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HR mandates piss tests for all of Gloria's nurses, which only Jackie and Kelly really worry about. In the end, after nonstop complaining and worrying about it, Gloria tosses Jackie's urine sample in the garbage as some kind of revolutionary act or something. Whatever involves a total lack of consequences and return to status quo. The myriad ways in which this show refuses to ever change can be really unsatisfying.
I love how Lenny is the only ambulance driver in New York. The only patients of note this week are a pair of brothers, one of whom is both deaf and blind, but beyond Jackie's usual high level of care there's not much to that. Somehow Coop gets her, and everybody, involved in his big birthday-wedding plans, but the girl cold-foots it on out of there and leaves him at the altar before we even get to meet her. Having been stood up, Coop seems more distraught than ever, but the staff all sing "Happy Birthday" to him and that cheers him up. Although not quite as much as the romantic pedicab ride Eddie takes him on afterwards.
Fiona playing with matches leads to Kevin calling and calling, but since Jackie has a feeling he's going to freak out on her about something, she avoids him all day long. Eventually he shows up at the hospital with the girls -- who, predictably, love what a trainwreck Zoey is -- and takes Jackie aside for a very stern conversation about why he's been such a sour-faced monster all season...
Turns out, of course, Kev himself had an affair at some point after the intervention. Jackie kicks him out of the house, because she is a gross hypocrite drug addict, and that's the only real cliffhanger thing. We don't address Eleanor's offer last week to supply Jackie with drugs, we don't find a reason for anything that happened this season really, and absolutely nothing changes. Kevin will, I'm sure, have moved back into the house by the time season starts. Same old song, but getting kind of tiresome after three years.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously, not that it generally matters: Kevin acted sketchy when he was here at all, and Jackie took her daughter's baby-Xanax. Eleanor offered to be Jackie's drug dealer, cementing the sort of awful dependence between them. Jackie was stepped down from handling drugs at work, to protect her and Gloria essentially, and she learned that Kelly is kind of an amazing bullshitter. Oh, and Coop dealt with his moms' divorce by marrying the first Facebook person that ever poked him back.
SCHOOL
Fiona: "Yes, I'm still on this show. I have graduated to burning shit with a magnifying glass."
Even Scarier Kid: "I have a lighter for us to play with."
Fiona: "That sounds enjoyable, to say the least."
ADMISSIONS
Crazy Dude: "I have lots of mental and developmental issues."
Jackie: "What a strange coincidence!"
Gloria: "Apparently the Pill-O-Matix and then firing you from half your job didn't do the trick, so now we've got piss tests."
Jackie: "When will this happen? I have lots of fluids to drink and a sauna to visit, so my day's pretty booked."
Kelly: "I too am looking forward to pissing in a cup after doing weird druggie activities."
Gloria: "In the tradition of '50s etiquette handbooks and pamphlets, I have started referring to dieting as 'reducing.'"
Gloria: Is still the greatest.
Everybody: Continues to be mean to the weirdo in Admitting. It's painful to watch. Jodie Foster would be proud.
Kelly & Jackie: Start pounding goldenseal and vitamins and kombucha, the very worst thing that has ever existed in all of existence. I remember when I saw Prince Of Darkness for the first time I thought that the Devil couldn't be a fluid and then I tried kombucha. Their junkie camaraderie is pretty fun to watch, but kind of a twist after the preceding season. It will be fun to watch them continue to like each other year, assuming the show doesn't forget Kelly ever existed. RIP Momo.
NURSES' STATION
Thor: "Confederate reenactor was cleaning his sword..."
Jackie: "I honestly thought you were talking about sex just now."
Sam: "Nerds don't have sex."
(Coop, off-stage: "WRONG!")
Thor: "All four fingers, gone."
Zoey: "I feel sorry for the patients who are, you know... Stupid."
Thor: "This is actually a story about a guy I'm dating."
Jackie, and for real: "Raise the bar, Thor."
Thor obviously can have anything he wants. He's wondrous.
Coop: "[Wedding stuff]."
Nobody: Cares at all.
Coop: "I wish I was marrying Nurse Kelly."
Jackie puts Zoey on cake duty after she unwisely admits being excited about Coop's birthday, which is slash-his-wedding if you recall.
TRAUMA
Lenny: Starts shit with Eleanor about Patient One, who has a pipe coming out his chest; she goes with his instincts.
