Jackie Makes Up For Lost Time
Even for a TV character, Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) has gone through more than the usual amount of shit over the four-plus years we've been following her adventures. When we first met her, she was a painkiller-addicted adulteress, fooling around with All Saints Hospital pharmacist Eddie (Paul Schulze) partly because she liked him, and partly to get him to sneak her drugs; meanwhile, none of her All Saints colleagues even knew she was long-married and the mother of two. Since then, both her big secrets have been revealed, her husband Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) has divorced her, she's gone to rehab, and is holding things together even as Kevin tests her ability to follow through on agreements they make by refusing to let her spend her (first sober) birthday with her daughters, but the latest episode suggests that Jackie's anti-drug might be dudes.
The first fellow on the horizon was Eddie; earlier this season, Jackie helped end the tyranny of the drug-dispensing pharmacybot and got Eddie his job back at All Saints, so now the two of them are trying out a new kind of relationship for them: platonic friendship. Stupid O'Hara (Eve Best) having stupidly returned to England has left Jackie lonelier than she probably should be, STUPID O'HARA (I don't mean it, O'Hara, please come back), Jackie does need a confidant, and even though it seems pretty clear that Eddie is just trying to wait Jackie out until she realizes she wants to get back together with him, Eddie does manage to behave supportively when he finds out that she has a proper date with a man, for which she plans to wear a dress, something she says she's never done sober.
What man is she going on this proper date with? It's our Bachelor #2, Frank (Adam Ferrara). Frank is a nice uniformed cop who frequently has occasion to be in the ER at All Saints. His pursuit of Jackie has allowed him to display an impressive level of adultivity: he expressed his interest in her directly; he wasn't fazed by the news that she is very newly divorced (he is also a divorced single parent); and he took her disclosure about her drug addiction in stride. That they both decided to bag the fancy French place and have fish and chips instead demonstrates compatibility with regard to dining preferences -- significant so that questions about where to eat don't turn into hours-long negotiations that end with one or the other partner screaming, "FINE, WHATEVER" because he or she is about to faint from hunger (we've all been there). And when Jackie cut their night short due to an urgent text from one of her kids, Frank let her go, no questions asked, like the decent, understanding person he clearly is. Except, whoops, she wasn't going to meet her daughter...
...she'd been paged by yet another dude. The latest episode saw our first glimpse this season of Mike (Bobby Cannavale), and he's still grieving the loss of his son, Charlie (Jake Cannavale), in the Season 4 finale. Jackie's still mourning Charlie too; all season, we've seen her coping in moments of crisis by leaving confessional messages on Charlie's former phone. Mike reveals that he hasn't been able to part with Charlie's phone, and that he's heard all of Jackie's voicemails; when she asks whether he's been seeing anyone -- a therapist or a woman -- he says he hasn't met any women he can trust...but he knows he can trust Jackie, and the moment of commiseration quickly turns carnal. Raise your hand, everyone who thought the first ass Jackie would get after her divorce would be from her late rehab pal's dad, who also happened to have been her ER antagonist. Shut up, you did not. No one could have seen this coming, and yet it kind of totally makes sense -- not just because anyone who would resist advances from someone who looks and sounds like Bobby Cannavale would have to be blind and deaf, but because this show's producers (and these performers in particular) are so good at portraying the questionable-yet-understandable decisions people make when they're in emotional turmoil.
So the good news is that when it comes to her romantic prospects, Jackie has two good options. The bad news is that the one she decided to break her sex fast with is not one of them, and that she's just found out she's lost her favourite sounding board, deceased though he may be. So I guess we all owe a debt of gratitude to Grace (Ruby Jerins), for getting Jackie out of a potentially touchy situation and for, let's hope, distracting Jackie enough from her man-harem to pick one that will have the best chance of being good for her in the long run. Thanks, Grace! Stay out of nightclubs, but if you can't, for God's sake, it's cold out: put on some tights.