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Set against the backdrop of Grace's anxiety party surrounding a saint pageant litany thing at school, this one's pretty funny. Kevin's sister continues to maybe exist or at least not matter, while the dad from Wonder Years shows up for a really long boring conversation about Kevin's horrible marriage. Eventually Jackie actually manages to impress Grace by showing up just in time for Grace's big speech.
Of course, the only reason she's there is that Devil Bill invited her over for some drugs, narrowly missed being killed by a gargoyle head, and then was run over by a truck. So Jackie ran away from that whole situation and back to the school in Queens, and we're still trying to figure out what this season is actually about.
Other developments: Kelly Slater has a fondness for young ladies, like jailbait-young, so that's his big fault. Besides, you know, how he's obnoxious to begin with. Coop is still melting down about his moms, and it's to the point where even Akalitus is screaming at him to pull it together. There's a great scene in the middle where Sam acts wussy about treating drug cases because of his recovery stuff, and Jackie schools him in a great way about being of service.
But the weird part is when this PCP OD guy shoves Eleanor in the boob, and she wanders around in a daze for a while and finally ends up getting a hug from Eddie, which Jackie has to witness third-hand because O'Hara's not really interested in showing Jackie vulnerability right now, plus Jackie has ruined them both for other people so now they can only be friends with each other.
Eddie immediately tries to load Eleanor up on drugs, because he's kinda gross, but when Jackie comes in looking to score, he full-on points out that she is a drug addict who is looking to score. Jackie doesn't want to be hearing that, but it's nice to see somebody call her out for once.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!THE DEFINITION OF A MIRACLE
Gracie, in saint garb: "I am Christina the Astonishing. I am from Belgium. I am remembered for my faith, and my violent fits of ecstasy..."
Jackie -- Looking totally like somebody's mom! -- pins in her mouth: "Grace honey, please stay still."
Grace is fairly awesome in this episode, which is pretty much the best episode of the season. Even Kev kind of rules this week. Things actually happen, and most of them are not annoying.
So Fiona keeps asking questions about the bizarrely grim facts of Grace's litany ("I was born a peasant, and when I was 21 years old, I had epilepsy and died") and they have another one of those family discussions of whether or not their religion is creepy.
Kevin, so excited to be acting like somebody's awesome dad: "You're gonna do great, you're gonna knock it out of the park, you're gonna dominate, you're gonna crack 'em and rack 'em and stack 'em and we're gonna be there, snapping pictures."
Grace actually giggles, smiles; you can see the little girl in there for once. Of course, she immediately has a meltdown because Jackie has created wings for the costume -- "If she had wings it wouldn't be a miracle!" -- but for once she seems like a normal anxious kid and not an anxiety-riddled basket case.
"Just try to relax, keep your shoulders back, your eyes straight ahead, keep breathing. What is the worst that could happen?"
THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN
At the diner where everybody goes when they're in recovery, the Devil is fighting on the phone with his interior decorator Greg, who has installed a bunch of naked Greco-Roman sculptures in his house. Considering what happens later, it's tempting to connect this obsession with pagan statuary to Gloria's saint thing to Grace's saint thing, but with this show I find that half the time I don't see the connections that are actually intended, and the other half I see stuff that is patently not there.
Jackie, no bullshit: "Yeah, can I get a hug?"
Devil Bill: Continues talking about interior design; one could call him an interior designer of a specifically demonic sort.
Jackie: "Hug."
Turns out Bill has no hugs to offer -- he's off to Miami to get some drugs tonight. So now there are two problems, because first of all she needs drugs and second of all her drug dealer leaving town is stressful in this whole other way. Jackie's superpower has always been using love to get what she wants, and one of the interesting things about this season is that she's gotten so low that for the first time in her life she's using a drug dealer, right, but in some ways that's actually less stressful at this point because she's dicked her people around so much.
It's kind of like how maybe you feel weird about buying condoms or something, until you have to buy a lice kit for your kid and then suddenly condoms are not that bad, you might toss some condoms in on top to distract people from the lice kit. You know? She used to be too good for drug dealers, but now it's actually less painful in some ways.
Also: Hugs are the only thing that matters in this episode. Keep your eye out for them.
Bill: "Look. After work come by my place, I'll see if I can't scrounge something up for you, okay?"
Jackie, of course: "Your 'place'? Like your home?"
Bill: "Relax. Right up the block. It's the Deco joint with the gargoyles on top."
