100 Favorite Shows: #7 — Scrubs
“She’s the idiot! We’re doctors.”
American television had seen single-camera comedies before. The Larry Sanders Show comes to mind as an innovator of the medium in the U.S. However, network television was always reluctant towards the format (a few counter-examples include The Addams Family and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose), preferring to stick to the traditional (and successful) multi-cam format. Scrubs was no pioneer, but it was a sapling for ambitious, single-cam, workplace comedies on network television. The Bill Lawrence-created medical comedy debuted in October 2001 and centered around Dr. J.D. Dorian (Zach Braff) beginning his residency at Sacred Heart Hospital. While the concept was not radical, Scrubs’ use of fantastical cut-aways, dreamy narration, and goofy slapstick set it apart as a series unlike any seen before (save for one notable exception). Over its eight-season run (plus one spin-off season) that shifted from NBC to ABC, Scrubs consistently managed to thread the stitches expertly throughout its many styles.
(Attention all Sacred Heart medical personnel. This essay contains spoilers for Scrubs, including heavy spoilers on the series finale of Scrubs.)
The work of a pilot episode is near-impossible. They have to establish the central characters of the series and their general motivations, as well as introduce the core premise and/or conflict of the series. On top of it all, they have to make the pilot feel like a normal episode of the series or else risk being thumbed down by the network or tuned out by the viewers. It’s a tricky tight rope and very few get to be Nik Wallenda. Cheers had an excellent pilot. Game of Thrones, too (after some re-shoots). Arrested Development, Mad Men, the U.K. version of The Office. It can be done, but it’s not easy.
Considering the immense standards, Scrubs had a fairly solid pilot. However, it’s not what I best remember the medical dramedy for. Instead, I appreciate Scrubs for the fact that it has the greatest series finale in the history of television, “My Finale.” As I rewatched the masterpiece for this essay, I was struck by all that goes into a pilot, especially in connection with the opposite of a pilot: the series finale. If pilots have to function as normal episodes of the television series they introduce, do finales have to function as normal episodes of what they conclude? Could that even be possible?
In the case of the Scrubs finale (which begins unexpectedly with “Snow (Hey Oh)” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers), there were no pretensions about crafting a normal installment of the series. There are a few standard Scrubs story lines: J.D. tries to have a heartwarming moment with Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley), The Janitor (Neil Flynn) tries to get J.D. to admit to putting a penny in a door during the pilot, “My First Day,” and a patient (Josh Cooke) learns he has a 50/50 shot at Huntington’s disease. But ultimately, the Scrubs finale is about the pay-offs. J.D. is on the hunt for heartfelt goodbyes and sentimental moments. Of course, none of his expectations of a last day would ever be met. How could they be? He works at a hospital. Life has to go on as normal there or else people could die (it’s a burden Scrubs never let us forget).
But in the meta context of the series, Braff and the rest of the Scrubs team got to have a grand send-off, complete with the best possible pay-offs any long-term fans could have asked for. I’m going to sprinkle each of them in throughout this rest of the essay, but I’ll begin first with the goodbye J.D. shares with Jordan (Christa Miller). It reminded me a lot of the goodbye I shared with an old trainer of mine when I left my theme park workplace. She was always a bit aloof and tough more than she was sensitive, but when she learned I was leaving, she offered me a hug.
It was a neat moment and one that, at the time, I savored. I had met a lot of wondrous people at that job and I didn’t want to let go of any of them. At the time, I thought the hug was an extension of ongoing friendship for the future. Now, I realize it really was just a goodbye. Sometimes, people just hug you goodbye because you’re not necessarily meant to be in each other’s lives forever; social media can warp those sorts of expectations. It’s just easy to slip into believing the final monologue Bill Lawrence wrote for J.D.
“Endings are never easy. I always build them up so much in my head they can’t possibly live up to my expectations and I just end up disappointed. I’m not even sure why it matters to me so much how things end here. I guess it’s because we all want to believe that what we do is very important, that people hang onto our every word, that they care what we think. The truth is, you should consider yourself lucky if you even occasionally get to make someone, anyone, feel a little better. After that, it’s all about the people that you let into your life.”
It’s partly a treatise from Lawrence on his role as a showrunner for television, but it’s also sage advice for anyone who is leaving a place they loved filled with people they loved even more. The goodbyes in your head will always surpass the ones you actually receive. Theme parks, hospitals, offices. They all keep running. What matters is what you’ll take away from them — and what you gave back. That matters even more when you get emotional and nostalgic about everything. As I do. As J.D. does. As you, dear reader, might.
