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Eddie feels weird about lying to Kevin about his whole life and everything, but of course Nurse Jackie just thinks that's silly, because telling total lies all the time is her favorite thing of life. She agrees to help him tell a lie that will unwind all the other lies, by fake-getting him a job at All Saints so that Kevin can at least know where Eddie works. I don't know why any of this matters to Eddie, but Kevin is still being annoying and bleak so whatever, it's Eddie's thing right now.
There is a lady who yells about pee a lot. I don't know why she had so much pee talk coming out of her, but that part was rough. Lady just kept talking about pee.
The rest of the episode is Fitch Cooper following Sam around trying to make him love him again, which is kind of cute and implausible in the way that everything Coop does is cute and implausible.
Meanwhile, Jackie is doing the same thing but on two fronts, flirting her way back into both O'Hara's and Kevin's good graces. This quickly turns into one of those spooky addict things that make this show so nervous to watch: She gives them both the exact same speech about how she will never desert them and follow them anywhere and all of that, you can count on me kinds of things, and it's super gross.
I miss God. Akalitus's Michelle Obama obsession is starting to feel kind of racist. But now she's on a rampage to end childhood obesity and I really, really hope they stick with that storyline, because how awesome will it be to watch Akalitus yelling at fat kids each week?
Zoey spends the episode stealing gloves from other departments, that's like a whole storyline, and then also there's a situation where a suicidal guy accidentally got resuscitated by Lenny's EMT rig, so everybody yells at everybody about that, but eventually the guy dies. So, good for him.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It's Fiona's first day at school and she is mesmerized by the girls jumping rope outside; Grace assures her sister that her uniform has always itched, will always itch, the world is a cold and uncaring place, everybody dies one day, whatever.
Nun: "Fiona, my dear. Are you half the Debbie Downer your sister is?"
Fiona: "Yeah, I hate her too. Consider me the manic to her depressive. I light fires."
Jackie: "Speaking of, Grace? Are you pulling out your hair?"
Grace: "Dad already checked. I like it better when he checks, considering you're the reason I pull my hair out constantly. Kind of cuts out the middleman when you're involved."
(Fiona takes Grace's hand and they walk in together, and it's super cute.)
Jackie, leaning into Kevin: "How cute is that?"
Kevin, stepping away like she's got lice: "Nope, still hate you. You're going to have to find something better than our nutty kids to get me going."
Gloria jumps rope, somehow is unable to jump rope, so she looks at her picture of the First Lady and realizes she is wearing shoes which is why she is able to jump rope, which from there it's just a hop to getting those crazy arms of hers. Zoey knocks several times on the door before acknowledging Gloria's welcome.
Zoey: "I have a complaint."
Gloria: "I have many."
Zoey: "Mine's mean-spirited. Makes me feel small hearted."
Gloria: "Is it justified?"
The situation is that Maternity is stealing "all the good gloves" from the ER, so Gloria tells her to steal them back, and that two wrongs totally make a right. Of course, Zoey takes this opportunity to turn into a spy like usual.
Zoey: "Will you have my back?"
Gloria, meaning absolutely not: "Don't get caught."
Zoey: "They'll know I'm hiding something."
Gloria starts into telling Zoey that she's not an open book, but of course she is, and somehow her transparent head lets Gloria in on her secret desire to skip rope, so she gives her leave and sits back to watch and see how Zoey does it. The thing about this -- besides the race-adjacent thing going on with the jumprope and Michelle Obama tropes, I didn't mention it before but the majority of girls skipping rope at the girls' school were also black, because on TV black kids and jumpropes are two parts of an eternal golden braid -- is that nobody finds it difficult to jump rope. Not a single person in the history of rope has found this difficult. So the idea that, to Gloria, Zoey is some kind of jumproping savant is just... Taking the long way around to get to a joke that still makes no sense.
An aged hipster with a fake-looking mustache bucks at an old lady as he's skateboarding past, causing her to yeep and fall down, and of course Jackie body-blocks him, because that's obligatory in every episode; luckily, it's awesome every time.
O'Hara: "She blindsided you? That's what happens when you get in her way."
Jackie: "If you don't stop accusing me of my actions I'm gonna be so mad! Peace out!"
Sam: "Are you and O'Hara fighting?"
Jackie: "Doctors are the enemy, babe."