Jackie: "Go figure."
PATIENT ONE
Is a 25-year-old male who went nuts on the High Line -- which is that pretty park on the West Side that used to be an elevated rail until 1980, which I thought but wasn't sure until I looked it up -- and is probably on angel dust at this current time.
Eleanor: "I need a tox screen. And Thor. Bring me my giant!"
They talk about maybe it's PCP, or glue, and helpfully define for us what a "sherm stick" is, which is about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of: A cigarette dipped in formaldehyde. Why would you do that? Drugs are so fucking stupid. Nobody can come up with any real answers as to what he might be going through right now, leading to this:
Zoey: "Wow. It's so hard to know what's going on inside someone."
Jackie, essentially: "That is a double-edged blade."
Eleanor: "Yes well you two can stand here and mull over his right to privacy while Thor draws blood for a tox screen. Thor?"
Zoey grabs Eleanor and asks her to lunch, because somewhere she came across a $50 giftcard to an Indian restaurant. Eleanor and Jackie have a telepathic conversation of the "I will if you will" type, and Zoey totally calls them out on it, which is funny, and they just sort of shrug and commit fully to the crazy notion of lunch with Zoey.
FITCH COOPER: A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN AN ENEMA
Gloria comes running through with her new phone, and then heads over to Coop's Childhood Museum of an office to tell him about it. Coop is in a bad way, of course, because divorcing mommies makes him dive into a pool of kiddie crap like Scrooge McDuck. Gloria awesomely opens the door of this dollhouse he's staring at, so she can talk to him through the skeleton of the house.
Coop: "It's a diorama of a 19th-century dentist's office. The three of us made it together for Social Studies. We were up all night."
Gloria: "I'm gonna have this conversation with you once, and only once. Your mothers called me, both of them. They told me about the divorce, and that they're worried about you. This is not my job. You have two mothers. You don't need a third. Get your act together and clean your office. This is a health hazard."
Poor cute mopey little guy is like, "I honestly have no idea what is going on," and she tells him to purge and get it together. Fitch Cooper getting it together. A, it will never ever happen, not on this show; B, that is even scarier than regular Coop.
OUT OF SERVICE
Jackie sends Sam to take care of the PCP guy, and things get stupid.
Sam: "Drug cases are kind of weird for me? You know? I'm just trying to negotiate everything?"
Jackie, not having it: "Really? Sam, you're a nurse. You don't get to choose who you treat... What would your 'sponsor,' or whatever, tell you?"
I love that bitchy little thing in there, like recovery is this Star Trek: The Generation deal that only geeks are into. But not as much as I love his answer:
Sam: "He'd tell me to be of service."
So, yeah.
After she tells him in detail how he can do so, he runs off and Zoey stares and says something about how Jackie would kick ass in AA, and Eleanor does this hilarious oh girl no thing, like practically drawing her thumbnail across her throat, and takes off. Zoey is left wondering why Jackie would care about that, and Jackie runs off to go do a shitload of drugs.
PATIENTS TWO
Are a pair of tweens who skipped school to get drunk and have ended up in the ER by falling over like idiots, and now are noticing that Dr. Cooper is not only hot but famously so. (One of the great things about this episode is how it remembers other episodes, like a lot of shows often do, but not so much this show.)
Tweens: "We both wanna marry doctors. Or even a nurse. I'd get with a nurse, because they're healers."
Coop: "Girls, I'm gonna drop some wisdom on you."
Nurse Kelly: "-- Oh, you don't have to do that, Dr. Cooper..."
Coop: "-- So many things that we love are illusions. Look at these shoes. These shoes are $600. Illusions. Look at this phone. Awesome phone. Illusion. But this guy? This guy is real."
Kelly: Is in no way real.
Part of this episode concerns whether or not Kelly is being inappropriate with the young ladies. It's obvious that he's enjoying the attention and that he is some kind of scammer, but having watched it a few times specifically to figure out what's going on with these girls and Kelly, I still can't figure out what's going on with these girls and Kelly.
I mean, Nurse Jackie has an agenda -- for everything, but specifically for staying on top of Kelly, who has jumped ahead in Gloria's estimation because of Michelle Obama and the ubiquitous Lily Chung -- but in this case the way it's actually filmed I cannot tell whether or not she's being legit about it.