And J.D. gave so much back. To Sacred Heart and to everyone who entered into his orbit during his time there — colleagues and patients alike. (Though, it was always occasionally fun when characters who primarily played off J.D. ended up playing off each other. Like in “My Screw-Up” when Elliot (Sarah Chalke) and The Janitor search for Carla (Judy Reyes) and the latter implies that she’s dead. “We’re not looking for dead Carla,” Elliot replies and The Janitor gives her a pitying look, commending her for staying optimistic. For J.D., this would be an average day for The Janitor. For Elliot, who’s interacted with him infrequently, she’s not sure if he just murdered her best friend.)
J.D.’s final monologue cascades into a turn down a hospital hallway where a “wave of shared experience” hits him in the form of his most memorable patients and colleagues greeting him for a goodbye stroll down the corridors. It’s an admirable way to bring back the series’ best recurring characters. His brother, Dan (Tom Cavanagh, in a defensive role), throws out his classic, “Hey, little brother,” Jill (Nicole Sullivan) peeks out from a hospital room, Ted (the late Sam Lloyd, who once had dirt for coffee) sings a short ditty with the rest of the Worthless Peons, The Todd (Robert Maschio, always waiting for a sexual innuendo) offers a goodbye five. It’s such an overwhelming sense of emotion that anyone who feels sentimentality and nostalgia as deeply as J.D. can relate to. (The best comes when Mrs. Tanner (Kathryn Joosten) returns from “My Old Lady” to remind J.D. to take the time out of his day and have a picnic.)
We get final glances from Hooch (Phil Lewis), Snoop Dogg Attending (Manley Henry), Colonel Doctor (Bob Bencomo), and Leonard (Randall Winston), the security guard with a hook hand (as Dr. Cox once said, “I think I just got the move on signal from a hook”). Everyone’s back and even if they’re not (like Brendan Fraser’s Ben or Scott Foley’s Sean, who can’t resist a good storm-off, smells like Kelso’s (Ken Jenkins) tackle box, and communicates with Shamu), we still can’t help but be hit by the same wave that is breaking over J.D. We went on this journey with him and met all these people when he meet them. We were inside his thoughts and daydreams. Scrubs is a very personal experience, more so than many other television series that have characters you check in on weekly. This applied to characters who endured so much (Dr. Cox) and those who created their own sources of conflict (The Janitor).
At first, The Janitor was conceived as a character who would be a figment of J.D.’s imagination (another hallmark of Scrubs’ bleeding ambition that has been called into question by the Scrubs rewatch podcast), but over time, he was so dynamite that he couldn’t help but become a part of the regular cast. (The opening credits even stretched out just to include him for a brief stint!) The Janitor was an excellent source of comedic relief, even in a series filled with funny characters, partly thanks to Flynn’s impeccable improv talents (Julian the Manatee? “Pointer and thumb-pinky”? All him) and partly because the character was written as a bizarre soothsayer who actually had no idea what he was talking about in any given moment (M. Night Shyamalan, losing the ability to use vowels, eating soup with a fork).
His relationship with J.D. is a constant throughout the show; they’re always at odds with one another. Most of the time, this results in The Janitor tricking J.D. into partaking in some humiliating antic or painful catastrophe. Other times, The Janitor’s relentless confidence backfires and he becomes tasked with scrubbing a permanent marker’s line from the wall (Turk (Donald Faison) asks why he doesn’t just paint over it) or checking out a potential melanoma on his penis that was only noticed by J.D.
J.D.: “Look, Janitor, I’m gonna be straight with you. I saw your penis and I noticed a possible melanoma that you should really have checked out.”
Janitor: “When did you see my penis?”
J.D.: “Last night when you were showering.”
Janitor: “Where were you?”
J.D.: “Oh, I was outside in the bushes. Look, it was just a coincidence, man. If you had looked out of the window you would’ve seen my penis, you know.”
Janitor: “What? Why?”
J.D.: “Because I had it out while I was looking at yours!”
It’s easy for the two of them to exacerbate tension between one another, but in “My Finale,” they share a brief moment of bonding when The Janitor decides it’s time to stop messing with J.D., now that he’s really on his way out of Sacred Heart. Another pay-off results when The Janitor finally reveals his name to be Glenn Matthews, but it’s too little, too late for them to forge a friendship together. I’ve known many janitors in my life and I’m grateful I remember their names. There’s been many nights when I’m trying to fall asleep and I remember a jovial interaction shared with one of them and pangs of sentimentality strike me in my deeply emotional psyche. I’m sure J.D. experienced the same with Glenn every now and then.
