Quick spoilers for tonight’s “Nurse Jackie” coming up just as soon as I figure out if this is Sunday… “Super obese is morbidly obese!”(*) -Zoey (*) No, that line doesn’t really sum up the themes of this episode, but it was so freaking funny that I wanted to highlight it up top. Jackie’s downward spiral goes ever deeper in this one, as she has to literally break her ring finger to come up with a plausible excuse for cutting off the ring, and as she indulges Coop’s weird attraction to her to cover for the organ donor mess from last week. And Zoey finds out about her and Eddie, which is a terrible for a woman like Jackie, who’s so paranoid about anyone knowing anything about her that she will, in fact, smash her finger with a hammer to keep her lives separate. I’m still recuperating from press tour, so I’m not going to analyze this one any deeper. But I just wanted to offer

up a couple of tidbits from my conversation with showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, which I’ll be running in full after the finale: • Wallem and Brixius are both recovering addicts, and they said the kind of fantatical compartmentalization that Jackie practices isn’t uncommon among addicts. • In terms of the logistics of Jackie hiding her two pregnancies from her co-workers, they said that “Tiny Bubbles” (the episode with Judith Ivey) gave the false impression that Jackie has been working at All Saints since Paula was there. Instead, the idea is supposed to be that Jackie has bounced around among many different hospitals in New York, including prior stints at All Saints, but that she’s only been back there for a few years. Anyway, I hope to be back in the swing of things for the season’s final two episodes. In the meantime, what did everybody else think?

Excerpt from:
Nurse Jackie, "Ring Finger": Stop. Hammer time.