Patient Two: Not sure what's going on with him.
SCHOOL
There's a neat/meaningless transition involving scattered tongue depressors, and we switch back and forth between the two scenes.
Patient Two: Is deaf and cannot speak and is blind, so he hands Slater a card detailing these many bummer afflictions instructing them to call his brother. I will give you fifty dollars if the brother is anyone on the planet except for the pipe guy. It's more likely that the brother is Eleanor O'Hara than anybody else but the pipe guy.
Jackie calls the brother, with Gloria yelling at her about the piss test, and the pipe guy's phone rings over with Lenny and Zoey. It's kind of funny how they're having this conversation in the hospital, which is confusing for a second, and then they quickly figure out the obvious situation. The real itchy part of it is, without the brother to Annie Sullivan the deaf guy, how do you tell him what's going on?
Maybe this is a metaphor for Jackie's complete disconnect from everyone around her, particularly those that love her. Maybe the juxtaposition is with poor Fiona whom we haven't seen since Kevin's meaningless sister was around. I just can't think of anything more awful than -- even if you're used to it, even if it's the whole universe as far as you know -- being in this silent blackness and hurting and waiting for somebody to comfort you, and nobody comes.
That sounds like what it's like to be Jackie Peyton. You could have angels all around, holding you up, calling your name, urging you onward, and you'd never even know. All the love in the world.
Brother: "Write in his hand."
Jackie runs back and Annie Sullivans the guy.
You are okay.
He nearly cries with relief; he can barely let go of her hand to write on it. She lies and says his brother is okay. He grasps at her. He doesn't know who she is. He loves her anyway.
He is beautiful. He won't ever know that. You could tell him and he still wouldn't know what that means. Intellectually, yes. But not what it means.
PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE
Fiona's been caught. Grace is horrified slash excited to see her in trouble, that trainwreck fascination face she makes; Fi and her little buddy are just kind of grim and waiting for their punishment. Maybe because it's the finale, maybe because this is a pretty good episode, but it's really effective: That principal's office feeling, the piss-test hanging over you.
PHARMACY
Kevin, calling his wife: "Answer your fucking phone!"
Jackie, looking at the caller ID: "...Nope."
Eddie chooses Jackie over Coop, for a moment, so that they can have a private talk. Coop admits to having lost Eddie's love to his rival in this one case, but isn't giving up. This strutting Big Day Birthday Boy Fitch is one of the less attractive ones, to say the least.
Eddie: "Oh, I know that look..."
Jackie: "Do you? Because if you did, you'd know to keep that thought to yourself."
Eddie: Sympathetic, to a point.
Jackie: "Essentially the walls are closing in. Deaf, blind, tumor, pee-test. It's all happening. Kevin's calling."
Eddie: "Kevin's calling."
Jackie: "Don't pick it up."
She doesn't even know why. He's just on the list.
Probably the best thing about Bridesmaids, for me personally, was the point it stressed about how all your problems are not the same problem. When you're feeling weak or exposed or when you're on the run, it can seem like that. Like your rival's wedding present is better than yours and your boyfriend is a dickhead and your brake light is broken and you treated a nice guy poorly and your business failed and you're all alone, and that's the story of you.
But the movie says no, stop being ridiculous. Fix your brake light. Then the thing.
I'm not sure where this paralysis sets in, like, what kind of intelligent design is it that puts you into this position where the more you need to move, to change, to get out, the more likely it is that you will be depressed and handcuffed and broken. I guess it makes about as much sense as addiction.
I have realized that, though I've always believed that since Jackie Peyton was the hardest to love out of the Showtime Ladies With Problems, she was also the most important one to love. But you know what, she's hardened out of Funny Righteous Addict and just into Desperate Ugly Addict. It's more realistic, of course, but after three seasons of lateral movement it's not exactly a pretty picture to consider.
Dexter's never going to get caught, either.
It's not necessary to "root" for a protagonist, necessarily -- although people seem to find it harder when the antihero is a woman -- but even recognizing that you still have to consider whether you're even having fun anymore. Knowing that she'll continue to become more and more a caricature of this sort of ball-busting Hothead Paisan fantasy figure; knowing that the universe will never let her down.