The goodbyes J.D. experiences with Turk, Carla, and Elliot, on the other hand are much easier. For them, it’s not really goodbye. Carla, the lifeblood of Sacred Heart who is basically responsible for the day-to-day functionality of the hospital, tells J.D. that she coddled him because there were plenty of people to scream at him. But she’s not going anywhere; she’s married to Turk. Carla and J.D. will be in one another’s lives forever because of that and so their goodbye comes naturally because they’re not leaving each other in the same way J.D. will probably never see Glenn again.
Even if Carla wasn’t married to Turk, they’d have a chance of sticking around for one another. But J.D. and Turk are forever companions. As one of the most overt bromances in the history of television, the bond between J.D. and Turk is forged with alien steel that cannot be broken by Earth-bound happenstances. They gossip during sleepovers when Turk is banished to J.D.’s room after upsetting Carla, they lay underneath a basketball hoop to diminish embarrassment inflicted by passersby, they dress as vampires (Dr. Acula), they grip and neck one each other to sing “Guy Love” or to sniff their hair and remark, “You smell like it’s hot out.” J.D. loves Turk more than anyone (save for Elliot) in the world to the point where Carla accepts that her marriage will never experience the same affection.
Turk is endlessly cool, but also accepting of J.D. and in touch with both of their emotional sides. An avid devotee of the Gilmore Girls styling, Turk leads with kindness and sentimentality, even if he does it under the guise of a break-dancing, occasional meathead. J.D. bears these emotions proudly on his chest and when he’s around J.D., that comes out in Turk, too. That friendship is going nowhere.
And of course, J.D. see will Elliot forever, regardless of hospital affiliation, because they’re finally committed to one another by the time the series comes to an end. Their relationship was disastrous for a long stretch of time, but ultimately, Elliot had to conquer her own fears to love herself and consequentially accept the abundance of love J.D. was willing to give to her at all times. She finds her voice and her courage by standing up to Dr. Kelso (her white whale in “My White Whale”) and she grows to trust her own abilities as a doctor. When she fully trusts herself, she can open herself up to trust in others, without a grander fear that she’ll be hurt. A kiss between J.D. and Elliot is one of the series’ final images even though it never prioritized romance above other series moments; that’s the growth they experienced in their journey to earning one another.
Those goodbyes aren’t permanent goodbyes, but when J.D. parts with Dr. Kelso and Dr. Cox, he really might be seeing them for the last time.
With Dr. Kelso, it’s not as consequential. As the tip top honcho of Sacred Heart, J.D.’s connection with him was never as deep as it was with Dr. Cox. Kelso was the boss, but Cox was a true mentor. Sure, Kelso was similar to Cox with about ten times as much cruelty and one-tenth as much heart, but he was still an effective leader at Sacred Heart who gave everyone what they needed to work effectively. When Kelso eventually retires and becomes more geared towards Bahama Mamas, muffins, and bowling shirts, he does become more genial, but he still doesn’t build a connection with anyone deeper than the one he has with Ted (and maybe Carla, who was one of the most effective at bringing out Kelso’s heart, deep within his green, Seussian fur, especially in “My Screw-Up” when he solves both her and Turk’s identity crises).
J.D. and Dr. Cox went through so much together, though. That’s why a crucial aspect of “My Finale” sees J.D. searching and praying for one final moment of emotional swelling between the two of them.
Kelso may be a fraction of Cox’s archetype, but what an archetype it is. To be honest, the kind of character that Dr. Cox represents is my favorite kind in all of television. The mentor who tends to religiously follow the rules of their job and pretends to be a hard-ass with no feeling, but actually ends up being the character who cares the most? There is no better archetype. (Carlton Lassiter, Ron Swanson, and Jeff Winger all represent this mold.) When he yells at J.D., it’s because he cares about J.D. and wants to see him succeed. It’s just that Dr. Cox also prioritizes the quality of the work over the feelings of his pupils.
Dr. Cox consistently pretends like he has no love for the people in his life. (He mocks J.D. and Turk’s close friendship even though his kinship with Ben is highly comparable, he saves some of his most devastating insults for Jordan who’s supposed to be his partner, and on J.D.’s last day, he tells him that it is not actually a special day.) Ultimately, it’s always clear that Dr. Cox’s love just manifests in different ways. After all, in “My White Whale,” he is paralyzed with fear that his son, Jack, has fluid in his lungs as a result of a small cough. That’s the curse of caring as much as Cox does and also being a doctor who knows too well how scathingly an illness can devolve.
