Scrubs: My New Role, and My Lawyer’s in Love

Posted by SH

This week’s twofer focused on a pair of supporting players, with the first half dedicated to watching Dr. Cox adjust to life as the new chief of medicine. He secretly solicits advice and — gasp! — friendship from Bob to show him the ropes. But he sees quickly just how different his life has become. Instead of attending to patients and scaring the interns, he’s relegated to signing forms and making schedules. Janitor even has him taking all day helping him hang a painting.

Elliott must confront her own air of superiority when she’s condescending to one of the nurses. Only this nurse is an expert kickboxer and just might be waiting to smash Elliott’s face in after work. BTW, is Elliott still in private practice? She seems to be more involved with everyone than she should be, if that were the case. Anyone know?

Carla is struggling to convince the nurses that she’s still one of them, despite her overwhelming involvement with doctors, e.g. Turk, Elliott, J.D. and the new chief. She tries in vain to bring the nurses’ concerns to Cox. In this episode, it’s a staff shortage; in the next, it’s overlapping schedules.

J.D. learns he has to be dogged and determined if he’s going to get through to Cox. In short, be like Cox. He’s trying to get an under-insured patient a few more days at the hospital. It’s the kind of thing Cox did all the time, but now he believes he has to cool it for a while so as not to catch the board’s eye. Interesting theory. Don’t you think that if they knew he did that stuff before, that he wouldn’t all of a sudden stop now? It just doesn’t generate too much tension, having J.D. yell at Cox to get him to do something you know he wants to do anyway. But Bob tells J.D. that his strategy was to always turn down an initial request. The ones Cox fought for are the ones he ended up considering.

It ends with Cox not being too appreciative of J.D.’s efforts. He tells him to go to hell and drives off angry. Not sure why this fazes J.D.; it’s pretty much summed up their entire relationship.

Next up, Ted starts things off by demonstrating his pull with The Worthless Peons. With a simple cry of “Peons! Assemble!” they come a’runnin’ — all the way from accounting, shipping and receiving, and online property management including pest control, nighttime security and non-arborial gardening services. Then with “Disburse!” they flee. They need to practice so they can wow Dr. Cox into letting them sing for the kids in the pediatric ward. Unfortunately, their song selection is “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” That, and Cox consider a cappella music “ear rape.”

Ted is quite taken with another house musician, a pixie-like ukelele girl named Stephanie Gooch. She seems to like him, too, but he can’t get over his flop sweat and tragically dry mouth. J.D. and the Janitor call an intermittent truce (interrupted by Janitor occasionally throwing J.D.’s stuff out the window, or licking stuff he wants to eat) in order to help Ted grow confident. Eventually, he does, and they end up making beautiful music together. Like this.

Cox learns the hard way he can’t do it all, breaking a promise to a patient, seeing every single nurse show up to work at the same time and forgetting to pick up his son from school. He learns to give a little in order to accommodate his new life.

Weirdest thing about these episodes: The unexplained absence of Turk. He’s referred to in “My New Role,” with J.D. using Elliott’s intern to relay silly messages and drawings back and forth to him. But he’s not even mentioned in “Lawyer’s in Love.” Did Donald Faison have a prior engagement? Where did Elliott go in the second episode? Maybe that’s why both these episodes seemed a little light.