Mighty Thor.

[captainsblog]

Marathoning is hard. Until discovering we'd missed nearly an entire season of Nurse Jackie that I thought began (rather than ending) this month, I'd never done one. Now that Netflix has enabled (in more ways than one) the Day-One mainlining of entire multiple-episode arcs like House of Cards, I've gotten stuck. I liked the Kevin Spacey take on that material, but couldn't do the entire arc in a week, or even month.

That said, though? We did commit to knock off an entire Season Five of Jacks in just over a week, and it did some serious rocking.

Some, of the boat: S4 ended, you will recall, with Our Heroine being fired, and much of the rest of the All Saints staff committing to a Mutiny on the Bowery to stand up for her in the face of that firing. By the time the curtain came down, O'Hara had just given birth; Cruz's kid (and Jackie's friend) had just died; and Zoey had just broken up with her EMT fiance and had moved into the Queens family manse.

So, naturally, this season began with the introduction of two new showrunners (the main one from Dexter), and at least three new Very Important Characters: Carrie. Prentiss. Frank.

Their interactions with the main characters, and the dynamics of most of the old ones with them and each other, are still in SPOILERS! territory. Suffice it that we moved more in these 10 weeks than any previous series had done- and not all in a single direction. The new surgeon Prentiss did add a much MASH-ier component to both the storylines and visuals; Father Mulcahy and his Tom Mix pocketknife had nothing on some of the graphic depictions of procedures we saw here.

Yet I won't spoil those specifics, either. So instead, I am here to say nice things about the one character from past years whose heart, and importance, grew three sizes this year: Stephen Wallem, who plays the Unnambiguously Gay ER Nurse named Thor.

He's show-creator (and former showrunner) Linda Wallem's brother, but this is not a patronage-pit hire by any means. He has an impressive theatrical background, mainly in musicals, including long runs in Forever Plaid. He and Edie Falco have performed show-tune programmes under the awesome umbrella of "The Other Steve and Edie." So, yeah, that's him singing his own version of "One for My Baby (and One More For the Road)" in the final moments of the final episode, to a clinically non-diseased but just plain old gay man (played by John Collum, aka Holling Vancour from Northern Exposure, who I totally didn't recognize despite just having referenced him within the past few weeks). Seeing the totally asexual love between Thor and Wally was touching- and the other consequences in those final moments, paired with the news of Jacks's other former husband's death that came literally seconds after we finished the finale, made for high drama and high hopes for the already announced Season 6.

Eddie is back; Grace grew far beyond anything Meadow or AJ ever achieved; and I'm looking forward to actually paying attention this time to when the new season begins.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

But you have to admit, that ending hurts.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

The showrunner snippet after the episode made clear that they planned it that way from the beginning. All the struggle, all the success, all the passed-on opportunities to fail- 10 weeks of red herring worked into that little red pill.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I kept hoping that the series would end this season on an up note, with a sober and wiser Jackie in a new relationship, etc.

I still have the occasional nightmare that I start drinking again, so the horrors of falling off the wagon are particularly vivid to me. But from a dramatic standpoint, what is left to tell? We've already seen her long day's journey into night. Must we now see her disgraced, dismissed, and discarded?

[greenquotebook.livejournal.com]

We did the marathon thing with Fringe. It was great at first, but once we hit the middle of season three - I think. It's been so long I can't remember - we were so burnt out that we had to take a break. We haven't picked it back up yet.