Of course, part of the brilliance of Cox is McGinley’s performance. He’s endlessly passionate in every motion and his line delivery is always hilariously impeccable. McGinley savors every pause and every new diphthong in his parade of intricate insults and hurtful rants. (One of the best McGinley line readings does actually come in “My Finale” when Carla teases him about opening up to J.D. and he replies, “Un — let it arrive — acceptable.”) And who’s to say if these rants are actually the best way to mentor young doctors? Maybe he could’ve been more nurturing, but he’s also aware that coddling doesn’t work in medicine. If you mess up, people die. You can’t afford to be wishy-washy. J.D. learns to quell this impulse through Dr. Cox, but he also learns how to build bonds with his patients through Cox’s genuine bedside manner.
Dr. Cox also teaches J.D. that it’s impossible to devote oneself to every bond. There’s too many patients and too many doctors in a person’s life and in “My Lunch,” Cox explains that to help every single person at every time of day is just too much to ask of yourself. It’s a lesson that comes after J.D. and Cox run into Jill at the local grocery store and ignore all the warning signs of mental illness she is exhibiting. Eventually, Jill ends up back in Sacred Heart (and props to Scrubs for using a previously-established patient to really ratchet up the emotion in this episode) under the presumption that she tried to kill herself. There’s no hope for her recovery and so the decision is made by her next of kin to harvest Jill’s organs and save a number of patients in need of them. J.D. tells Jill’s sister that there’s nothing that could have been done, but he thinks back to the cry for help in the grocery store that was masked under sociability J.D. tried desperately to ignore.
Is he responsible for her death? J.D. certainly believes so and as soon as Cox sees this flicker of doubt in him, he immediately stops any slight against J.D. and takes him out to lunch to tell him that too many doctors have had their careers ruined by guilt. Cox takes it upon himself to ensure that J.D. won’t be one of them. He’s too good a doctor for that and Cox can recognize the importance of the lesson over his own need to be aloof.
Later in “My Lunch,” it becomes J.D.’s duty to return the favor when it turns out that rabies — not drugs — killed Jill. Two patients who received Jill’s organs die as a result of the infections and it demolishes Cox to the break room where he sits in stunned, five o’clock shadow-marked silence. J.D. enters with lunch, when he tells Cox that not a single mistake was made on the grounds that testing the organs for rabies would have been an “irresponsible” waste of time. Dr. Cox is momentarily comforted when J.D. says he would have made the same decision, but we can hardly bask in the moment until J.D.’s narration returns and reveals that the hospital picked that day as the day “to pile it on.” Cox’s patient, who only needed a kidney in a non-time sensitive manner, doesn’t survive the transplant and it results in “How to Save a Life” (an obvious musical pick, but an obscenely emotional one) blaring overhead as Dr. Cox destroys the EKG machine in rage and Carla looks on in bleary silence. Dr. Cox storms from the hospital, completely ready to ruin his career, as he ignores J.D.’s protest about not blaming oneself for uncontrollable medical disasters. His eyes are completely bloodshot as he leaves Sacred Heart.
When we next see him enter, in the subsequent “My Fallen Idol,” we see how the burden of responsibility has completely crushed his spirit. Miserable and drunk, Dr. Cox still shows up to work until he almost botches a routine procedure. It sends him down the rabbit hole of despair that leads to his son’s first complete sentence being, “Daddy drinks a lot” and J.D. deciding not to visit Cox’s home with a pep talk. Eventually, J.D. does relent after every other character’s efforts to rescue Cox fail and he reveals (with no eye contact — just words) that the reason he avoided Cox’s home was because he was afraid. To J.D., Cox is a superhero and it was tough to see someone he perceived to be unflappable actually fall so hard. But it’s precisely this that renews J.D.’s faith. He didn’t idolize Cox because Cox was a perfect doctor. He idolizes him because Cox takes every mistake and every slip-up harder than any other doctor. He feels them so deeply that they become a part of Cox and his work going forward.
