With almost 10 years off the air and about a thousand pairs of scrubs under our belts, it's just about time to start dusting off the stethoscopes and pixie cuts. With Edie Falco set to return as Jackie Peyton in the Nurse Jackie revival, it almost automatically brings the explosive series finale into question, as we left things off with Jackie overdosing on the floor of All Saints' Hospital. Overall, it was pretty split on whether she'd survive the overdose, but given that Zoey Barkow (Merritt Wever) was running the floor at the time, Jackie had a pretty high chance of survival.
Listen, it's been a while since we've revisited that fateful moment on the emergency room floor — but what about the half-hour that led up to that moment?
What Really Went Down on the 'Nurse Jackie' Finale?
Let's set the scene real quick: Jackie has been back working at All Saints Hospital, pretending to be sober as she continues to pop pills at work on the regular. As the series finale takes place throughout an entire day, we start things off at a church, with Jackie praying alone before her family arrives to watch Fiona's (Mackenzie Aladjem) confirmation practice. Oh, and she pops a quick pill before anyone else arrives at the church, so it's really just business as usual. After the practice, Dr. Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best) shows up to surprise her best friend and to be there at the confirmation as Fiona's Godmother, so thank you, Fiona.
Being that it's the last official day before All Saints is being shut down for good, Jackie is waiting to hear back about a nursing job at nearby Bellevue Hospital while she carries on with her day. Things at the hospital are busier than usual, and to quote Thor Lundgren (Stephen Wallem), it's "like we're having a going out of business sale." There, Jackie gets a call that she got the job at Bellevue, and she celebrates along with her co-workers, but not before telling Zoey Barkow that they were asking her for recommendations. However, Zoey isn't so sure about joining Bellevue as a nurse just yet. Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith) stomps onto the hospital floor for the last day, though she's not as keen on Jackie as the rest of the staff still are, avoiding her at all cost under the guise of being busy with running the hospital.
As for Eddie Walzer (Paul Schulze), he's being investigated for pharmaceutical misconduct in a lawyer's office, which mostly has to do with not having enough physician signatures for the amount of medications he's doled out over the years. While Eddie's lawyer, Barry Wolfe (Mark Feuerstein), thought he had the case practically sewn up in their favor, a last-minute District Attorney search led to an unearthing of a large quantity of narcotics that match Eddie's batch numbers at a "pill mill" in Brooklyn. Wolfe wants his client to expose the name of the "pill mill" doctor in exchange for his immunity, but Eddie refuses because of the blowback it would have on Jackie's involvement.
Back at the hospital in a conversation separate from Jackie, Zoey gets very honest with O'Hara about how tough it's been having to keep up with Jackie between her stint in jail, relapse, and just the day-to-day job of struggling to trust her, which is most likely why she's so unsure about joining Bellevue with Jackie. Following this, O'Hara confronts Jackie separately and accuses her of being high, which Jackie dismisses and refuses to discuss. Though O'Hara agrees to still attend Fiona's confirmation, things are still clearly very strained between the two.
"Because you're my friend, Jacks," O'Hara says before leaving the room. "Why do you have to make it so fucking hard to be one?"
Right after this conversation, Jackie heads out onto the floor and is confronted by an irrationally-acting man who's looking for someone at the hospital. While bleeding from his head, he says that this person hit him with a brick and stole his belongings, and at that point, he pulls a gun on Jackie. Dr. Bernard Prince (Tony Shalhoub) approaches the man from behind and tells him to point the gun at him instead, as he's in the final stages of glioblastoma and feels that his life is less important than Jackie's. He pretends to be an officer with the NYPD and eventually gets the man to leave, though the entire incident leaves the staff at a loss for words.
In the bathroom, Jackie finds the person that the man was looking for and informs him that the man is gone, though she notices that this person is clearly a heroin addict by the state of his arms. She decides to clean him up and transfer him to Bellevue, where she'll be working come tomorrow.
Eddie visits Jackie at the hospital, and in some weird act of love, he decided not to take his lawyer's advice and confessed to the crime, sparing Jackie in the process. While she's upset with him for making that choice, he reassures her that it'll only be a year "in some Martha Stewart prison." Besides, he says, he'll have a lifetime with Jackie after he's done serving his time.
As the heroin addict is carted out on a gurney to be transferred to Bellevue, Zoey and Jackie watch as the last-ever patient at All Saints' leaves the hospital. Jackie asks Zoey if she's made a decision about taking the job at Bellevue, and her response isn't exactly what she wanted to hear: that she needs Jackie to let her move on. While Jackie tries to convince her that the two of them can "move on together," it's ultimately no use.
"The first time I met you, I was afraid of you," Zoey says. "And then I wanted to be you, and now all I do is worry about you. Jackie, I need to go out there and make my own mistakes that have nothing to do with you."
In an extremely emotional moment, Jackie told Zoey that she was like a daughter to her, but that she was also proud of her — for everything. Despite that tough moment, the vibes immediately shift in the emergency room as tons of food and alcohol are wheeled in and gloves are blown up as party balloons. The music's blasting, doctors are riding around on wheelchairs, everyone's dancing, and nurses are making out in corners: it's the perfect sendoff for All Saints. Though in the bathroom like always, Jackie is alone getting high again, except this time, it's with the stash that the heroin addict from before had left behind.
The Final Five Minutes
After snorting three massive lines of what we're to believe is heroin, Jackie heads back into the emergency room one last time, takes off her stethoscope, hospital ID, and watch, and leaves all three on the nurse's counter. Set to the tune of k.d. lang's "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls," she walks out onto the busy streets of New York and takes everything in for once, appreciating the minutiae of the moment. Suddenly, she's doing yoga in the middle of Times Square, corpse pose to be specific, just as we cut to the emergency room floor of All Saints, where Jackie has collapsed in the middle of the party. Zoey, Eddie, Thor, Dr. Carrie Roman (Betty Gilpin), and Akalitus all rush to her side, and Zoey starts calling out orders—it turns out the heroin addict from before wasn't the last patient, after all.
The last words we heard from an almost-tearful Zoey were, "You're good, Jackie, you're good," as she was attempting to revive her former boss. And then the screen went black.
The Future of Jackie Peyton and Company
Now that we have Falco signed on to return as Jackie, it all but confirms the fact that — by some sort of miracle— she survived the series finale; that is, unless Jackie's returning in some sort of odd, ghost-of-Christmas-past role, though that seems fairly unlikely at this point. Zoey was just beginning to pursue her master's degree in order to become a nurse practitioner, so perhaps she'll be in an even higher role at another hospital if Wever signs on to the revival. She was also going to head off to Haiti to work for Doctors Without Borders, her version of a "vacation" after having worked for All Saints for so long.
While Akalitus' future is unknown, we do know that Thor's engaged to his boyfriend; and while it'd be nice for O'Hara to return to the U.S. full-time as a doctor for the revival, it seems like a bit of a stretch given that she already left the series once. Although now that her child is a little more grown up, it could potentially work if that were the case. Either way, as long as we're getting Edie Falco back into that blonde pixie cut, this Nurse Jackie revival is definitely going to be one for the books.