bad for Jackie, because she needs a friend once Kevin shows up at the hospital and she gets cornered into admitting her pill problem to Gloria Akalitus. Now everybody knows that she is married and sort of a drug addict, which are two things she didn't historically want people to know. Here's hoping week holds some kind of surprises or something, because -- even for this show -- this just seemed like treading water.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!There's something funny about the way this show ignores consequences, something that seems to be a thing with every Showtime show that has any popular traction: The high of watching Jackie Peyton or Dexter Morgan or Nancy Botwin get themselves into these impossible situations and then get themselves out of them again in the season. And every season, the stakes are higher and the scrape is closer and it's all very exciting, right up until the season starts.
Mileage varies as to how well the particular shows nail this thing, and it's the usual complaints come premiere time for every show regardless of how they're earned, but the funny part here is how hard this show fights itself about it. I mean, from a production standpoint you have a funny feedback loop having to do with wanting Jackie to succeed -- the creators talk about how you don't really want to see Jackie get caught -- but at the same time upping the stakes, all the time.
There's a metaphor to be drawn here to addiction, specifically the addiction of the consumer to the qualities of the product that keep you coming back, and how your high is never quite as good as the first time. I will say, though, that this season does a better job -- of answering the lingering questions and playing out the consequences -- than last year, when basically the entire thing got swept under the rug.
But still: Wouldn't it be nice if these particular shows trusted us to follow us when they go somewhere new? If they didn't have to keep telling the same stories over and over, desperately afraid they'll lose our interest? Think about the most beloved Dexter finales, for example: Not the same cliffhangers over and over, like Weeds, and not the icky redemption-just-kidding plays this show makes (often successfully, mind you), but the actual game-changers, if you know what I mean. Things that actually stick.
And I mean Dexter, I love it, but it's not really as good as this show when it's at its best (and neither of them hold a candle to Tara), but the audience is vocal about how they feel about actual stakes, actual changes, actual creative leaps. Something to think about.
So where we're at right now is that Jackie's best friend Eleanor O'Hara discovered she'd been passed a fake MRI, in order to beef up her casual Percocet-between-friends supply to actual, illegally giving her friend drugs. Same time, Jackie's husband Kevin discovered her secret post office box containing insane amounts of secret credit card debt at pharmacies all over town. He called O'Hara, and the two of them tried to throw Jackie a little intervention. Well of course she went apeshit on both of them, right for the jugular, and locked herself in the bathroom.
Jackie looks herself in the mirror for a while, thinks about how probably she's an addict, and then that "Rain On My Parade" song that sounds like you're having a stroke starts playing, and she searches the whole bathroom for drugs, all the doorframe and top of the cabinet places, then every cabinet and drawer, and then -- having struck up a great idea for how best to scream this little problem away, tosses all the usual things in the bathroom that might come from a drugstore into a laundry bag, and heads out to find her husband.
"O'Hara? Really? You couldn't handle this yourself?"
Oh, the amazing drama, as she tosses the contents of her hobo bag onto the floor in front of Kevin -- Eleanor having gotten the fuck out of there -- and showing him how the credit card receipts he used as proof are mostly just school supplies and sundries, razors and eardrops.
Every couple of items, she tosses in low-dose meds -- muscle relaxers, sleeping pills -- to sweeten the deal. Throw it against the wall and see what sticks, yelling so loud all he hears is screaming.
And now that he's confused, and on the defensive, she jumps at him: "My body is falling apart, what do you want from me for fuck's sake?"
And then the kids: "Why aren't the girls here?"
And then more lies: The credit card? "Separate! Not secret, separate! Since when do I have to run every little fuckin' thing by you? When have we ever done things like that? When was the last time you bought your own razors?"
And the PO box? "You know what? Here. Here, take the fuckin' key!"
Still not an answer: "Doesn't matter, you know why? Because I keep the house stocked."
And the masculinity: "That's my job, because you can't manage money!"
And then the kids: "And by the way, what message are we sending Fi? I'm sorry, you're just not quite as important as Grace, we have money for her tuition but not yours."
And the masculinity: "It's tuition, Kevin! You find it!"
And the unrelated accusations: "I should never have had to beg! For God's sake I sure as hell shouldn't have to sneak around."
And the kids: "She is your daughter!" You can see that one, actually feel that blow land. It has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. It works; it sticks.
And the masculinity: "You know what? From now on buy your own fucking razors!"
And the kids again: "I'm getting my kids."