If you consider this as a relationship we've been having with a particularly important-to-us addict, then, it becomes clear that just like in real life, she's got the system gamed for a reason: That's what keeps her alive. The smarter you are, the crazier you get to be, because the world doesn't give you the firm smack you need. It's a failing of the show, but it's also what keeps functioning addicts functioning; it's a great reason to remove yourself from the situation altogether, so you're not a moving part in their machinery. But what got left out, this season, is any believable reason that any of these people would give a shit about her at this point. It's gotten so claustrophobic, and not in a real way.
Made even weirder by the leaps and jumps in Gloria's character, where suddenly at the point where Jackie's the most cartoonish and antagonistic, she's more respectful and friendly than she's been this whole time. Maybe that's part of the character but I don't even think it's intentional. It's hard to say much about this show really exhibiting signs of intent.
Anyway, Eddie answers the phone, and Kevin yells at him about Jackie not picking up her phone -- of course, because he's freaking out about Fiona. Which -- aha! -- actually does make sense, because Kevin took Jackie off the Emergency Contact List for the girls back at the beginning of the season. She actually has no way of knowing that Fiona has finally -- finally -- decided to blow everybody to hell.
CHAPEL HALL
The saints go, as they say, marching back into the Chapel thanks to Gloria's manipulations. Gloria comes hopping up and immediately asks if she's in there to avoid the piss-test. This again with that underlying sense of "we both know what's going on," to the extent that Jackie admits she's more interested in avoiding her husband right now anyway.
A Psych patient in a gown goes running past them, and Gloria just yells at her to stop running in the halls even though she's clearly an escapee of some kind. Jackie chases her down.
ER
Coop: "Anybody seen my crackhead?"
Jackie's got her tied down, and smoothly gets Coop to administer some valium while she gives the patient an anti-nausea medication. Of course, he still has no idea. The patient swears that she has been barfing forever because she ate two pounds of bacon -- a six-year vegetarian -- and that clearly the crack has nothing to do with this problem. Just the phrase "two pounds of bacon" makes me want to die.
I'm so fucking tired of hearing about bacon, you guys. Find a new thing. Just call it, it's been going on for five years. Bacon is now the Chuck Norris Joke of foods. The Betty White of breakfast.
Crackhead: "I was tweaking and starving at the same time. Then suddenly bacon. Probably because people won't shut up about it."
A social services lady threatens to take the deaf guy home, but Jackie resists her attempts to free up the ER bed for some reason... Ah. She wants to keep him there long enough to make sure the brother is okay. She puts on a big song and dance for the lady and shuffles his chart around, and then Jackie and Thor steal the deaf guy so he can go see his brother, who is stable.
Thor's upset because he needs to meet what we're calling Coop's "bride" outside pretty soon, but Jackie sends him upstairs anyhow. Meanwhile, Zoey's downstairs with the cake. Hopefully the two ladies will have a hilarious run-in with the bride. I still can't believe she's real. Or a woman.
Zoey: "I had to go to like ten places... Nobody sells wedding cakes! It's a world of birthdays out there!"
They spot the bride, who is smoking and has a thin face. She's wearing a white dress and carrying a bouquet. Jackie prays.
Jackie: "Come on. Go inside, go inside. Come on, honey, go inside. Go inside... Yes!"
The girl immediately comes running back out to catch a bus, and Jackie has the feeling that by watching this happen -- by letting down the guard just enough to pray for poor Fitch Cooper -- she's somehow involved.
Gloria is grossed out less by the fact that the cakes are now on a Urology cart, and more that they contain so much sugar. Thank God this ludicrous wedding is taking place in the middle of the night or she'd probably take up a flaming sword just to swat little fat kids away from them.
Thor sings "Ave Maria" and the whole place, statuary back in position, is done up with Christmas lights. I don't know if there's a point beyond the humor of seeing semi-tacky white x-mas lights crowning the Blessed Virgin, but it's good enough as-is. The place looks lovely, and Thor's singing is pretty/funny, too. The whole thing is so sad and lame and ramshackle; the ambulance guys are all in costume and the bride isn't showing.
Jackie finally admits to Eleanor that the bride will never show, and then slowly moseys up to the altar to take Coop aside. She assures him sweetly that he doesn't look like an idiot; she even gives him the credit for restoring the chapel and putting the first smile of all time on Gloria's face.
Coop: "No one's ever going to wanna marry me."
Jacob: Time and place. Could do better, will probably do worse.
Jackie, still being oddly awesome: "Not true."
Gloria: Thanks him for the statues.
Zoey gives him a tiny present for his birthday. The smallest stuffed koala in the world, no bigger than a thumb.
