By Jacob
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Poor sweet sad Lou is back, as well as the fake-asthma little girl from last week, and the devil man supervillain guy. Jackie, having lost some of her pills to the rats in the ceiling, goes begging to the devil man, and of course he gives her some pills in the most fucked up way possible (inside a sobriety chip container), with the scariest devil-man smile of all time. Along with this foreboding is the scary feelings of watching Lou circle the drain.
On the other hand, watching Eleanor and Jackie fake-fight over the little asthma girl's future so she won't be infected by the awfulness of her dickhead mom was one of the sweetest things this whole season, so it's a wash.
Gloria gets Jackie and Thor to help her steal the Virgin Mary statue from the chapel, and Thor is pissy about the way Jackie treats him for a second, but that's all the hospital stuff basically. Oh, and a stoned rat drops out of the ceiling onto Zoey's lunch wrap, so that was fun. Although when Jackie flushes it, you might learn that the visual of a big rat going down a toilet is viscerally upsetting.
What else? Coop's moms are breaking up, and one of them has turned into Judith Light. I loooove looking at Judith Light, especially wearing purple, so that is just fine. Coop is, of course, a massive drama queen about it, and adds several minutes to the show's already impressive collection of "Jackie Peyton standing there awkwardly while somebody hugs her" footage that will eventually be made into some kind of YouTube video.
So as we head into the halfway point of the season, we're seeing more recurring characters than this show usually has, and we also have devil-man finally stepping up to be Jackie's dealer. I am fascinated by this storyline, and by the ongoing awesomeness of poor sweet Lou, but given this show's history it's just as likely we'll never see either of them again, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Zoey's pink bunnies inform Jackie's sensible nurse shoes that "Cantasha" -- aka Candace & Natasha, the non-asthma asthma pair from last week -- are back. And not only are they back, but they littered! Zoey can't figure any of this out.
Jackie: "...So nobody's sick."
Zoey: "Nobody's ever sick! They're always here and they're never sick!"
Jackie blows her off to bitch at Eddie for having textual communication with Tunie, pointing out that she's the sister-in-law of a ticking time bomb. Eddie checks her out, silently, finally admitting he's just looking for the leg to stand on. The hit connects and she throws her hands up, telling him to go for it. "But just so you know, she was up half the night hacking into her ex-boyfriend's email. Who is a pilot, by the way."
It's interesting, because nothing ever sticks on this show, but the thing that stuck is Eddie's new bizarre place in her life. No wonder she can't adjust; no wonder she's feeling something that just can't be jealousy. Jackie doesn't like it when the puppets go off book; especially when she has to start shit while pretending there's no shit to start.
Finally, nervily, Eddie offers her some Valium and she snits that she's not stressing about the possibility of her ex-boyfriend dating both her husband and his sister, and this with such voluble pissiness that she ends up coming off even more stressed about it than she actually is, which works just fine for Eddie but more importantly starts the ramping up of Jackie's stress level that will pay off at the end of the episode.
Which episode is, probably, the best of the season, so you should watch it again because this is as good as it's going to get. So: Round One to Eddie, which is itself a danger sign.
Thor comes running up to Jackie with his most adorable excited squealing, and she totally cuts him off in a way neither we nor Thor are used to seeing. The first thing I thought was, "That was totally a Zoey, she just Zoey'd Thor, how awful," and then later on he says the exact same thing.
In comes a GSW, meaning lots of running around for Eleanor and Fitch, both screaming for Jackie, but Jackie is nowhere to be found: Jackie's down in some office somewhere (The tapdancing room? Maybe the place she spaced out in the first finale?) retrieving drugs down from an acoustic tile. Sadly, the rats are back, and have seriously depleted her stash. She counts them out on a blotter calendar while the music gets more and more nervous for her: What was once seven grains, no more no less, has become five giant blue pills a day -- and her days are running out. She nearly starts crying, poor thing.