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Caalarocashock Media. Hey bonus episode. I’m Johnny Mack and this is a recap of Scrubs Season ten, episode one, my return. Original air date February twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. I just needed to get on Mike today.
Sometimes I just do a show for me, and this is one of those. Boy, am I happy? I watched that show last night, and I was so happy that Scrubs landed properly. So many things that I love, specifically Star Trek, have gotten ruined in modern times, and that Scrubs came back and felt like Scrubs and made me laugh and gave me the feels. Oh my goodness, so fantastic.
So if you haven’t watched yet, bail out of this episode because we’re gonna break it down as a recap here seen by seeing him doing this from a combination of memory and AI, and I’m hoping the AI isn’t hallucinating spoilers. We open up with a cold open. It’s a prestige medical drama fake out, perhaps kind of sort of like the Pit. The coloring is a little different. It’s blue, gray, handhaild cameras, tight lens, no music, a Gurney slams through the er doors.
Doctors are speaking in clipped jargon, BP crashing and get me a line, and we see JD in the center of the frame. He’s calm focused, completely different body language from classic JD. It’s like we’re in the pit, except it’s JD.
And then cut suddenly we’re in a luxury apartment.
JD is in concierge medicine. He’s checking a rich guy’s pulse. The guy asked if kombucha counts us water onto the title sequence. It’s a lot like the original. The music is back, we see the new interns, and then last is JD, who doesn’t hang up at X ray puts it on some sort of electronic skinner thing.
Creator Bill Lawrence spoke with Deadline. He said the new season is conceived as if the original series ended with season eight. Okay, so we’re just gonna hand wave there is no season nine. Don’t ask any questions. It just want we meet up with the old folks.
Turk is stuck in a rut, Doctor Cox is doing his tough love thing. But you know, times change in these kids today, there’s a new annoying hr rep played by Vanessa buyer, who I think is gonna get old real fast if they don’t modify that character. Elliott is there. She heads the simulation lab now out to the parking lot for the first scene. It’s the same physical geography as the pilot episode, but JD is walking slower.
Nobody recognize him. We check in with Carla. She’s at the nurses station. She appears to be some sort of boss. Now he runs into Turk in the hallway.
They scream like children, JD Churk and they decide to do the eagle thing. That’s where JD jumps on Turk’s back. They make a couple steps, they collapse in a heat. Turk has a bad back. Now we’re all fifty years old.
He’s excited to see JD.
And then the big reveal spoilers.
We run into Elliott. We find out that they are divorced. We find out that she ended it. Bill Lawrence talked about the divorce. He said, here’s the scoop.
The eighth year of Scrubs ends with just once, I’d like to believe my dreams came true. We all felt that way to be dark about the world. But even though I’m very grateful about how my life is gone. Not everything works out the way you want to work it out of a huge believer in writing what you know and what you see. Our show runner is someone that when I left Scrubs was married and having a young child and now is a single parent co raising that child with somebody.
That doesn’t mean it’s acrimonious, and that doesn’t mean that it’s his own journey. I’m sure you have that same experience. Some people in your lives work out, some don’t. Bill said, I was really resistant at first, and the one things these guys all drove home to me, They’re like, if you watch the nine thousand episodes of Scrubs, you would say Turk and Carla are gonna make it, and then you would say, I don’t think j D and Elliott have had more than an episode and a half that they seem like a functioning couple. So it’s a good storytelling device.
Doesn’t mean their story’s over, but it’s certainly something that adults have to navigate all the time. Zach braftag Danny said, what JDC’s projected on the sheet at the end of season eight again ignore season nine, is what he hopes and dreams will happen, but that doesn’t necessarily come true, especially when you’re fifty years old. Things that you want to happen happen. Some marriages fail, some don’t. You have the contrast with Turk and Carl where they’re as happily married as ever, compared to us who are learning how to copare it and eventually work together.
So I think that was a good way of showing a wide array of how marriages can turn out in midlife. On to meet the new characters. Now, I kind of like the new characters. I mean, I’m not in love with them, but I didn’t hate them, which for me says a lot. I was ready to not like them.