Zoey: "It's from all of us."
They wheel in the wedding cakes, which are now birthday cakes, and sing to him. It's always nice to see an asshole get a little compassion. It's probably essential. Everybody's got a birthday. It's a world of birthdays out there.
It is absolutely one of my favorite things in a story, when people realize that Michael Scott or Roger Sterling are as close to the edge as they really always are, and they're able to momentarily forgive the distance and draw him close, and sing. I think you get more out of a scene like that -- everybody rushing into this void to sing to Fitch Cooper, who they hate -- than most anything else. I don't think anybody is proud, not even to say conscious sometimes, of their deepest flaws. I think everybody is usually doing the best they can. I think that probably this is a fact that we could stand to remember, much more than we do: Mostly we do the best we can.
Other people are no more a part of your larger problem than a broken taillight, and the reason for this is firstly because nobody cares enough to really come after you, but mostly it's because there is no larger problem. That kind of simplification is usually laziness, or exhaustion: The fact remains that all we ever really have are small problems that add up to the unmovable mountain.
But you only deserve that kind of compassion half the time, like, not only would it make Jackie very uncomfortable to have this thing done for her, on the other hand basically her every day is just having this experience over and over. Any time she uses somebody, any time they overlook her bullshit, any time she gets applauded for clotheslining some asshole: Happy birthday, you win again.
Birthdays aren't for addicts, they're for people on the other side of the circle, who can't get away from their own loneliness. I mean, there's self-loathing in the addict, obviously, but that's not the central problem of the addict: The central problem of the addict is the opposite issue, the survival-induced state of putting him- or herself before everybody else. That's why it was so moving and decidedly brilliant to have Jackie privately jump so quickly to praying that Coop would be okay, and talking him through it: That's who she is, we just don't get to see it because nobody else is allowed to have problems around her. She doesn't begrudge anybody their happiness. It doesn't add to her one giant imaginary problem.
Because take Jackie, take any addict: The problem is that she's an addict, sure. And all that implies. But the real problem, staring down the long barrel of sobriety, is the tiny little sips and snorts and pops and pills that got you there -- and the knowing that it's so many tiny occasions of abstention -- too many seconds-after-seconds-after-seconds of the agony of sobriety -- that will get you clean again.
The fear isn't of a major life change, and certainly the fear is not about success or happiness or whatever: The fear is a very real, very honest, very justifiable fear of watching the seconds of strength turn into minutes of pain and hours of misery and being fairly certain that on the other side of this process is a world devoid of excitement or color or pleasure.
Toward the end of a marathon, possibly you have the runs or maybe your nips are bleeding, okay, and it can be hard to remember that you are doing this to fight breast cancer. So you focus on the end of the road. But a sober life doesn't end. It keeps going.
And that's why the God Step that trips so many smart people up in recovery has always made the most sense to me, out of all of them. The other things you should be doing anyway. But if you've got yourself so cornered that you are gaming your universe the way Jackie does -- when the addict in you is running the table -- the only thing possible is for you to make this jump into faith.
Which is like the most loaded word. But I think it's the marathon thing. We get so caught up, every day, in what we feel like right now. You don't eat lunch, and suddenly everybody just turns into an asshole for no reason? Nonsense, your blood sugar is low. But it's hard to keep your eye on the Real You in the middle of that storm. The you that is separate from your mood or your blood sugar or your fatigue or your bleeding nipples.
And to me, that's what faith implies more than anything: The "real" you, the one that's never actually around because you're always having a bad mood or a good mood or metabolizing sugar or whatever you're doing right this second. This eternal person that is always loving and never gets impatient and never stops to whine because they're too busy hustling. Keeping your eye on him or her, letting him or her dictate your behaviors when you're not up to the challenge, being brave enough to let him or her drive even out here in the real world: That's the definition of faith to me.
Knowing, actually believing and knowing and trusting entirely, that the Real You would not motherfucking stand for any of this nonsense.
That's the reason prayer looks like that: God's just a way of reminding yourself to leave a little space between Right Now and Real You, for the light to get in, and the only way that can happen is on your knees. Real You is not an asshole, but sometimes Right Now You needs to be reminded that he or she very often is. (Especially and obviously if Right Now You is a huge drug addict that would rather die than feel like everybody else.) Making faith just the action of that part of your brain that's even willing to admit the possibility.