Sam: "Right on."
Jackie: "One more thing? Mind your biz."
Sam deflates even further as Coop appears.
Coop: "Sam, I love you and I'm sorry I fucked your girlfriend but I've never had a guy friend before besides Eddie, and honestly he hates me as much as everybody else does."
Sam: "It's because you are the worst."
Coop: "My misguided grasping at the signifiers of masculinity must surely bear fruit at some point! Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while! I had no father! Apparently I am the result when that happens!"
Zoey pulls a prodigious amount of gloves from every single area of herself, causing everybody's eyes to widen and widen and eventually they feel like she's crossed a line. "Second ago you thought it was magic," she gleams, and heads off to steal from Oncology. Thor, of course, is appalled by this. Zoey is in the grip of her mania and cannot be dissuaded. Eddie appears and kidnaps Jackie back to the pharmacy so he can whine at her about his "best friend" Kevin and how it makes him sad to lie to Kevin, etc.
What everybody seems to have forgotten is that Eddie only became friends with Kevin to fuck with Jackie, that was expressly and solely the reason, to ruin her marriage in retaliation for her not following his orders precisely and being in love with him, and when she was unaffected he tried to use their past relationship to blackmail her into fucking him. It is so characteristic of this show that now we're expected to respect the bromance between Eddie and Kevin, the meaningful details of which we are constantly being told and not shown, because they exist even less than the patients do.
As badly as men write about women -- at least in the second wave narrative we all keep telling and retelling each other as though it is true or relevant -- that's how dumb this show is about men. Which I guess is a step toward equality in one way, but not the right way; definitely it's one of the places [e.g. Fitch Cooper, e.g. Urine Lady below] where the resentment seems to puddle up and express itself, with the effect that you're performing feminism so poorly it turns into the opposite of itself. Not the worst part of the writing in this season/this show, but definitely one of the less admirable parts.
Speaking as I do from a place of white male privilege: There's no such thing as reverse sexism, any more than there is such a thing as reverse racism or, I don't know, heterophobia. I'm not complaining out of outrage or victimhood, because it is my privilege to be impervious to victimhood in those ways. But there is the possibility of being tacky, and sometimes this show is very tacky, genderwise, in a way that harms and does not help the narrative itself, which is my only (ever) complaint: The writing.
Invariably the recipient of Jackie's justice will be an entrenched white male: A good thing. The only power relationships of merit -- the only relationships of merit -- on this show are between intelligent, powerful women. Also a good thing. Bechdel Test satisfied, week in, week out: Good thing. It's when Coop gets involved, or we're going on three years with either zero or wildly discontinuous characterizations of Kev and Eddie respectively, that everything turns cardboard and the Take Back The Night vengeance-fantasy stuff starts seeming obsolete and meanspirited, without larger purpose. Which, considering the episodes barely hang together as it is, maybe you walk before you run. Three years in, these should not be the questions.
Anyway, the ultimatum that Jackie finally accepts is that she will find a way to "get" Eddie a job at All Saints so that at least Kevin will know where he works. But Eddie's leverage -- and maybe she's just agreeing to keep him happy -- is that he never would have gotten involved with her if he'd known she was married. Which may or may not be true, but is still irrelevant because he was never involved with Kevin until after that came out. His friendship with Kevin, however it behaves now, arose as a weapon against Jackie. One which no longer carries that much weight, because he's leaning so hard on the virtue and strength of his relationship with Kevin -- and completely disinterested in resuming anything having to do with his relationship with Jackie -- so the question becomes, "Why is this her problem?"
Eddie: "...Don't take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but you are an amazing fucking liar. A world-class genius. So just think about it."
Jackie, immediately: "I don't need to think about it. Call him and tell him you just lost your job and you're looking for work in a downtown pharmacy. I'll take it from there."
She didn't even need to think about it. There's a thread this season about how great of a liar she is, and we see more and more where Jackie keeps doing that thing House does, where she takes part of somebody else's conversation and applies it to her own life, this bricolage of just taking the basic building blocks of existence and mashing them into her life however they fit, and it's super scary, but never quite as scary as in this episode, where basically she could be having the same conversations -- employing the same borrowed lies so quickly and smoothly she might not even know she's lying -- verbatim with every character.
