Nurse Jackie: Season 1 Finale

Someone forgot to tell the writing staff of Nurse Jackie that there's a big difference between a finale cliffhanger and ending a season one episode early. This last half hour of Season 1 is nothing if not a string of stories that really need to be tied up, or at least condensed. I can understand wanting to retain some tension for the second season (production begins in a month), but at least something needs to be resolved.

On the other side of things, some threads that have been central to the drama on Nurse Jackie just didn't get any attention at all in the finale, except maybe in a hallucination. I think it was a huge misstep to dump so much energy into the iffy mistaken romance plot between Coop and Jackie. Like so much of this show turned out to be, that element always felt tacked-on. And now they've thrown in what will likely be a dead-end gay romance plot between Coop and Momo. Is it possible to groan and yawn at the same time?

Speaking of groaning, Akalitus is back to being a useless character. After a few minutes of being a bad-guy, she gets stuck in an elevator and attempts to serve as some kind of comic relief throughout the episode. And fails. As usual.

Then there's Dr. O'Hara's magical plot mother. Of all the inexplicable things on this show, shipping Mrs. O'Hara across the ocean just so her doctor daughter can emote may just be the shark this show had to jump.

But the finale wasn't all bad. Eddie drinking with Kevin was interesting enough. That's the kind of tense, character-driven stuff that makes good TV. Too bad it's surrounded by a show with an identity crisis. When a drunken Eddie shows up at All Saints I suppose the intention is to set up some kind of drama for Season 2, but I can't quite figure out why Eddie wouldn't just disappear. "Because it serves the plot" is not a good enough reason to make characters do something.

Oh, and the film critic has an inexplicable change of heart after being in a drug-induced coma. Really?

After Eddie's drunken outburst at the ER, Jackie scrambles for a fix and ends up taking meds from the Pill-O-Matix (stupid, stupid name, btw) using her own PIN. We end the show watching her come down from her high. For me, that'll be the last image of Nurse Jackie I ever get on purpose.

Even though Season 2 is a sure thing, I can't really justify continuing coverage of Nurse Jackie. It's not an awful show, but it's often more frustrating to watch a series that could be fantastic and ends up stumbling instead. After twelve episodes, this show never found its tone and failed to make most of its characters all that interesting. There's a lot of wasted time and more marks were missed than hit. I liked the starting formula, but the series veered away from it early. Unremarkable, mundane patients ended up being the best part of the show, but then the chicken soup and the stereotypes and the grinchy film critics ruined the party.

In the end, I feel about Nurse Jackie the way I felt about the film adaptation of Rent. I can see the enthusiasm and how it might have been really good, but all of the problems are so glaring, all of the design flaws so obvious and all of the attempts at depth so sophomoric that the whole project sinks.