AFTERMATH
Though Coop makes a good case for it, Eddie does not accompany him on his cheesy carriage ride; he takes off alone, which is probably best. Coop could use a little Coop time. Eddie, conversely, exists in an ongoing state of a little too much Coop time.
Then Eddie changes his mind, and they ride off together. Coop thinks about loneliness. Sometimes there is so much kindness in the world that it is blinding, if you can see it. If you're lucky enough to see it in the dark.
PISS TEST
Gloria: "Anything you want to tell me?"
No ma'am. Jackie takes her cup to the bathroom, while Zoey and Sam attempt to give a shit about Coop and chow down on some cake. That's when Kevin appears in the ER.
Zoey, mouth full of cake, welcomes Kevin to All Saints with her usual mix of cringing and grimacing and ceremony. She jerks Sam to his feet so that he too can marvel at the Man Who Married Her, while the kids stare and think about their mother's secret life here, and fall in love with Zoey just like anybody would.
Eleanor spots him and the girls, in Admissions, and runs to find Jackie -- Gloria's supervising her piss test -- and all three of them feel weird about life.
Jackie: "What do I do? Tell me what to do?"
They stare at each other in the mirror, terrified; Zoey comes in screaming incomprehensibly about Grace and Fiona and how beautiful they are and they stare at her until she leaves.
Eleanor drags Jackie by the hand into a closed trauma bed, where a woman is getting Last Rites. Thor, thinking fast, explains that Eleanor is the woman's daughter.
Eleanor: "She's a hundred."
Thor corrects himself; they bow their heads. There's a sense of urgency that I'm not sure I understand. Kevin, maybe, but he's got the girls in tow. I don't really understand why Jackie, much less Eleanor, are climbing the walls at this time.
Gloria stomps down the hall with Jackie's urine in hand, while Jackie and Eleanor make plans over the dying lady. Eleanor offers to distract the girls until they find out why Kevin's been calling all day -- does Jackie have like a sense of foreboding about this? Is that why there's so much crazy flying around?
I guess since Eddie told her that Kevin's onto them -- which clearly he isn't, and it's been over anyway for like two whole seasons, and that's such a huge knot to unravel considering he's Kevin's friend and Kevin got him the job at the hospital that it couldn't really work that way no matter how you look at it -- Jackie's probably just staving off whatever the inevitable conflict is.
Except that Jackie doesn't know this is the season finale, or that Kevin and Gloria are being forced into position to give us this sense of urgency in the middle of the night for reasons purely of plot, or that there's going to be a cliffhanger, or anything like that.
I am not calling the show out on this one, though, because I honestly believe there's something I'm not getting this time. Last year it was the intervention, and you could see the noose pulling tight; the year before that she was fucking over everybody at once and eventually OD'd or whatever, with the rats. I mean, nothing came of it, but it felt organic at least.
This year, it just seems like another version of that trick the show's been pulling for awhile where if they tell us enough times that we're on the edge of our seats, our asses themselves will scoot forward, as if by magic.
Jackie acknowledges that Kevin's probably right about whatever he's going to yell at her about, and that more than likely she's about to be fired, and finally that she envies the dead lady; Eleanor fairly laughs and tells her to man up.
ADMISSIONS
Eleanor dotes on the young ladies and Jackie takes Kevin away with Fiona's warning that she's going to be pissed about the fire, and Grace's soulfully mature admission that yes, Jackie is going to lose it. She's so cute now I can barely remember hating her.
Eleanor: "Absolutely no homework allowed! Follow me, and we shall go and look at broken things."
She's always at her best with the girls, isn't she? And not in that playing-against-expectations way the show so enjoys: Her relationship with them is easy, natural, delightful and absolutely in character. A little brightness.
Jackie: "You brought the girls? Really?"
There's something deserved and respectful about this. Even though the showdown seems to be mostly in her head, Kevin clearly has some shit on his mind and so it's a combination of what's known and not-known that she says this and he's like, "Yes, it's awkward, but we're out of time and there was nobody to take the girls. What was I supposed to do?"
Jackie: "You're the dad, you're supposed to hold it in."
And so there you have it. Just naked admission that she's going to use him until he's used up. I'm glad they're having the talk. They walk past the nurses' station; they are offered wedding cake. I don't think it would taste too sweet, today.
They take the elevator down, to the basement, where this kind of stuff always happens.
