Oh, man: how sad is it that Coop’s buying Ramen noodles for dinner? The camera didn’t go out of its way to focus on his choice of food, but I’d know a package of those anywhere. (Hand on heart, I’m eating a bowl of them as I write this very blog…which, come to think of it, is pretty tragic in and of itself.) Between his one-man meals, his overemphasis on how many folks on Twitter are following his every move, and his repeated reminders to Eddie that he’s there for him if he needs to talk, it’s clear that Cooper’s life is pretty pitiful these days…almost, it seems, as pitiful as Eddie’s. (The way he grills Coop about who’s spreading the word about his supposed suicide attempt, you can tell that he wants to find any possible excuse to hate Jackie.) I hope making the list of the 25 Best Doctors in Manhattan pays off for Coop…and not just because he spent money on a publicist to earn his position. At this rate, the guy’s going to fall into a serious depression way sooner than later.

What is it about medical shows that they feel obliged to make their male viewers squirm for all they’re worth…or am I the only one who reacted that way at the below-the-waist issues of the dog-bite victim? Mind you, it took a little bit of the sting away when his wife’s first reaction to her husband’s injuries was to muse, “I’ll probably be banned from the kennel club for life…” Thank God we didn’t get a shot of the guy whose cell phone blew up in his face…

Jackie’s really not paying much attention to what’s going on around her: first Kaitlyn busts her snorting drugs, and then Zoe catches her trying to use her PIN to get drugs out of the Pill-O-Matix. She’s also growing even more hypocritical this season that she was in the last, such as claiming at one point in the episode that “we don’t take pills in our family,” then later snorting drugs in the bathroom stall and emerging to tell the nursing mother swigging vodka by the sink that “if you’re gonna drink, you’ve gotta do it outside.” We’re shaping up to see her take a big fall sooner than later, and there’s going to be a whole lot of denial going on when it happens.

We didn’t get a whole lot of development with the subsidiary characters this week, though. Zoe’s wearing eyeshadow and perfume and people are noticing and wanting to know why, but it takes Eleanor’s direct question – “Who is he?” – to get any semblance of an answer out of her: there’s a party, and a particular person of interest will be in attendance. Sam turns up just long enough for Jackie to bitch at him, but his reaction to said bitching was priceless. (“You are going to bust my balls every chance you get!”) Similarly, Thor only had a chance to deliver a single laugh this week, with Zoe calling him on his 3-time use of a dated O.J. joke, resulting in his snippy reply, “Oh, like your material’s so fresh…” But I really liked the scene where Akalitis and Eleanor bond over the latter’s utter annoyance at being left off the 25 Doctors list, particularly when Akalitis read Eleanor’s mind and told her exactly what she was asking herself: “What is my incentive to keep bringing my best?” It was a nice touch to have Eleanor spend the episode complaining about America’s obsession with lists, only to respond to her placement on Akalitis’s top-5 list by demanding, “Who are the other four?”

Awesome ending, with Jackie walking into the house to find Eddie sitting on the floor, playing with her kids. Edie Falco’s expression was priceless. Can’t wait to see how things pick up next week.

Random observations:

* I can appreciate that Kevin’s not into the idea of having to deal with the strings that might be attached to Eleanor’s money for the girls’ education, but it struck me as rather pigheaded. I mean, it’s their education. Personally, I make a lot of exceptions to my personal rules where my daughter is concerned. You’ve got to do what’s best for your kids, right?

* I laughed out loud at the cut from Kevin agreeing to Jackie’s assessment that he’s a good dad to Jackie snorting drugs. Well, at least the kids have one good parent…

* Also funny: Coop’s attempt to act bad-ass while delivering the line, “I will crush her!”

* I loved the ihe incredibly un-casual way Coop literally dumped the copy of New York Magazine into Eleanor and Jackie’s laps, as well as Eleanor’s subsequent outrage that she didn’t make the list of the 25 Best Doctors in Manhattan.

* Did you pay attention to the almost-throwaway line from Jackie in the middle of her back-and-forth with the wife of the dog-bite victim – “We don’t take pills in our family” – and how, when it was countered, it led Jackie to offer a particularly nasty delivery when revealing the patient’s testicular-migration woes.

* Akalitis’s best quote this week: “I like to hide my humanity…or least keep it to a minimum.”

