Review: Scrubs, "My Angel" | Season 10, Episode 5

“Don’t deny yourself the chance”

When it was revealed that Scrubs broke up J.D. and Elliot, there are two ways of interpreting this from a writing perspective.

The first is that the writers were concerned there would be new story opportunities if they were split up: it immediately places both characters at a mid-life crossroads, opening up new stories about post-divorce life. The second is that the writers were worried the show would lack a central conflict if they were happily married, and that the revival needed some tension in order for it to feel like a substantive return to this world.

“My Angel” is an episode where the writers are trying out the former argument, which had previously been untested. We saw Elliot flirting with “Dr. Chapstick” in the premiere, but that never went anywhere, and the post-divorce stories have consciously sidestepped their dating lives. But as Elliot enjoys some weighted blanket chat time with Sibby, and as J.D. realizes he doesn’t want to turn into someone who’s dating their A.I. (more on that in the Strays), they’re both reflecting on what it means to move on.

It’s an episode that makes the argument that you have to seize the second chances you have, as captured by Elliot’s liver transplant patient who’s asked to accept a mangy-ass clog liver instead, but it also talks itself into taking Elliot and J.D.’s dating lives off the table for at least the time being. It’s a conclusion that I was grateful for, because I was mostly uninterested in J.D.’s date with Lily the harpist. Was this partially because I was focused on how Lisa Gilroy booked two separate “disastrous first dates for middle-aged Bill Lawrence protagonists returning to the dating scene” in the span of a month? Yes. But I also don’t really care about his romantic life, and the show’s balance of the personal and the professional is in such a weird place with the revival logics that time spent outside of the hospital isn’t worth it to me.