PEYTON PLACE
The dad from Wonder Years comes to hang out at Kevin's bar, which is too bad because the electricity has been out for awhile and the beer is all warm. He's a cop or something, something in City Hall, and he has come by to ask if everything is okay because something we didn't know is that Kevin got pulled over with the girls in the car, for speeding. Seems important, right? Stay tuned, because it kind of is and it kind of isn't.
NAMASTE
Zoey plays their Indian lunch like some kind of meeting of just the girls, and it's fairly adorable, and the ladies have to admit they're having a nice time... Right until Zoey starts bugging them about their relationship and whether or not they're still fighting, in such journalistic tones that it's entirely clear almost immediately that we're back on her blogging thing.
Zoey: "My entry is titled 'No Longer Cats & Dogs.'"
Jackie, menacing: "No. It isn't."
Eleanor, breezy: "Zoey, you do realize if you mention either of us online we will cut you into little pieces and feed you to snakes."
Their names on her blog: Lady Penelope and Taffy. Oh, girl.
Zoey: "It's just that I look at the two of you and I see something, you know, rare and amazing."
Eleanor talks about how she doesn't really like nurses, other than Jackie -- And, um, Zoey, of course -- and certainly not Kelly, even if everybody else does.
Zoey: "The ladies love Kelly."
Taffy: "Yeah, well, we are not ladies."
Zoey asks if they honestly don't like Kelly, and they have to get vague really quickly, and then they think about killing her some more.
PURGING THE JUNK
Gloria summons Fitch to watch her replace her phone, so that he will understand purging, but she can't really work her new phone either. Coop asks her for a hug, just a hug, no small talk, gargoyles everywhere, and calls her Gloria into the bargain, and she sends him off to find Thor to fix her phone because he is amazing.
Coop: "You know, there are lots of people that would hug me."
Gloria: "Then find them. And hug them."
NO LONGER CATS & DOGS
So, the secret life of Kevin Peyton is that, after that night where he threw a shit-fit and she left him on the side of the road and Eddie had to go pick him up on the motorcycle, morning he packed bags for himself and the girls and took off. And it wasn't until he got pulled over that he realized he was acting crazy. (Not that he was acting crazy.) Dan Lauria tells him to have an affair, and Kevin says no, and it's the longest conversation.
Over in the ER, Kelly is or is not flirting with the tweens and Jackie tells him to get the fuck away from them and go deal with PCP guy. It's an odd little moment -- is she clued in to something real or what? -- and he tells the girls some kind of nasty secret mean thing about Jackie, which maybe confirms it, but the thing that happens is really bad:
The PCP guy freaks, knocks Eleanor on her ass, and she spends the rest of the episode out of it and post-traumatic and in need of a hug. Maybe it seems like more a big deal than it really is because she's such a great actress, but it is hard to watch.
MY GIANT
Thor explains all the many functions of Gloria's new phone, and in the middle of things who should call but old Lily Chung, which sends Gloria into a tailspin.
Gloria: "Last night after one too many vodka gimlets, I called Lily Chung twice -- maybe three times -- and left a series of increasingly embarrassing voicemails."
Thor: Is of course deliciously familiar with the drunkdial.
Gloria: "She makes me feel... Unaccomplished. She's my Voldemort."
Thor puts on his awesomest power-twink voice and answers the phone like Gloria has this Byzantine support system, and makes like she's having an appointment lunch with the mayor, and is generally amazing. And seconds later:
Coop: "Oh, come on! He gets a hug?"
THOR ALWAYS GETS A HUG, DUDE
Pouring the girls' warm beers down a bathroom sink, Jackie worries over Eleanor's PCP-related abrasions, and tells her to go get drugs from Eddie, but Eleanor's in a crazy stalwart place right now and won't look anybody in the eye or talk over a scary stoic whisper-murmur ("I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine") so finally Jackie leaves it alone. Eleanor takes a sip from one of the girls' beers, and that's it.
Minutes later, Eleanor's down at the pharmacy wishing for a drink, and Eddie offers her many medicinal options. She settles for a hug. There's one connection to follow here, the warm beers of Kev and the warm beers of Jackie, and the difference between a hug and a "hug," and the way we act when we get truly hurt. I don't know. Eddie gives her a hug, but also Jackie walks right by when this is happening, so you have this extra factor of them continuing to be friends and freaking her out on that level... All of which adds up to the fact that Jackie's hug dealer is going to Miami tonight.