You can’t say the set designers haven’t come up with a realistic looking garage for the Peyton family, and as soon as I saw the shot of the electrical outlets, I knew it was going to play into the storyline in some capacity, but I didn’t expect that it would involve the ever-paranoid Grace going around and unplugging all of the appliances in the house every night so as to avoid possible house fires. Good lord, the child has been saving her allowance to buy the safest possible smoke detector for the house…? That’s a whole new level of paranoia, so I figured it wouldn’t be long before the child entered therapy on a full-time basis, and, of course, I was right: Jackie was looking into it before the end of the episode. And speaking of that particular discussion, Akalitis’s comment about how the psychiatrist “was extremely helpful with my boy” is, unless I missed something last season, the first actual clarification as to why she was so enamored of the baby last season. She used to have a son, it seems, and the fact that there’s been no mention of him up to this point leads me to suspect that the boy in question is no longer among the living, though given Akalitis’s age, I suppose it’s equally possible that he’s now grown up and out in the world somewhere.

So Eleanor “partied like a 20-year-old last night,” scored some Ecstasy, and admits that she’s still high. I’m watching this, and I’m thinking with all due sarcasm, “Oh, no, that’s not going to come back into play. Never!” Well, at the very least, it didn’t come back into play this episode, which truly surprised me. I guess it’s just part of the overall “I miss Mummy” arc, along with Eleanor’s recurring demand that Jackie inform her daughters that they now have a godmother with a crisp British accent, but the end result was that, on second viewing, I could just sit back and enjoy Eleanor’s hysterical run / dance down the hallway (and the resulting scream from Zoe) and her unabashed flirtation with and up-and-down admiration of Sam without fear that it was all going to be tainted by Eleanor screwing up on the job while still under the influence. To be momentarily melancholy, though, I must mention one bit about Eleanor’s mourning of her mother that really hit home for me: her uncertainty about how to remove her from the list of contacts on her cell phone. Having witnessed someone have a breakdown when they accidentally stumbled upon their deceased parent’s number on their phone, I can say with 100% seriousness that this is a very valid point of concern.

Eddie comes into the bar for further bonding with Kevin, continues his interesting tactic of telling his carefully parsed-out version of the truth by admitting his suicide attempt to get the attention of a woman, then says, “Ah, I’m just fucking with ya.” Comedy: it comes in all forms. Sick sense of humor? You said it, pal. not me. I keep waiting for Eddie to pull out a gun, but, y’know, I’m getting the impression that, while this may have started as Eddie trying to get revenge on Jackie for what he views as a betrayal, he might actually be starting to like Kevin. Makes sense: they do have something in common, after all.

This was a great week for back-and-forth battles. First, you had Jackie vs. Coop, which started out with Jackie being incredibly shitty to him and refusing to let him get the last word when talking to their young patient and his family, but just when I was feeling sympathy for the guy, he walks out of the room and starts Tweeting about his life (a nice nod to Peter Facinelli’s real-life obsession with the activity). Granted, it was pretty hilarious, but it’s something that you can totally understand Jackie viewing as a douche-tastic maneuver. In the end, though, she’s the one who got smacked across the face for trying to do an end-run around Coop, so I guess I was rooting for the right horse all along. Man, Jackie really knows how to push people’s emotional buttons…which is no doubt why she hates it when other people do it to her. By the way, this was definitely one of those cases where you’re reminded that, in the end, these patients are often little more than chess pieces for the doctors and nurses. The other battle of the week was between Jackie and Sam, of course, and allow me to once again reiterate how psyched I am that they brought him back as a regular for Season 2. I love the way he’s shaking things up for Jackie. I just hate to see her stab him in the back, but you know it’s going to happen sooner than later. Her complaint to Akalitis is just her official way of handling the situation. When she steps outside the lines, that’s when it’s going to get U-G-L-Y.

Woo-hoo! God’s back! I’m not surprised, either: his appearance from last season was classic, and giving him the chance to interact with the cast in person (as opposed to from an open window) was a must-do. Zoe’s scream of “God down!” after he was hit by the bottle made me laugh out loud, as did God’s decision to retract the comparison he’d made between Coop and Clark Gable, but clearly the best part of the storyline was Zoe accidentally breaking God’s brain by clarifying for him that he, uh, isn’t God. Her pep talk was awesome, though, particularly her use of the phrase “religious hierarchical stratification.”