Kevin swears it's the hardest thing he's ever done, whatever it is that he is doing -- which, the number one way to piss me off is to do the "we need to talk" thing and then let it ride, that's such a fucking power play -- but that the girls are going crazy and they need to address their whatever-this-is, their marriage, immediately.
Gloria takes the elevator up, to HR.
In the room where Sam nearly died and where Nurses were recently Appreciated, Kevin gets Jackie to acknowledge he's been trying to have this conversation for weeks. Finally, and to my mind rightfully, Jackie finally tells him to spit it out. And this is what he says.
Kevin: "You can't just step outside a marriage and fuck someone else because things got hard, and expect the marriage to survive."
Jackie's guilty. Until he admits he's not talking about her.
She stares, pissed. She stares, relieved.
What happens when the warden puts the keys in your hand?
Her heart is breaking. Her heart sings. She sits there, on her knees. The solid wall, the rock-bottom, the jailer, the only one who knows her well enough to stop her -- to even ask. The only one besides Eleanor, who's joined her in the dark. It is dizzying.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do," says Jackie. Jackie says, "What am I supposed to say?"
I love you, he says. I forgive you.
She can feel the keys in her hand; she hears a door slam shut. Those things are true, but they're not what she is doing. She can feel herself getting freer. The only things that kept her human, getting burned off while we speak. Kneeling on the floor at the bottom of the world.
"Pack your bags," she says. And nods to herself, briskly. She is terrified and in the dark; he's put the keys into her hands.
And upstairs, Gloria comes closer and closer to HR, almost there before she pitches the piss test into a garbage cart and keeps walking.
"Fuck 'em," she says, and heads back to the Chapel.
D.E.T.A.C.H.
I guess in some ways this one's legit. I'd like to see Jackie without Kevin. Frankly, I don't know what purpose the girls really can serve anymore. I'd like to see the promise of Bill fulfilled and I'd like to see Jackie out of control, just once. Just once I'd like to see her let a little light in. But I doubt that this will happen either.
But when you think about addicts and how they get there, I don't know that it's all that unrealistic. Addiction, a lot of mental illness, can be resolved down to an embarrassing disconnect between the power we yield as adults over our own fates and the amount of responsibility we have toward that power. Like Thor, eating his sugar, or Eleanor's day-drinking, all of us do things we know are bad for us. The only difference between a child drinking to excess and an adult doing the same is that there's somebody there to tell him no.
So if we look at the misdeeds of Jackie Peyton as a sort of dark and anguished triumphant shout, this is like a birthday and a wedding altogether at once: The chance to be completely free and see where that takes her. A renunciation of the responsibilities that kept her tethered. On a story level, I don't really love it because we didn't see it happen: He was on the show or not, and it didn't necessarily connect at all to whether he was in her life or not, because of the way the story goes. So if you tell me they were falling apart this whole time, that's one way to get it across. Little shots of him disappearing and putting on cologne aside, I mean, you can say that these scenes were sprinkled in arbitrarily and that somehow adds up to a compelling narrative arc, but does it really?
Jackie ignoring her husband, from this side of a screen, is indistinguishable from the show ignoring her husband, so there's a discernable lack of shock at this development. But since we only stay with her anyway, I guess it's best to see this through her eyes, and puzzle out the rest. See the abyss it means she's standing at -- and how Gloria's misbegotten kindness is just digging the hole deeper.
"Make more rope," Gloria said. We thought she was talking about baby Xanax, but it occurs to me that the show might finally be giving Jackie enough rope to actually hurt herself, after three years of basically resenting the fact of her husband and the limits he places on her.
It's not like she's got the stuff to emotionally disengage from anybody, right? It would have to be his choice. Just like she let Eddie, and now Eleanor, fill in the blanks of their love. Just like she's never, ever lied to Gloria Akalitus, not once.
So I guess for a fairly good season -- as judged on the merits, and not how the unduly critical Jacob, Expert In Things Televisual, would prefer things to have gone -- you've got what amounts to a pretty stellar finale:
Jackie finally gets what she wants, complete and total autonomy. The ultimate punchline: "Oh, you think the universe keeps handing Jackie what she wants? How about everything at once? Everything the tiny monster, the little king inside her, could ever demand?"
And maybe that leads to, just maybe, Jackie getting what she needs: God's most gigantic knuckle sandwich. A chance at grace.
But I wouldn't bet on it. I still don't think the show loves her enough for that.