Zoey appears and whistles a tiny "Caw-caw!" because she's still being a superspy, and Jackie demands half her purple gloves from Oncology. There's a crazy patient lady -- the blonde woman's wife from early Friends, aka the first lesbian of all time -- who has lost her mind due to her sons' pissing all over the place like little boys do, and she's screaming about urine and has hacksawed into her own hand by accident, and the boys are traumatized and the lady is clearly traumatized and won't let any male doctors or nurses near her, and it's a gross and very realistic conversation in the middle of a less than realistic flip-out.
Coming from a large family of sons whose urination-control abilities seemed to decline every time another one of us was born, I get the frustration, believe me. There are entire rooms in the house that still require a hazmat team and/or priest if anybody's ever going to escape from them unscathed. And it's as gross to talk about in real life as it is to talk about it on TV, which is why I do not.
At Jackie's somewhat reckless suggestion, Coop switches cases with Eleanor -- who is dealing with a poison ingestion, far away from Jackie, which is how she wants it -- but then out at the nurses' station they're all noshing on donuts and getting a speech from Gloria about childhood obesity -- FLOTUS's whole deal, of course -- and how this is the key to getting Mrs. Obama to visit them over Bellevue. Also, there's a history with Bellevue where Gloria's counterpart/nemesis Lily Chung is better at this kind of thing, networking, so we'll presumably be hearing about or running into her as this thing develops.
Gloria keeps handing everybody donuts, even poor Thor, and I guess there's some kind of irony or hypocrisy having to do with them eating donuts that seems maybe better on the page than in execution. Coop keeps trying to slip Sam an apology donut in a way where he simultaneously won't and will notice the apology donut, and it's sad and kind of sweet, but of course Sam is not interested. And since Jackie spends this entire episode on the same trajectory -- trying desperately to get Eleanor and Kevin to love her again, because without them she is nothing -- it's even more touching to watch Coop try to figure out how people act and what the protocol is to make somebody stop being angry with you and go back to loving you. There's never been a lot for Sam to do on this show, so it's nice on that level; even nicer in the same way that Thor's diabetes struggles last year were such a soft, bright contrast to the unhealthy addictions of our antiheroine.
Gloria: "Do you have any idea what that kind of press will do for our profile? CNN, MSNBC. People magazine, I'm talking People, people. You can't put a price on it. So please join me in making fat kids enemy number one at All Saints."
(And again, please, please, please let Gloria's war on fat kids be a priority in this season, because that sounds adorable and hilarious, two things this show does well -- vide Zoey; vide again Fitch Cooper on his best days -- when it remembers to do them at all.)
Pee Lady: "Urine urine urine valium urine."
Jackie: "I am acquainted with urine."
Pee Lady: "Yeah, but you get paid."
Jackie: (Can't disagree.)
Pee Lady, verbatim: "You know how I get paid? IN URINE!"
Jackie grabs the kids and shoves 'em out like somebody just opened the Ark of the Covenant. Their piss-stained feet don't even touch the floor. Eleanor enters and immediately agrees, without looking up, that Jackie would be better off dealing with the children. Jackie strips off her apron, disappointed and hurt, and takes the kids to Thor.
Jackie: "This is Thor. He's my boss."
Thor: "Hilarious!"
Jackie: "Take them to the family room, fill them up with snacks, stick them in front of the TV."
Gloria, from out of nowhere: "Don't you dare. Snacks and TV are why our kids are in danger!"
Jackie: "Their mother just unhinged her jaw and tried to devour them. TV is the safest place."
(Jackie knows from endangered children; Jackie knows from rage.)
Gloria, awkwardly and sharply: "Stand up straight."
Boys, unsurprisingly: (Instantly adore Mrs. Akalitus.)
A couple hotty EMTs bring in a guy in his eighties who was found in Tompkins Square, close to death; Zoey notices quietly that he's pinned a note that reads I AM ELIOT GRAHAM, I AM DNR to his chest, and Jackie goes off on them. But as Coop confirms, the EMS were obliged to resuscitate him on the scene regardless, so she can go ahead and stop yelling at the boys any time. Guessing she won't. "I wanted to die outside," he mumbles to Zoey and Coop, and they just stare at each other for a second.
Zoey, of course, pulls the shades; she floods him with sunlight.
Coop heads to Eddie for some adorable relationship advice through the pharmacy glass.
