'Nurse Jackie' Finale: A Shocking End
Nurse Jackie closed out its seven-season run with a finale that in its short half-hour managed to trace the entire arc of the title character’s life and bring it to a startling conclusion. The episode encapsulated what made the show so irresistible, despite the fact that Edie Falco’s nurse Jackie Peyton had become a realistically resistible figure.
Warning: Spoilers follow for the series finale of Nurse Jackie.
We knew that All Saints Hospital had to close, and if that plot point made for a too-neat coincidence for the closing down of this show, it still worked in the final drama. Sunday night’s episode found Jackie — restored to her nurse position yet still popping pills — caring for one last patient, a grotty-looking heroin addict, before the ER doors were locked.
It was important to show that Jackie, despite the fact that she was still using — even Eve Best’s Dr. O’Hara, winging in from England, recognized the signs — was nevertheless a devoted, caring nurse. In the finale’s quiet high point, she was shown down on her knees, bathing the feet of the addict as golden sunlight streamed through a window from above. If that wasn’t staged as a nod to Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, I’ll give you my copy of the New Testament.
In the end, Jackie succumbed to her addiction. After an emotional conversation with Zoey (and, boy, did Merritt Wever ever give an extraordinary, seven-season-long great performance as that smart, funny, sweet, always-evolving young woman), Jackie dug through the heroin patient’s clothes for his stash, chopping it up and inhaling it. She collapsed on the hospital floor, and the show ended with Zoey saying, “You’re good, Jackie, you’re good.” These were words Jackie may have heard and taken comfort in as a benediction — she and this show have always had deep undercurrents of faith, redemption, perdition, and resurrection. But even though Jackie’s eyes opened, I choose to think she was probably having a seizure, and died soon after on that cold hospital floor.
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The Nurse Jackie that ended Sunday night was not the show created by Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem. The original show had a tough-mindedness that softened considerably — became much more of a comedy — once Brixius left Jackie in 2012. The most recent showrunner, producer-writer Clyde Phillips, brought back more bracing drama and pulled off a tricky thing in this final season: Introducing a major character — Tony Shalhoub’s Dr. Bernie Prince — and weaving him so thoroughly into the proceedings that Bernie, who was dying of cancer, didn’t seem out of place in the show’s final days. Certainly much of the credit for that goes to Shalhoub, who was raffishly charming; he totally earned his final, disease-addled scene with Falco.
As for Falco — she earned all the praise and awards she garnered over the course of Nurse Jackie’s run. Back in 2009, probably few people thought Falco was going to make viewers put aside our memories of Carmela Soprano, but damned if she didn’t do it. No matter how uneven some of the middle seasons were, Falco’s performance never wavered from excellence. She is one of the least showy great actors on television, someone who gets our allegiance by never seeking it.
As Zoey said to Jackie, we all say to Falco: You’re good — you’re good.
