It ended the way all the episodes of Nurse Jackie have begun, with Jackie in the bathroom looking at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
And even when looking at her own reflection, she lied to herself, just as she had to everyone around her whom she loves, desperate to save her skin, to get to her next fix and to deny the truth about the havoc she’s wreaking on her life.
I was pleased that this episode wasn’t of the purging and confessing variety where Jackie made excuses and apologized and then became a different, humbled kind of person. That would’ve felt too contrived, given how we’ve come to see Jackie over the first two seasons. Instead, Jackie was unrepentant, rejecting the label of “drug addict” even when confronted with evidence from Kevin and O’Hara in the form of a secret credit card bill featuring dozens of charges from pharmacies, even after being threatened by a menacing drug dealer from whom she stole $12,000 worth of Oxycontins.
“Hi, my name is Jackie. I’m a drug addict,” Jackie said to herself in the mirror after fleeing the kitchen where Kevin and O’Hara were waiting for her after telling her the jig was up. Jackie wore a serious look on her face after those those words were uttered. And for a moment — especially when she imagined herself alone on a beach (Was that the same beach from the season premiere where she and her family were hanging out?) — I thought maybe, just maybe, she was going to stop playing games.
Then she laughed.
“Blow me,” she tauntingly said. Then the credits rolled.
All throughout the episode, the red flags, they were aflyin': Jackie told Kevin that she was no good (“I keep telling you I’m no prize and you won’t listen.”). She remarked to Thor that she was “goin’ down,” which was literal, as they were in an elevator, as well as figurative. She confided in Eddie that, “It’s all crashing down around me.” Even O’Hara — after she and Jackie initially patched things up, before Kevin found the credit card bill — jokingly said, “You’re really awful,” when Jackie declined to go into the hospital chapel to light some candles. “That’s what I tried to tell you,” Jackie replied.
The biggest red flag, I thought, was the smell of smoke in the hospital, amusingly tracked down by Gloria Akalitus who discovered the source of the smoke was “God.” At the same time that Gloria found God, Kevin had just opened Jackie’s secret Post Office box, found that bill and realized that his life was about to change.
But the writers didn’t go for the obvious here, as they could have. Jackie didn’t offer contrition. There was no involuntary commitment to a drug treatment program followed by an ugly detox process followed by counseling where she’d crack wise to the therapist. The writers appear to be leaning toward a Dr. House route, at least during the early years when Dr. House knew he had a problem but was unwilling to do anything about it (that was before his hallucinations).
This provides an interesting set up for the third season where Jackie knows her family and her friendship with O’Hara are at stake (not her job, yet, until that drug dealer causes problems at work for her), but her addiction appears so powerful that it blots out everything else.
The heaviness of all this was offset by the Zoey-Lenny story where Lenny had Zoey at duck sauce. My favorite scene, other than the duck sauce one, was when Zoey gave Lenny the watch. “What’s it for, years of service?” Lenny asked her.
“I hope so,” she sweetly replied.
What did you think of the season finale?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Jun 08, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT
