Nurse Jackie ended on an ambiguous note over 10 years ago in June 2015, and even now, the Showtime dramedy’s cliffhanger finale still leaves fans frustrated and perhaps a little confused.
As the show gains a new audience on Netflix, many are discovering the Edie Falco-led dramedy for the first time and asking the same question longtime viewers have debated for years: What really happened to Jackie Peyton in those final moments?
So what exactly happened in the series closer, and why? Let’s revisit the final moments of the show and what people said about it below. Warning: Spoilers ahead!
The show ended on an inconclusive note
In that series finale, Season 7’s “I Say a Little Prayer,” Edie Falco’s titular character is back in scrubs following a nursing license hearing about her substance abuse, and she gets a job offer from Bellevue Hospital, a lifeline out of the soon-to-close All Saints Hospital. All seems well, but Jackie’s former coworker Eleanor (Eve Best) is right to think Jackie has relapsed in her addiction recovery.
At a farewell party with her coworkers — including mentee-turned-minder Zoey (Merritt Wever) — Jackie snorts lines of heroin and overdoses, collapsing to the floor of the All Saints ER. Jackie’s work family rushes to her side, but her fate is still a question mark when the end credits roll.
“What the heck kind of series finale was that?!” one disgruntled fan wrote on Facebook at the time.
“I hate how all these shows are starting to have ambiguous/cliffhanger endings,” a commenter added, no doubt recalling the cut-to-black ending of The Sopranos, another Falco project.
Fast-forward a decade, and Nurse Jackie’s finale still has viewers flummoxed. “Can someone please help explain the ending to me?” one user wrote on Reddit’s Nurse Jackie forum earlier this year. “Zoey is saying to Jackie that she’s OK, and Jackie smiles and opens her eyes? Huh? So is she alive? I don’t get it?”
Controversy and ambiguity were goals for the Nurse Jackie writers
According to showrunner Clyde Phillips, who co-wrote that final episode, riling up the audience was what they intended.
“We wanted the ending to be authentic and controversial, and for the finale to continue to be part of the conversation,” Phillips told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “David Nevins [Showtime’s then-CEO] and I discussed how we wanted it to happen and had some different choices. I made the pitch for keeping it somewhat ambiguous and inspiring. When the credits rolled, I wanted people to lean forward and talk about what they just saw.”
Phillips also said neither he nor Falco wanted a happy ending, and he credited the Emmy-winning actor with the uncertainty of the episode’s final moments. “One of the reasons why there’s a question is because Edie Falco is so brilliant,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Imagine lying on the floor in the middle of 60 people with a camera in your face and giving just enough of an eye flutter and just enough of a move of her lips that you think, “Maybe!”
He also explained Zoey saying Jackie was “good” in that scene, as the latter nurse hovered between life and death. “It goes back to the pilot, where at the end of the pilot, we learn that Jackie has a family, and she steps into the shadows and says, ‘Make me good Lord — but not yet’ in voiceover. At the beginning of the series finale, she’s in church by herself waiting for her family to arrive for her daughter’s confirmation, and she says, ‘Make me good.’ … Those are the words that Jackie wanted to hear.”
Nurse Jackie almost had a different ending altogether
The Nurse Jackie writers actually had a different ending in mind as they plotted the show’s endgame, as Phillips revealed in a Variety interview. In that version, a fire breaks out in the All Saints ER, and Jackie heroically saves a patient, a fellow addict, who’s handcuffed to a bed in the hospital basement. The ceiling collapses on Jackie, but she finds a way out, squeezing out of a window “like a birth,” Phillips said. Then Jackie spots a crowd of people congregating outside the burning hospital and starts moving toward them before changing her mind and running in the opposite direction. “She realizes that she’s free,” Phillips said.
Nurse Jackie’s crew members built the basement set in Season 7 in preparation for that fiery climax, but the writers had a change of heart. “About three-quarters through the season, we realized that we had planned was too much about story and not enough about character,” Phillips told EW. “We had to turn this big ship around and bring it down to Jackie Peyton.”
And for the record, Phillips thinks Jackie survives the overdose in the filmed version of the finale and restarts her life from a new rock bottom.
In a 2016 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Falco said the Nurse Jackie writers were “bandying about every possibility and some very big dramatic stuff, some very small stuff” as they approached the finale.
And Falco wanted her character to die. “I really thought it was important,” she said. “I said, I want it to be clear that this is not something that goes away, that all of a sudden she doesn’t have to deal with this anymore. She’s not going to meetings, she’s not looking out for herself, she’s not taking time to, I don’t know, meditate, whatever she might do to combat her addiction. It’s got to be clear that that won’t last, that that won’t abide. … I think she should die, and we don’t do that on television shows a lot. So that became the battle at the end, a little bit.”
Falco also indicated that the finale script unambiguously showed Jackie’s saying. “As written, I thought, ‘Oh, good, very good. We’ll get to do this.’ And I think the network pushed back a little bit, like, ‘I don’t think you can kill her. People care about this woman.’ I said, ‘That’s the point: the unfairness, the largeness of the ramifications of rampant drug use.’ So anyway, we ended up with some sort of a compromise where people aren’t sure that she died. And if you ask me, she died.”
The bigger point of the finale wasn’t just whether she lived or died
Especially with its finale, Nurse Jackie showed the ravages of addiction and how recovery is often not linear and certainly not guaranteed. “One of our ambitions has always been to have people understand the ferocity of the disease she has, and to have compassion,” Phillips told Variety. “If Jackie had cancer, everybody would be completely compassionate. This disease she has causes her to hurt other people because it’s such a narcissistic disease. All she cares about is her next hit.”
And no matter whether fans loved or hated the episode, for what it’s worth, “I Say a Little Prayer” is currently ranked 12th best out of 80 episodes in IMDb user ratings — everyone must appreciate Falco’s performance in Nurse Jackie’s last episode and the show at large.
“Jackie Peyton is a trainwreck,” Phillips observed. “She’s a sociopathic drug addict who has destroyed everything in her life. There’s one reason [viewers] have stuck with it for seven years, and that one reason is Edie Falco.”
Will there be a Season 8 of Nurse Jackie?
Well, the question of whether or not Jackie died in the series finale may be answered as the morally ambiguous healthcare worker will hopefully return in an all-new series.
While there will not be a traditional Season 8 of Nurse Jackie, as the series concluded after seven seasons, a sequel series and/or revival was in development at Prime Video in 2023, featuring Falco returning as Jackie Peyton to continue her story 10 years after the finale. That new series was, at the time, said to be written and executive produced by Abe Sylvia and Liz Flahive, respectively. There haven’t been any updates since the initial announcement.
Nurse Jackie, Streaming now, Netflix
If you or someone you know has addiction issues, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration‘s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.
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