Eddie: "I don't know what to say, you have to give him his own space."
Coop: "I'm not trying to get into his space, I'm trying to drag him into my space. And he's being a dick."
Eddie: "Maybe you have to bare your soul."
Coop: (Sparkles; opens wide, revealing a vast chasm of feelings, feelings, feelings.)
Eddie: "To him, not me! Him, him, him!"
(And then but sometimes, the show does men awfully well; even if this is just a Zoey/Jackie scene with the names changed it's still fucking great, from the terror in Eddie's eyes to the mournful, lonesome, dreamy way Coop runs his fingers across the glass while talking about Sam.)
There is here a very, very Gloria scene here where she bitches at somebody's answering service while also telling Jackie -- in a quietly meaningful, seemingly offhand, plausible-deniability way -- that O'Hara has contacted Sloan-Kettering about a job. Jackie has to play the same hand -- "Oh? That's a good hospital" -- and they both just stare at each other, like, "Which of us can stop this from happening?" Finally Gloria's like, "That's all."
Translation: "What I just told you is to fix this, and underneath that I'm warning you that you're running out of time, because underneath that I don't want my best ER surgeon leaving, and because underneath all that, I want you to be happy and I know that you need her."
Zoey runs to the pharmacy with her stolen Urology stuff -- literally this is all she does the entire episode, besides her connection to the old suicide guy, and in both cases it's amazing because Zoey is, if possible, even more consistently wonderful this year -- and then Jackie busts in there, snorts a bunch of secret pills, and leaves without giving Zoey a fist-bump. Sweetly, Eddie gives her the bump instead, and it's a nice moment. He knows what it feels like, when Jackie leaves you hanging.
Pee Lady: "I can't believe I went off like that in front of the kids... I look at the other moms -- Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Xanax, Ativan -- and I think, I don't know, maybe it would help? But I just, I don't want to be that kind of mom, you know?"
Jackie: (Totally does.)
Which is what makes the whole thing sad and why I'll continue to root for her no matter how horrible she gets or how little accountability the show demands of her, because whatever "consequences" there are that we're constantly overlooking and being asked to overlook in favor of the ever-increasing high of watching her fuck up: Every moment of her day is another strip off her back because she is completely aware of what a fucking monster she is. She's uglier to herself than the show could ever see her; we are all uglier to ourselves than we could possibly really be.
The thing about sainthood is that you're in a race with yourself, and your demons, and nobody else: You left them behind a long time ago. So the thing that usually would get you out -- shame -- isn't something you have to draw on, because as an addict you're already so close to being God, and as a genius you know for a fact you're better than everybody else, because the smarter you are the crazier you get to be. The well is darker and lonelier; it's a longer fall to find the bottom.
Or else why would they constantly do exactly what you tell them to do? Letting it go slack -- so loose you could skip rope with it -- and then reeling them in again? Giving them just enough to hang themselves with, as long as you can keep them. As long as they are yours.
Coop heads to the giftshop, the better to buy a greeting card; they don't sell cards for this kind of thing, because this kind of thing is specific and new and hopeful. The maybe one upside of the suppression and systematic devaluation of female sexuality has been the understanding in and between women of the difference between sexual and emotional romance: Eleanor and Jackie love each other as much as Anne Shirley loved Diana Barry, as passionately and multivalently as they ever did, without getting confused about it, even with O'Hara's sexuality in the corner. And while men have always quietly done the same, it's only as recent as last week they could be as vocal about it as Eddie and Kevin, or as ridiculous, as ham-fistedly romantic, as Coop: In a world without fathers we can all do what we want.
Thanks to Jackie, Zoey has decided to ride Lenny about the whole DNR thing. She makes him apologize and beg for awhile before gifting him a grin; she is learning. She senses the stressful silence between Jackie and Eleanor, at the smoking door, and offers to have lunch again with Eleanor, whom Lenny compliments. It ends well, for the youngsters; Jackie gives Eleanor a sheepish wave as she's getting her black car.
Jackie: "I'm sorry, Kev. The last thing I meant to do was scare you. Sweetie, I'm not a moron, yes of course there's a potential for addiction, yes. I was nowhere near that. Honey, I'm not that kind of mom..."
And just like that, Pee Lady becomes part of the story too. That's what a non-addict would say, so she says it.