It’s a talk that pulls Cox out to the point where he actually uses J.D.’s name instead of a feminine name or “Newbie.” J.D. spits out the scotch (he’s more of an appletini guy) and Cox gives him a bit of ribbing. After four and a half seasons, Scrubs had more than earned the concept of J.D., still seen as the new guy, rescuing his lofty veteran. The reason it works so effectively is precisely because everything J.D. put back into saving Cox from his depression is what he learned from Cox in the first place. The love and care J.D. has for the people in his life is not limited to supporting their endeavors or going to their birthday parties — it extends to rescuing them, even if they don’t want to be caught. J.D. was never afraid to push past those boundaries because he knew it was for the greatest good — for him and for Dr. Cox.
And you can’t just go through something like that with another human being and then not acknowledge it when it seems like that person might be leaving your life for good. In “My Finale,” J.D. goes to great lengths to have a moment with Dr. Cox, even though the latter is wholly uninterested in such a thing. (J.D. even provides Dr. Cox with a cataloged encyclopedia of every one of Cox’s rants that helped make him the man he is today, to which Cox replies, “You can’t blame me for that.”)
Ultimately, their personalities are too disparate for Scrubs to actually justify a back-and-forth heart-to-heart between the two of them (“Why do you hate me when I show you nothing but love?”). Instead, in true Scrubs fashion, they blend the emotion with the goofiness as J.D. pays off an intern to set Cox up for a monologue about what J.D. meant to him, without realizing that J.D. is actually directly behind him. He refers to J.D. as an “exceptional person,” which results in J.D. giving a tight, love-overpouring hug to Cox (who secretly wanted it, I tell myself).
Scrubs struck a balance between humor and heart better than most series have managed over the decades of television. No show (aside from perhaps BoJack Horseman) could go as silly as Scrubs did and then rein it back in for a moment as gutting as Cox losing all three patients to rabies. I see Dr. Cox rip apart a hospital room and I’m sucker-punched by sobbing. Then, J.D. gives an X-ray to a Muppet or dresses up as a Renaissance jester and I struggle to reconcile the fact that these are, in fact, all moments from the same series.
Scrubs was not the first to find the balance between comedy and drama, especially in the medical setting. It’s pretty clearly influenced by M*A*S*H, which showed that trying to keep people alive is not an easy job and it’s crucial that the doctors and nurses are able to find humor whenever they can — even if the humor doesn’t always win. It’s a job with rare wins, so if a doctor shows affection by calling someone “Newbie” or “Barbie” or “Bambi,” then maybe it’s enough to get through the day without losing your mind to the idea of what could have been differently.
The goofy silliness was a direct antidote to how sad the reality of the hospital could be, but the humor never reneged on its promise of being clever and cartoonish in equal measure. A Donkey Boy resides in the ICU, Dr. Cox runs away to the zip sound effect of the Roadrunner, The Todd’s high-fives sound like the crack of a whip (no series had better sound effects than Scrubs). These moments of levity were vital to keeping Sacred Heart from flatlining. For every perfectly constructed joke (“Either this kid has a light bulb up his butt or his colon has a great idea”), there were stupider, more sense of humor-specific ones (“I’m sorry; I was thinking about soup”). They helped set Scrubs apart as one of the more delightful hospital series — and one of the more medically accurate, too.
Fortunately, the medicine came second to the characters on Scrubs. We were invested in the patients, sure, but we were mostly invested in the characters. Especially J.D. (Most episode titles did begin with “My.”) He’s a self-described “dreamer,” not an idiot, who wants desperately to be liked, wears a Hairmet, and takes us through the annals of Sacred Heart from his own idealistic perspective. His daydreaming allowed for Scrubs to veer into some high-concept gags (the actors floating on dollies in “My Overkill,” dressing up as pimps, recreating The Wizard of Oz), but it also allowed for Braff to prove that he had some of the best comedic timing (“Neat hug!,” “Eagle!,” “Love train!”) of any actor on television. (His faces whenever he’d come out of a fantasy where hysterical, but his inner monologue also allowed for some great one-off quips, like how his SpongeBob costume was a gift “from me to me,” how imagining Turk to be Chinese was a “lucky” guess, and how sticks and stones may break his bones, “but words will hurt forever.”)
Ultimately, J.D. was always comfortable being himself. Whether he was making a tape with Danni (Tara Reid) for America’s Funniest Home Videos instead of sex or attaching a Velcro shower wallet to his shower shorts, J.D. was never embarrassed to be the person he is, which is an extremely empathetic and deeply feeling human. As a self-described “sensi,” J.D. just had a special knack for reaching the humanity of others. He cries when he’s hurt and he hugs when he’s in love. We could all stand to be a bit more like him.
