The fat kids show up, and Zoey lights up like Christmas.

OUTSIDE

Eddie: "Coop, I'm sorry I yelled at you about unrelated shit."
Coop: "It's okay! I don't remember when things happen."
Eddie: "I'm having a bad day, that's all."
Coop: "Listen, I'm 35 and I don't want to be alone anymore and I love this girl."
Eddie: "Great, but I still don't want to be involved in this."
Coop: "Please?"
Eddie: "Okay, but don't hug me right now."
Coop: "I'm hugging you in my mind."
Eddie: "Okay, that's kind of cute."
Coop: "Sometimes I'm cute."

ELEANOR'S OFFICE

Jackie: "I see you've been shopping. That's probably due to me once again ruining your day."
Eleanor: "Siddown, close the door. Here are Grace's pills, since you ate all of hers. But that's not enough. I want to actually help you instead of always giving you a band-aid for your grossness. I will pay for rehab even though it's a joke. I will go to meetings with you, also a joke. I would send you on detox but you'd kill yourself."
Jackie: "So what else is there? I have explored these options and you are right about them being worthless."

Eleanor: "As grossed out as I am by myself at this moment, there's another way. I can just prescribe the drugs that I think you should be taking, on your way to get clean. Like a fancy methadone clinic."
Jackie: "Are you comfortable with that?"
Eleanor: "Fucking no. But it's the best thing I can think of. I want things to be better, not worse. And I don't want to hear that you have actually fucked yourself over. So this is all I can think of."
Jackie: "Thank you."

I have to say, for all my whinging about the failures of this show, there is something to be said for the fact that this awful plan makes the most possible sense. They've managed to so thoroughly derange the system -- ethically, and in terms of friendship, and in terms of Jackie's bizarre power over everybody, her searing will -- that it does make a certain gross kind of backwards sense. Which in terms of story is pretty remarkable.

And watching Jackie nod and think so fast and realize that possibly this is the thing that is going to save her life... It's not really all that sickening at all. It's sort of delirious, but not vile. It's sort of sad, but not depressing. We deal with the situation as it stands, sometimes; not just the way people have always done things. And whatever else there is to say, you can't deny that Jackie is a special case. Which is her triumph and her tragedy both, but also makes the show what it is. Anybody else would be happy, or dead, by now.