Lastly, I’m really digging the conversations between Jackie and Thor, but, uh, wow, so I guess Steven Wallem is missing an eye in real life? Otherwise, that was a remarkable bit of visual trickery, the way he seemed to pop it right out of the socket!

Random comments and observations:

* “You know, the number one ingredient in hot dogs is cancer.” Really, Jackie? Because I could swear I read somewhere that it was pig anuses…

* Eleanor observing a disheveled Zoe stepping out of a cab and asking, “Was that a walk of shame?” If anything, I’d say it was more of a walk of pride, given Zoe’s cheerfulness, but I nonetheless laughed at the exchange between Eleanor and Jackie on the matter. “Do you think Zoe got her pipes cleaned?” “It’s like seeing Santa naked,” replied Jackie, with a shudder. “It’s not right.”

* Sam’s diagnosis of Eleanor’s activities from the previous evening. “Chasing your G & T’s with a little Thai stick…? Impressive!”

* Thor’s hoarding of magazines, “including ‘InTouch.'” (“Please don’t amplify my shame.”)

* Zoe and Sam’s brief bonding moment…or, more specifically, Zoe’s anecdote about taking Dramamine before going to Great Adventure because of a previous unfortunate yakking experience, which was aided in no small fashion by her gesticulation.

* Coop’s Tweet: “Bitchy nurse being bitchy again.”

* God telling Zoe that he saw something when he got hit. “”Like what?” she asks. “Like a bottle whizzing towards you?”

* And, of course, this exchange between Jackie and Thor:

Jackie: What do you think of the new nurse, Sam?
Thor: Well, I think he’s really smart and incredibly cute, and I think he’s probably an excellent nurse.
Jackie: I don’t like him.
Thor: He’s dead to me.

In closing, let us all remember the words of God’s brother-in-law: “Lather, rinse, repeat: that’s how they’ll get you!”

In the case of “Nurse Jackie,” it also helps immensely that I really love the show. Although I’m guilty of missing the first season when it originally aired, I can assure you that no arm-twisting was required to dole four stars for the Season 1 DVD set, and by the time I’d finished watching the whole thing from top to bottom, I was chomping at the bit to dive into Season 2, so it’s a pleasure to finally be able to do so.

I’ll say this for Showtime’s series: they sure do use some great music: “United States of Tara” offered up the Zombies’ “Care of Cell 44,” and now “Nurse Jackie” gives us “I Say A Little Prayer.” Niiiiiiice. But am I the only one who wasn’t entirely certain for a few minutes that the opening scene was actually taking place in the real world? It sure felt like a dream at first, the way it drifted slowly out of the opening credit sequence and onto the shot of Jackie on the beach. It wasn’t until the close-up shot of Grace doing her Lady Macbeth impression with the soap and water in her sand bucket that I decided for sure that what I was watching wasn’t all in Jackie’s head. Oh, hey, as long as we’re on the topic of heads, how about that raccoon, huh? It says so much about both Fiona and Elenor that the former would take a picture and send it to the latter, resulting in both of them being quite pleased with themselves. It’s no real surprise that Grace is still neurotic, nor that she’s still not talking to her mother, and it’s typical Jackie to be annoyed about receiving the silent treatment from her daughter, even though she unquestionably earned it.

“I Say A Little Prayer” pops back onto the soundtrack the moment Jackie re-enters the hospital, but while it first appears to be directly connected to the appearance of the Virgin Mary statue, it seems more likely that it’s because it was only by the grace of God that Jackie didn’t get struck by the bullet that zings Mary. I found it interesting that, while the average person would’ve had that sudden realization that they had been only a few steps from being in the bullet’s path, Jackie had no “I could’ve been killed” epiphany. Instead, she just screams at the shooter, “She’s a mother!” Really, though, we’re talking about a woman who pops pills left and right, so while she might not have a death wish in the traditional sense, she’s clearly not exactly doing anything to avoid death.

