"For you to threaten me the way you did this morning is just unconscionable. Do you know what that means?" Heh. He's all, "Uh, yeah?" but he still doesn't see the net she's drawing around him, which is to press every single mommy button -- which he's obviously sporting like a neverending therapy fractal -- until he has no choice but to grab her boob. "I have been watching people die since you were on the fucking playground," she says, with just enough force behind it that... Yep, there he goes.

"I'm so sorry, Jackie," he blubbers, his hand sort of farmer's-marketing around on her breast like ripe produce, and she says tenderly, "It's okay. Don't panic." Which just intensifies it on two levels, because it's both mommy-voice and therapeutic-voice, which have attended this disorder since he was little, so she's caging him in from both sides. "This has been a shitty day," she says, reminding him of the cardiac arrest before hitting the praise/destroy button that separates amateur manipulation from its distinctly more terrifying professional counterpart: "You did everything you could back there. You were really very smart." She puts her hand over his hand over her breast, and looks soulfully into his eyes, and says it again: "No need to panic, okay? Just trust me."

I admit that I started shivering at this part, because it's so brilliantly done and so terribly frightening and such a great summing up of both characters and their relationship, but also because it's so real and terrifying that I wanted to save him from her, a little bit. I kept expecting the rattlesnake sound to start up. "And I need to be able to trust you." Coop is variously: babbling, breathing hard, and stammering. His brain has literally become a pie chart -- mommy, sex, power, authority, accomplishment, incompetence, life, death -- and everything's bleeding into everything else, and his hand is still in the scariest place in the entire universe. He's either going to start crying and pass out, or fall in love. Those are the options.

Oh, you know what this is like? That weird syndicated Raimi show on Saturdays with the magical forest. I can't remember the name because it's like The Seeker Of The Sword Of The Wizard Of The Mommy Issues Of The Rule Of The BDSM Legend Of Latter-Day Saints or something, but the guy has a radically sick body and he's always getting tied up or beaten or going swimming just because he feels like it, and in the show he pals around with this Ren Faire chick who has magic powers to do exactly this thing, where they can't lie to her and they instantly fall in love with her and follow her around until they die, even though she's sort of pointy and trashy-looking. You can always tel,l because their pupils dilate in a magical way. Now, in this case, Jackie is high as fuck so who knows, but I bet his eyes are about to go all-black just like on that creepy S&M forest show.