J.D.’s inner monologues also bring themselves back together by the end of each installment to wrap up each plot with an overarching moral lesson to take away from them. For example, in “My Overkill,” the lesson is that sometimes, things go back to normal without anything needing to be done. In “My Screw-Up,” the lesson is to forgive, to accept others, and to be comfortable with showing emotion, rather than suppressing it.
“My Old Lady” is the first major emotional episode from Scrubs and “My Lunch” is probably the most memorable. But “My Screw-Up” is what truly put Scrubs on the map as something special. In this episode, Ben’s cancer, thought to be in remission, returns and actually kills him. Because the episode is structured more from Dr. Cox’s point of view/fantasy, we don’t see it as Ben being the one who died. Ben appears as a figment of Cox’s imagination/subconscious/guilt, leading us to think that Cox is blaming J.D. for the death of a different patient. (Upon a rewatch, you can notice that Ben’s not really there. There are no more photos to take.) This guilt leads to denial and the complete refusal to accept that Ben is dead without it being someone’s fault. As a result, Cox ends up working and grieving for sixty consecutive hours with no sleep, blowing right through his own child’s birthday party.
Eventually, the two-hander nature of the episode shifts from Ben and Cox to J.D. and Cox when J.D. reveals the plot twist with a simple, “Where do you think we are?” and Ben’s gone all over again; they’re at his funeral. No other word is spoken, unless you count the haunting lyrics of Joshua Radin’s “Winter” (indicative of Scrubs’ impeccable music taste, which also featured Colin Hay multiple times over (a musical fantasy sequence for a dying patient, a stalking opener to season two, and the hope that when women give birth, it’s actually to Hay himself)) that coats the scene as J.D. puts a hand on Cox’s shoulder. The flappable hero stares at the casket with tears filling his eyes.
“My Screw-Up” comes about halfway through season three, so it’s enough time to buy that J.D. would sit next to Cox at the funeral of Cox’s friend. It’s a great go-to installment when you have the need to cry, especially at the overall injustice over someone as full of life and love as Ben being the one to be claimed from both things. It’s never easy to lose a patient, but Scrubs showed us that no doctor could be desensitized by it. (Not even Kelso, who saves a prenatal unit in “My Jiggly Ball,” but has to lose a patient along the way, stepping off the hospital grounds with nary a grin or whistle.) Because when someone they love — truly love — goes the way of the daily walk-ins to their jobs, there’s no way through it but to cry and to accept the love from those you dare to let into your heart — even out of fear of losing them, too.
Moments like these helped eventually guide Scrubs to the best series finale of all-time. How could a show with these types of episodes not rip your heart apart at the end, too? J.D. waxes about letting people into his heart before thinking back to what his patient, Dan, said about the future. By declining to know if he has Huntington’s disease, he makes certain his future is still his own. It can be whatever he wants and the same is true for J.D., who finds solace in a one-off character he’d never met before. Dan provides the way forward for J.D. Yes, he’s leaving Sacred Heart, but he has the gift that many of his patients didn’t have: control, opportunity, self-determination. His future belongs to him.
And we are lucky enough to peek inside his brain one last time to see what his ideal future would be. It manifests in the form of a video montage played against the back of his farewell banner from Turk. The scenes include Elliot’s pregnancy, his wedding with Elliot, the reveal that his child is engaged to Turk’s child far in the future, and a Christmas get-together between J.D., Elliot, Turk, Carla, Perry, Jordan, and all of their children. As if the pay-offs with his friends, Glen, Perry, and the hallway were not enough, Scrubs goes even deeper into the tear ducts by shooting “The Book of Love” by Peter Gabriel directly into our sensitive ear holes.
It’s the most beautiful end to any television series and it might not have even happened! It’s J.D.’s ideal future. Perhaps he never sees Perry again. Perhaps he and Turk don’t get to be some sort of weird fathers-in-law with one another. But in J.D.’s head, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. No matter what, this fantasy will come true, even though none of them ever have before.
To work in a hospital for eight years and be surrounded by nothing but humiliation and death and only occasional spurts of love is to court cynicism. Not everyone can make it out of that as innocent as they entered. Sure, J.D. was hardly as doe-eyed as when he began, but he still had hope and fantasy. His spirit is resilient and it is rare. Our fortune in experiencing it can compare only to those who grew firsthand from witnessing it. Whether they were the ones in the hospital beds or the ones holding the charts and forcing smiles above them. In a hospital, someone has to be the one to smile.