I think Star Trek has done a lot of damage to my brain. But they’re all fine. And one of the things I’m really enjoying about the show, and I said to my wife as we watched it, it puts the characters twenty five years later or twenty years later, you know we’ve all changed. One thing you learn as you get older is you can’t put the band back together. You can maybe get together for dinner every now and then for one night, but you just can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
People change things move on anyway. We meet the interns and then in walks my personal hero, doctor Cox. He’s older, his voice isn’t as strong as it was. I don’t know if that is how McGinley sounds now or if that was a choice it did. Keep noticing it.
JD thinks he can’t call me nuby and doctor Cox now calls him, which got a chuckle out of me a few times. As viewers, we can tell that doctor Cox is setting up JD for success. He kind of manipulates JD into watching over the terrans for a couple of minutes. There’s a thing with a patient. We see JD come in, takes over.
He’s very confident, he’s a veteran doctor.
And then the big twist at the end of the episode, it’s Cox and JD.
Cox gets very serious. This is John McGinley dropping the guff doctor Cox character. He invites JD to come back. JD mentions as he’s excited to work with doctor Cox. Doctor Cox says, you’re not going to be working with me.
You’re going to replace me, and he offers JD the job of chief of Medicine. Now it might brain I don’t know how that works. Like in the Chief of Medicine, it’s not the monarchy just to point the next guy. But maybe we’re gonna learn that Jordan is still on the board. Anyway, doesn’t matter, it moves the plot along.
JD accepts he is now the Chief of Medicine, so he is now in the role that doctor Kelso was in twenty five years ago and Doctor Cox was in towards the end of the original series. Doctor Cox seems kind of worn down by these kids today and he says a line, I’m tired. I’ll talk about that in the second half. What that might mean. Doctor Cox says, I feel like this particular time has passed me by.
Let me take a quick break and I’ll talk a little bit about John C. Mcginley’s Doctor Cox. Now, unfortunately McGinley is only in two more episodes. He’s not in episode two, so it seems like he really is not in the show all that much. I thought they were just going to do the dynamic where he was JD’s boss, but it seems like they’re going for something else.
And as I read the interviews spoilers, it seems like there might be something with doctor Cox’s health now. Deadline asked McGinley. Is doctor Cox a relic? How does his character fit into today’s world. McGinley said, I think people who understand fatigue and being exhausted will understand doctor Cox’s dilemma.
I think he accomplished everything he set out to accomplish, and he’s ready to move on. Bill Lauren said, the showrunner when they came to me with their idea was it’d be cool to see these students teachers now, and to do that, you need somebody to take doctor Cox’s role. Then to do that, it was really important to see JD maybe entered a little bit of cush your life, because when you work at a teaching hospital, you’re there because you’re being of service. There’s no other side to it. But even then we knew that meant in the opening of the show, JD had a step onto the mantle of you need to be there for these kids.
What I was to you, Lawrence says, Doctor Cox is a huge character on the show. He comes back at the end of the year and will continue on next year. Now that’s interesting is Lawrence telling us that this show has secretly been picked up for season two. I’ve been assuming that they would do one of those day one. Oh my god, the ratings were so big that it’s immediately coming back.
So it looks like Bill Lawrence knows that this will be back, which is great now possible major spoiler here. McGinley said, I’ll come back to the hospital in a profoundly different capacity. Deadline said, I hope doctor Cox is not dying. McGinley said, we all die. Nellie, yikes, can you imagine.
Don’t do that to me. Don’t just don’t do that to me. I can’t handle that. Zach, how do you feel about JD being the new Doctor Cox? Zach brav said, I think one of the things you see in the pilot is that JD hasn’t been a teacher in years, but you can see how good he is at it, how much you miss is it.
Whereas Cox is such a tough love kind of teacher that doesn’t really work, and as we learn from researching, isn’t not really in a loud anymore, and he sort of burned out. He’s like a dinosaur.
And then he clocks JD helping the interns and being able to actually speak to…
I’m too old. The line is they need someone to do for them what I did for you, and I think that’s one of the main themes of the first season. Plenty more to unpack. I’ll do another one of these tomorrow, but Johnny Mack is thrilled that Scrubs is back. If you haven’t checked it out, please do make sure you set the DVR.
This is technically season one according to YouTube TV, so if you go to record Scrubs, make sure you’re not recording old Scrubs and you record the new one. But great to have the show back. So happy. I know I’m rambling today, but I’m so excited about this again. We’ll do another one of these tomorrow, back in the morning with a normal episode by