SHE WASN'T AN ANGEL
So of course Grace calls at this exact moment that Jackie is locking herself in the bathroom stall, sounding burnt out and sweet, to apologize for blowing up about the wings this morning. It's a pretty amazing moment because we've all been there, apologizing for some small thing but feeling so hard the larger things it's connected to. Certainly that's been Jackie's story this season, trying to add up tiny kindnesses into one big apology, but the actress nails it so beautifully and it's so sad.
Grace: "I just wanted to tell you that I liked the wings you made for me. You were being nice. I was mean. I didn't mean to be mean. It's just that she wasn't an angel. She was a saint."
Jackie comes closer to tears than she's been in a long time, just this tiny amount of sunshine coming through after so many dark days, and I don't know. It's a moment of perfection in a show that deserves more of them. Just devastating and effective.
...And then it's done. Grace has to run away back to class before she gets caught with her friend's phone, and Jackie has so many words in her throat that they can't get out, and by the time she can even register what's happening enough to respond, Grace is gone. It is so perfect. Especially considering the fact that, since this is a TV show, they're not actually on the phone with each other, you know what I mean? Both sides of this could have happened on different days, but somehow they made this beautiful moment.
The only real hug in the entire episode, and Jackie got caught in it with her pants down and only just realized it was happening as it was ending. I don't know much about addiction or recovery but I have this sort of intuition that it's probably even harder for Jackie to live through than it is to watch. Something about moms, and mental illness, and those times that you come so close to getting there and then it goes away again.
Needless to say, Jackie rubs what's left of her drugs on her gums once it's over. And then it really is.
TAFFY
Kelly offers Zoey some of his sandwich, but she's still riding high on having "dined with the girls," which provides entrée to her intel about how Jackie may or may not hate Nurse Kelly, but either way he's still not bowing to the social pressure of being completely in awe of Jackie no matter how many times they tell him to. Also, Zoey is the baby of the family and rarely has the option of being wise, when being wise and nurturing is like what she was born to do -- someday soon, really, she's getting there fast -- so she relishes that too.
Zoey: "A little heads up from someone who's been here awhile. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of getting along with Jackie."
Kelly immediately asks if something's going on, and Zoey freezes up, and before you know it Jackie has appeared, like Beetlejuice.
Zoey: "No! No one said anything! I tried to be gossipy and it's totally backfiring! Abort abort abort!"
Jackie tells Kelly to take it easy on the jailbait, and also to scram, and Zoey grins.
Zoey: "I'm not jailbait."
Jackie: "I wasn't talking about you."
Zoey: "I used to be jailbait."
Jackie, for real: "Shut up."
Zoey, nodding: "My bait used to be... Very jail."
Jackie follows Kelly into the men's room to bug him about it more, and he starts bitching back about the implications and how she needs to back off, and honestly he's reacting so strongly that I guess maybe she's right. The tone of it says that there's something to it, like, it seems so obvious to her both in script and delivery that I guess it's true, but I still don't really understand how this whole deal worked, but it gets intense.
Kelly: "If you're gonna come after me, I'm coming after you."
Jackie: "I know what I saw."
Kelly: "You're fucking high!"
Hmm. Not the right word choice. Things are only getting worse.
PHARMACY
There's some small talk about Eleanor, but Jackie's acting super sketchy at this point and sort of snorting and sniffing and her tongue's crazy in her cheeks and she's pacing and acting weird and pretending to discuss Eleanor with him for a really long time.
Jackie: "I think she's in more pain than she lets on..."
Eddie, milking it: "[Says nothing. Just stares.]"
Jackie, like we're still talking about Eleanor: "That PCP guy was a disaster! I threw my back out trying to restrain him..."
And oh, the over-it that Eddie gives her, it's heartbreaking. It's the opposite of a hug. He looks at her like a drug addict, and lets her keep talking. Suggests she try Pilates or something, for her back pain. And Jackie, who has found that there are lower levels you can go than Bill, having found that Eddie -- through Eleanor, maybe through Tunie -- has found just enough breathing room to assert himself over her using her drug addiction...
Ah God, it's a mess. Whole new side of self-loathing for her. She tells him to fuck off and leaves, which is frankly just handing it to him, but the whole thing is just so gross that he ends up looking worse than she does in a way. It's not an intervention or anything, it's just this nasty little moment that's more about him and her than it is about drugs. The Game of Concern. Her voice breaks.