Of course, you can’t entirely blame her for wishing she was dead when Coop’s on her case, desperately flirting with her. It was pretty hilarious to see him pitching the idea of going to see “Hair” because it’s ostensibly era-appropriate for her (“It takes place in the ’60s, I thought it might take you back”), only to immediately bail on his plan the second it doesn’t work and make with a snide comment about how much older than him she is. Coop’s other great moment this week comes when he demands an audience with Akalitis in order to lodge a formal complaint against Jackie for challenging his decisions, not acknowledging the chain of command, and for being bossy, rude, unpleasant, and just an all-around bully for not acknowledging the chain of command. “If this were a food pyramid,” he screams, I would be a steak!” Then he promptly starts crying.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a TV boss who’s as easy to hate as hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus on “Nurse Jackie.” Played to perfection by Anna Deavere Smith, Akalitus is a character who has enough leadership traits that you don’t question how she’s worked her way up through the ranks to her current position, but you do wonder how it is that no one’s killed her. Maybe my memory’s failing me, but I can’t remember any episodes on Season 1 where she had quite as many great moments as she did in this one.

1. Zoe asks if she’s just heard a gunshot, and Akalitus only considers the sound for a moment before replying, “22 caliber, I’m guessing.”
2. When Jackie is giving her less-than-spontaneous speech about the shrinkage in the hospital’s Pill-O-Matic machines, Akalitus steps in first to correct Jackie’s choice of phrase, then to underline a comment that Jackie didn’t emphasize sufficiently.
3. Akalitus is on the phone, throwing a fit with someone over the fact that they owe her money, then closes by saying, “Sorry, Monsignor.”
4. The whole time Coop is complaining to her about the way Jackie treats him, Akalitus is scribbling “World’s Biggest Asshole” on her notepad.

We don’t get nearly enough Zoe this episode, though her giddiness at getting Coop’s now-useless-to-him “Hair” tickets was a great moment. We do, however, see the return of Sam (Arjun Gupta), the guy who came onto the staff last year, got busted by Jackie for being hopped up on drugs, and – before hitting the road – gave her a verbal smackdown with his classic comeback, “Takes one to know one.” Sam, however, has been in rehab, which pisses her off even more, mostly because it means hours of forced denial on her part. Clearly, however, Jackie’s still just as much of an addict now as she was when she had Eddie in the palm of her hand. It’s completely ballsy yet totally in character for her to swipe meds from the Pill-o-Matic while in the process of giving her speech about drug shrinkage, but even though she knows full well that the hammer is inevitably going to come down on the hospital as a result of the vanishing drugs, she simply doesn’t care. She needs what she needs, and she’s going to take it, consequences be damned. Besides, it’s not like she’s not going to try to blame it all on someone else, anyway.

Which reminds me: could Jackie and Eddie possibly lose to anyone in the field of TV’s Most Dysfunctional Couple? (I’m excluding any couple where one or both parties are now dead, which takes Jesse and Jane from “Breaking Bad” out of the running, sadly.) Jackie’s tried to get over Eddie, but even after three months with no contact, she’s still seeing visions of him wherever she goes. I bet she wished it was only a vision when she saw him turn up in the E.R. as a victim of an overdose. Turns out he did it intentionally, knowing full well that he was only taking enough to get himself admitted and therefore get to see Jackie, but, again, these are clearly not the activities of someone who has a vested interest in continuing their existence. After she leaves him, Jackie pops into the hallway, takes a call from home, and is promptly back into her normal domestic mode. Can she possibly be over Eddie? It’s hard to imagine that’s the case: despite bringing home cake for dinner, she hasn’t been home more than a few minutes before she’s in the bathroom, snorting up to the tune of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile.” They’ll be bonding over benzodiazepine again soon enough.

Random things I really liked:

* Jackie taking down the douchebag at the fast food stand. Another classic example of the character doing the things that most viewers would seriously considering doing ourselves if we had the cajones and weren’t worried about the possibly repercussions of our actions. Another example of this comes when Jackie battles with the insurance company in order to help the deaf woman get her hand surgery covered. It’s absolutely genius, and you can bet the clip will end up on YouTube sooner than later as an example of how ridiculous insurance companies can be.

* The way how, the moment after Akalitus wonders aloud what’s different about the department that’s caused the State of New York to flag the hospital’s emergency room, Jackie pops her head into the office. All that was missing was her doing an impression of Michael McKean as Lenny and saying, “Hello!”

* Thor’s horror at the thought of having to work in the maternity ward, as well as his obsession with cake.

* Grace’s response when she misses Jupiter while listing off the planets of the solar system: “It doesn’t matter. The sun’s going to explode and eat up all of the other planets, anyway.” Well, it’s true…