Whatever sticks. She's out of there; Kevin left feeling like he's done something wrong, even though everything she's doing and saying, the faces she's making, the way she came at him and Eleanor like a Fury, tells him exactly what's going on. Textbook, if something would stick.
Jackie picks up the girls from Kevin's sister Tunie's house, sparkling so brightly it's hard to look at. Just feral, and desperate and sweaty. Throwing them against the wall, to see what sticks.
Over to All Saints, day, to head off the Eleanor part. The part where her job is maybe threatened, where the accusations of last year -- from Sam, the issue with the Pill-O-Matix -- will only lend credence to Eleanor's possible betrayal. Showing compassion for a beloved friend who needs it would be a betrayal in this instance, so she's got to get there first. Still wild-eyed and feral, even with Mrs. Akalitus.
Gloria staples a sign to the hospital chapel's door: PLEASE DO NOT KISS THE STATUES. Paint containing lead is known to cause poisoning. Jackie catches her in the hall, still itchy and babbling.
"This is entirely preemptive, there is nothing to be worried about: I've been doing this for twenty years, Gloria. Parts of my body are giving out. I started leaning on painkillers. It was a couple months, totally self-corrected."
Gloria gives her that owlish look and wonders aloud about the mishaps with the pill machine, before Eddie came back, but Jackie's got her story ready to go. Gloria hangs up her phone several times without answering, as she leads her down the rabbit hole.
"Nothing like that! My husband opened a credit card bill, he saw the pharmacy charges, that's it. But he called O'Hara... I'm fine, but he should not have called O'Hara. Her family? Like, drug addicts. Like pump-your-stomach, die-in-your-sleep drug addicts. So she had a disproportionate reaction. My husband feels like shit, he had no clue what her deal was when he called her... She might come in here. And if she does, I would just ask that you take whatever she says with a grain of salt, that's all."
Gloria's suspicious, but they have that nurse thing they have, that officer-of-the-court thing where if I tell you a thing is true, if I pinky-swear it, then we'll let it go this time because it's something I would never lie about. "Jackie, if a co-worker so much as raises the specter of substance abuse, I am required by law to inform HR, that's just the way it is. Fix it." Maybe just to shut her up, the constant talking, calling everybody into question in whatever way she can; maybe because she wants to solve the issue between her best nurse and her best doctor. Maybe because she loves Jackie Peyton.
Fitch Cooper comes in unannounced, whining about how he doesn't want to work with Sam -- Sam who punched him, Sam whose girlfriend he fucked -- and that since Zoey and "what's his name," Thor, are in Admitting, he needs Jackie. They take off, and Eleanor replaces them.
Coop's patient Pete has a dentist's mirror stuck up his nose because he wanted to see his brain. "I bet you are five," Jackie grins, and Pete asks Coop why his nose is broken. "My friend Sam didn't wanna share," he admits, and gives the mirror a little tug; it's lodged in his sinuses and he doesn't want to pull it out. Zoey appears in the doorway: "Tried to look at your brain, huh? Done that." I would be so scared to see Zoey's brain.
Pete's mom's horrified to hear Coop ask for surgical booties, but he assures her it's just to protect his new shoes; Jackie giggles with the little boy about the quality of his brain, and everything is normal for a second. In an aside, Jackie suggests that they give him a scan, so he can see his brain after all. "Using my powers for good," Coop muses. "Pretty tempting..." And before you know it, he's telling Pete his great idea.
"I've worked desperately to cultivate a remote and heartless persona for this exact reason. Well, no, actually it comes quite naturally. Point being, I suddenly am in the middle of something terribly private between Jackie and her husband." Gloria nods, waiting for Eleanor to blow the gig and force her to pursue the rabbit, but of course Eleanor doesn't. She loves Jackie too. "I would prefer that we didn't work the same shifts," is all she will say, and when Gloria can't help, she suggests she might be looking at other hospitals rather than follow this road with Jackie.
"Do you think he's right to be concerned?" Gloria asks, after a fairly impressive fight with herself, but Eleanor pretends she doesn't know what she's talking about, even after Gloria presses her.
"He called you," Gloria points out, and Eleanor spazzes, eyes latching onto a photo of Gloria's beloved First Lady. "Fabulous, isn't she?"
Gloria lets it go. Please don't kiss the saints.
Thor drops off some "electrolytes and transfats" for Sam's death-defying hangover, and they both stare horrified as Zoey hops manically around like a drunken third-grader, lurching around and talking to herself and staring at everybody in her bunny scrubs before finally working up the courage to tell Jackie she slept with her boyfriend, wonderful Lenny. The boys both scream at the nurse's station, and Jackie just gives a curt, hilarious no before turning back to her patient. Zoey is looking even prettier than usual, and her makeup is insanely great in this scene, by the way.