It's dangerous and weird and, even if you're tone-deaf to the ways this show plays with time vs. her addiction (Do you really keep track of whether she needs drugs at any given point in an episode? Are you even supposed to?) the episode gives you a very effective tick-tock in these scenes this week. She's got the pageant and she's got a possible meeting at the Devil's actual House, and here's hoping for the best.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE
Coop, having thought a little bit about hugs and a lot about purging, gets Zoey to help him hide a lot of his crap. She likes the dollhouse.
Coop: "It's not a dollhouse."
Zoey: "But you could use it as one, though. If you had dolls. And they needed a house."
Coop seems oddly like a man somehow, for once, I guess because he is sad and talking quietly and sadly and reaching so hard for what being a man or a grownup or anything at all, like, actually means. I don't know. He dates around and stuff but it's so hard to take him seriously. It seems funny that he should seem so much older -- and more... male? -- for this particular storyline.
Coop: "It still wouldn't be a dollhouse. It's a replica of a 19th-century dentist's office made to scale. I even made the dentist and the little man in the chair. When I was little, everything had to be perfect or I'd freak out."
Zoey: "Look at that poor guy. Looks like it hurts."
Coop: "He's having his impacted molar extracted without anesthesia, so yeah, it hurts."
THE DECO PLACE, WITH GARGOYLES
And I mean, there's another thing there about "hurting," everybody this episode talks about how some things hurt and sometimes people won't admit that they hurt, and all the way to the beginning where they talk about how hard it is to diagnose from the outside. And how when Zoey looks at Taffy and Lady Penelope she sees something so bright and so beautiful that she wants to preserve it forever, and do what she can -- storytelling, lunch, whatever it takes -- to keep it strong. Even more than she wants to be a part of it. And from the outside, you'd never know.
And even when Eddie looked Lady Penelope in the eye and told her she was hurting, she wanted a hug more than drugs. So you have both of them pretending they're not hurting, and both of them are hurting, but one of them knows it's a blip and the other one knows it's forever.
One of them's an angel -- all flighty and airy and careless and unreal -- and the other one's a very damaged saint. Which is why Eddie can give Lady Penelope a hundred hugs and never care, but won't even let Taffy touch him anymore, because he knows the price. I think we'll be reaching back to the episode over the month more than I might have thought. I feel like the saint thing is now in 90% of all storylines and I still don't really understand the point they're making.
Anyway, Jackie goes to the guy's apartment, and hates herself every single step, and just when you think the show has actually committed to something -- she's running late for the pageant because she's chilling outside her drug dealer's house -- one gargoyle's head cracks off and hits the ground... Right in front of him. A sign from God that went nowhere. She flinches, and Bill looks up at the top of the building... Which is when the truck gets him.
Dead Devil. End of storyline. End of interesting, magical, terrifying "find bottom" storyline that might actually have changed the show in any way. Sigh.
To her credit, however, Jackie runs away and back to Queens without looting the body. So that's a good thing, I guess. Pretty awesome when your main character is to be relatively praised for not stealing drugs from a corpse.
SO UM, WAY TO GO!
"I am Christina the Astonishing. I am from Belgium. I am remembered for my faith and my violent fits of ecstasy. I am the patron saint of insanity and lunatics. I died but came back to life."
Grace stares everywhere, waiting for her mother, without wings. She finally sees her, and smiles so beautifully.
Psalm 102, The Prayer Of The Afflicted, isn't the kind of thing you just pull out of your ass. It's big guns. It's about how even before drugs we knew what bottom was.
Grace's excerpt shines down on her mother, from above. She can't feel the light, just the shame. The affliction. If you knew it was time for this prayer, chances are it would be too late. That's what intercession is about; sometimes that's how it works. If you had wings, it wouldn't be a miracle. Angels don't have to try; saints never stop. Rock bottom feels like it. Aslan's not a tame lion.
The fact is that the unshakeable Lady Penelope was shaken, afflicted, and all Jackie could talk about was drugs, drugs, drugs. Gave her a warm beer instead of what she needed. Isn't that sad? Poor Taffy, struggling to be real. Poor saint, falling apart. When the only answer was to be of service. When the only answer, ever, is to be of service.
For my days vanish like smoke
I am like an owl in the desert
Among the ruins
I have mingled my drink with weeping
And my days are like a shadow.
Pray for me.
Or maybe Bill was never the Devil at all. Maybe he was just God, untamed, begging her to come back home. In the only language He could still hope she'd understand.