Eleanor drives away and Jackie runs into the street, lying carelessly to Kevin to get off the phone; Gloria's still on with the White House when Jackie asks for leave to chase Eleanor down. Apologies are not a two-way street.
Jackie: "Monday equals lunch on the terrace. Do I know you or do I know you?"
Eleanor: (That's the problem.)
Jackie: "Sloan-Kettering? Really? I trained with Brenda. Columbia Pres? I know everybody in HR. St. Luke's, I trained more than half their staff. So there is pretty much no place you can go where I can't be in 24 hours, just so you know. I'm not that easy to get rid of."
Waiter: "May I bring you..."
Jackie: "Hold your horses."
Eleanor: (Doesn't move.)
Jackie: "If I ever needed a friend, it's now. If you want to jump ship, you're gonna jump ship and there's nothing I can do about it. But don't think for one second that I won't cash in my chips at All Saints, because I will. And I will find you. Because you are my friend. That's just the way it is. So you might as well stay. Please stay. That's all I got."
Eleanor: (Doesn't move.)
People have got to stop trying to save people that don't want to be saved. End of story.
When Jackie gets back Sam can't fill her in, he did the NYU afternoon meeting. "One day at a time, my friend," Jackie says in a way that's barely taunting.
"Hanging by a thread," Sam mumbles. "I'm gonna do it this time," Sam promises.
Coop takes the stage, to a chorus of sighs, after Sam refuses the greeting card he chose. It's a birth announcement. "It's A Boy! Am I Sorry!"
"Dear Sam. I am sorry I slept with your girlfriend. What a dick move. Seriously. Apologies are a two-way street. And seeing that we work together, and even though I am a doctor and you are a nurse, I still want to apologize to you and for you to accept my apology as much as I accept yours. Don't forget, you broke my nose. I forgive you. Yours truly, Dr. Fitch..."
Mercifully, an alarm goes off: The old man finally died. Zoey puts a potted plant into his bed -- "I think he was a gardener" -- and tells Jackie the EMTs feel bad about the DNR thing.
"Good, shoulda left him alone. People've got to stop trying to save people who don't want to be saved. End of story."
Jackie lets Zoey call it. When Coop appears to complain about having flowers in the ER bay, Zoey tells him to cram it and shuts the curtain in his face; when Eleanor appears to check his charts, Jackie can't take her eyes off her face. Eleanor can barely move.
Jackie: "No shortage of cold shoulders between Kevin, Grace and you. What if we were to have lunch tomorrow?"
Eleanor, after a bit: "Not quite there yet."
Jackie, with a secret grin: "But we're getting closer. I can tell. How about the day after tomorrow? I'm buying."
Eleanor: "Not making any promises."
Jackie: "Look who you're talking to."
Apologies are not a two-way street. This is the best she can do. And it's working. We're getting closer, I can tell. "Look who you're talking to," she jokes, as if her betrayal is a new funny story between the two of them. As if they are on a two-way street. But it's working.
And because it works, she'll go home to Kevin's bar, and she'll listen to Fiona's first day of school -- "My new class is almost all girls," she'll complain, and Grace will whisper from her shroud, "That's because there's more girls on the planet than boys" -- and she'll drink a Shirley Temple where Kevin can see her.
She'll assure Fiona there are plenty of boys left in this world, and she'll be grateful when one of the regulars asks her why she's drinking her Shirley Temple; she'll joke that she's hung over from his first wedding, and won't be able to remember if they had a cash bar at her wedding to Kevin. When Eddie walks in she'll consider whether it's okay to talk about her wedding, and Grace will ask how she could ever forget a single detail about that day. She'll confuse everybody there, by offering to buy the place a round. They will be distracted, they will laugh.
She will throw her arms around her husband and this is what she'll say:
"You could go to the ends of the earth. And wherever you go, 24 hours later, I'm gonna be there. Cash in my chips, grab the girls, do it so fast it'd make your head spin. That's just the way it is. You are stuck with me."
She won't even think about Eddie's eyes on her, as Kevin relaxes into her arms. She'll believe every word, with such determination that Kevin will believe it too. And when he asks her for a favor, when he tells her Eddie's out of a job, she'll promise to help his friend, and she'll mean that too. She owes her husband that much, at least.
It works if you work it.
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