In this week’s Scrubs, Dr. Cox takes us to a magical land where a princess and a village idiot face off against a monster that has possessed a fair maiden with the help of a giant, a two-headed witch and a valiant knight while avoiding the wrath of an evil wizard that has taken over the Sacred Heartia. Strangely, however, that wasn’t even the most confusing thing about the episode. First off, the show was suddenly given the vague billing as the “Scrubs Finale”, noticeably leaving off any mention of whether this was the season or season finale. The truth is that it’s both. Or neither, really, depending on how you look at it. You see, this is the series finale of the show as part of the NBC lineup, before it makes its move to ABC, which the current network is understandably being quiet about. On top of that, we get the inexplicable return of Dr. Kelso as the Chief of Medicine and Keith as Elliot’s recently dumped ex-fiancee from one month(!) earlier.
The plot, itself, was pretty simple. Dr. Cox comes home from a long day at the hospital when Jordan forces him to read their son a bedtime story. After scolding him for trying to tell their son, Jack, a story about the hospital, Cox makes up a fantasy story about a princess (Elliot), a village idiot (J.D.) and a two-headed witch (Turk and Carla) as they try to slay a monster that has possessed a maiden. This maiden is actually a patient at the hospital that Elliot is having trouble diagnosing. Meanwhile, an evil wizard (Dr.Kelso), who, in real life was cracking down on employee hours since he didn’t want to pay any of his staff more than he had to.
After exploring all options, Elliot and J.D. decide to ask for help. Their help comes to them in the form of a valiant knight in shining armor and rock-hard abs who is, of course, played by Dr. Cox himself. Dr. Cox tries to fend off the monster before offering the duo the needlessly cryptic advice “You must remember what you heard when you weren’t even listening.” This refers to a conversation between two interns that J.D. inadvertently overheard earlier in the day since, for some reason, Cox thought it was more important to be cleverly mysterious in his advice about a life-threatening illness than simply tell his co-workers what was wrong to help them treat the disease. Then, though Cox is sure to give his son’s story a happy ending, it is implied that the patient dies.
Oh yeah, and J.D. and Elliot talk about their almost-kiss that happened so long ago that I completely forgot it happened.
It seemed, almost, that NBC was saving this episode for their finale simply because it was so bad that it would hopefully turn all of Scrubs’ fans off the show before it moved to their competing network. It clearly was supposed to be aired sometime well before the writer’s strike when, quite frankly, the show just felt sort of tired and I quietly hoped it would just end so that it could bow out gracefully. Fortunately, right after the strike, the show was back to the level it hadn’t been for years and even got me interested in the J.D./Elliot relationship once again. So, if you’re like me, my advice would be to just watch last week’s episode again and pretend that this one never happened in order to keep yourexcitement going for the next season of Scrubs.
-George Freitag, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
(Image courtesy of NBC)
Staff Columnist, BuddyTV