"Y'all's uptight, that's all I'm sayin'. He's a neat freak. Never saw that coming, because I'm more of a let-it-all-hang-out kind of partner. Smooth, like a gazelle. A very satisfied, sexy gazelle. Who just rolled over and wants a cigarette."
It only gets more and more hilarious and more and more horrifying and the boys are shocked into silence, until finally Zoey leans leering on the counter: "You don't get to stifle me." At the sight of Gloria looming behind her, Sam gets enough of his brain back to grin, and Zoey quickly gets meek again: "Stifle away, ma'am." Gloria nods, curtly. "Oh, I will."
Addressing the Emergency nurses with her usual sophisticated, martinet air, Gloria delivers a short speech about how hospitals are closing down all over town, but the sick and injured will continue to be sick and injured, meaning that they're going to be dealing with diverted ambulances, more walk-ins, and the generally uninsured: "Bad on top of bad."
The upside? All those hot little unemployed nurses just looking to oust our guys with their superior talent, skill and experience. It goes on in this vein for a while, but that's the gist; the only real result of the speech is that Sam tries to preemptively beg Jackie not to tell about his near-death bender, which makes her grin: "I've got an axe I can drop on your head at any moment. Why would I give that up?"
In a plotline that veers wildly between melodramatic and truly affecting, a guy is brought in whose son was just crushed under a ton or so of moving boxes. "I didn't know where he was, I thought he was taking a nap," he says. They watch the kid roll his eyes around, in shock, and then before you know it Jackie and Eleanor are locking eyes over the kid's body.
After a fairly decent but weirdly ambitious transition shot to an outside drainspout, Jackie heads outside to explain to the fairly adorable dad -- Gregory Jbara, one of those character actors you just love that this show always manages to find -- that it wasn't crushed bones or anything, just the amount of time under the boxes that -- now he's been recovered -- released all kinds of shit into his bloodstream, meaning that the kidneys are going to blow ultimately in addition to the internal hemorrhaging. He chews on this inside of his mouth for a while and starts the slow burn he'll be doing the rest of the episode until Jackie admits it's time to call the mom.
Immediately back inside, they watch the lungs and then the heart go, but it's Eleanor's prognosis, delivered right to Jackie's face, that's the real killer in this episode: "This is not survivable," she says, finally looking into Jackie's eyes for the first time: "It's not."
The chapel sign's been changed: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE STATUES, now. Jackie sits in there with him -- there's no rush, now that he's on life support; we're just waiting for the mom -- so that the dad can deliver a long monologue about how he thought his kid was fucking around, and it's not quite the scenery snack of say, Fierstein last year, but it's not exactly subtle although the dad does a fairly heartrending job with it.
At one point he pulls out the sandwich his son made him that morning, and offers some to Jackie, and she demurs, and he tears it in half with his hands and asks her please to eat some, with him, in this chapel. And just the half-assed, hamfisted way he rips it in half -- like, this symbolic gesture of sharing this death with her and the last thing his son ever made or did and all that -- is the saddest part. Big strong hands. She accepts, without looking him in the eye, and they eat together in silence for a second before he asks if she's got any kids.
Kevin has no time for this nun's bullshit or her questions about why he's enrolling Fiona in Grace's Catholic school -- because what are you going to say, my drug addict wife went to her lesbian best friend for money and then belittled my masculinity about it -- and she's like, "Can we meet with Jackie? About this huge change in your daughter's life?"
Well no, Sister, because fuck her, and he still can't figure out exactly how to be angry at her, but he hates this idea that she's the backbone of the home and that it's killing her and that if she were an addict, which she is fucking not, it would be his fault anyway, so he just yells at the nun for a while about how she will not be dealing with Jackie from here on out, and that he's not interested in discussing Fiona's enrollment or anything of the sort, he is, please, the girls' sole emergency contact, forget Jackie exists altogether.
Aaaand he can only pay half of Fiona's tuition upfront and can you please split it between these three credit cards, and it's like: This is the awful thing. This right here, not what Jackie was even saying before, but the fact that this whole scene -- with the nun-yelling, and the total shame, and the credit card-splitting -- is just collateral damage for the fact that he had the gall to accuse his wife of being exactly what she is.
So now his manhood and his fatherhood and all this stuff, things he's already guilty about period, all of it has led to this ugly scene where he's being mean to a cute, young black nun in the middle of his kids' school. That's the awful thing. The fact that it doesn't even matter; that she leveraged essentially his entire being against this one accusation, and he was guilty enough and scared enough and offended enough that he fell for it. That it stuck.
Another unnecessarily weird transition -- noodle art becomes pills Jackie's snorting -- and then back out of Eddie's bathroom into the pharmacy, where he's like, "What are you doing in here?" Just looking for paper tape. They discuss how they should not be sharing teriyaki wraps, given their confusing and complex relationship with her husband, and then Coop comes dorking in there all "Guess how much I paid for these shoes!" Absolutely not, says Jackie, which pretty much covers it.
Sam is trying to piece together the memories of his crisis -- "You and Jackie, like, tap-danced for me?" Yes we did. "Why?" To punish you -- when Zoey interrupts his conversation with Thor in order to talk more about "sexy time with Lenny," and how he's "much more oral than you'd expect" and how he has a Prince Albert, and it's all so gross and Thor is so incredibly troubled by it and it's so great that you don't even see the problem coming until Kevin is standing right there at the window in Admitting with his daughters, declaring himself Jackie Peyton's husband so all three nurses can stare at him and Zoey can tell him confidently that Jackie's not married and even more confidently -- and weird-assedly -- demand to see some ID.
Back in the pharmacy, the guesses about Coop's shoes are ranging from seventeen dollars to ten grand when Zoey comes in to warn Jackie that her husband has arrived. "Low blow, Zoey!" Coop laughs, and manages to make that a double insult against Zoey too, and finally Eddie's just like, "Jackie is married, you stupid fuckin' goat." Coop tries to make this about him, because of the weird kissing she used to do to freak him out, and once Jackie's gone -- wedding ring back on her finger -- Zoey stupidly tells Coop that Jackie slept with Eddie. Coop tries to dog on Eddie for sleeping with "another brother's lady," so of course that's when Sam walks in. Why is everybody hanging out in the Pharmacy?
Thor can't keep his eyes off Kevin, because who could, and Zoey either is or is not able to read their lips. What they're talking about is how Jackie's weirdness extends to keeping their marriage a secret -- "What, Zoey? Today is her first day, Kevin!" she lies, so easily you barely even see it happening -- and he hisses at her about how he paid off Fiona's tuition, will be paying the whole thing himself, that she starts Monday. Before he can get in her face about their overall shitty situation, some drunk ho comes shambling through Admitting and shatters a giant bottle of beer on the floor, so of course Jackie jumps over to grab little Pete, and Kev takes off.
PLEASE DO NOT FEED THOR, reads the chapel sign. Inside, Jackie's lying back on one of the pews and fiddling with her wedding ring when Eleanor -- wearing pink scrubs, having lost a boy earlier -- sits down in the front pew. "Rough day," Jackie says, sitting up, with that spritely kidding-around voice she uses when she fucks up. Eleanor doesn't move. Jackie comes around to sit directly behind her, begging the back of her head for forgiveness, and finally Eleanor just stands and walks out again.
"You broke my heart, Jackie."
Jackie jumps in to play with Pete some more and look at the scan with him -- since Coop can't get his attention -- and she does this whole thing about "here's your curiosity and here's your coolness and here's your common sense" and I guess it's cute, but Coop is just over the moon about it. Probably thinks that Jackie is so magic that those are actual parts of the brain they didn't tell him about in med school, at this point.
She has to cut her routine short, though, because Eleanor is outside snapping Zoey's head off at the neck for asking where Jackie was. "She... Lost somebody," Jackie says. Somebody who didn't want to be found. "Were you there?" asks Zoey, and gives her a hug she needs and doesn't want.
FUCK YOU, LOVE THOR reads the sign. The saints don't matter at all, anymore.
She takes the girls to Kevin's baseball game, screaming his name and cheering, but he can barely stand to look at her. "Is this Coke or Pepsi?" asks Grace, and Jackie just shakes her head. "It's whatever you want it to be, honey."
The mom in front looks around, nervously, at the bleachers behind and above her. Lost her last Percocet. Neck spasms. Jackie looks twice as hard, eyes picking it out of the noise like a hawk. She picks it up, and hands it over; she gives the woman her soda without a thought, so she can take her last Percocet. It's whatever you want it to be.
"That shit'll kill ya," Jackie grins, and the woman nods, ruefully. She wasn't panicked, was she? She needed it. Her body's falling apart. Kevin hits a home run and the crowd goes wild.
It's whatever you want it to be. It's whatever sticks, for now.
week: Coop tries to win back Sam's affection; Jackie fights a war on two fronts to get her husband and her best friend back, with Eddie looking on.