Episode 10 - My Waste of Time
4 January 2009
Review
Synopsis: Elliot is trying to track down a patient who may be entitled to money from a financial settlement. JD offers to help her if they can pick up Sam on the way home. They play a prank at a fast food outlet which goes wrong but eventually it brings them closer together. Carla wants to have another baby but Turk isn’t sure. The Janitor encourages Ted to be more assertive but it leads to conflict. In Dr Kelso’s absence Dr Cox is in charge and he has to deal with the various problems. The Good: How is Dr Kelso still the funniest character in the show even though he has left? (See Comic Highlight). I will give the writers some credit for the joke “Legal Custodians” as it is kind of clever. Turk has a perfectly reasonable rationale for not wanting another child so soon. The Bad: The JD and Elliot plot is really contrived. Why on earth didn’t Elliot look up her patient in the records to see if he had died? The reason she doesn’t is because we have to sit through the two of them having a disagreement which seems completely irrelevant. Then Elliot says she was psyched to be hanging out with JD again. It is a really unconvincing statement. She lived with JD last season and lived happily without him while she was with Keith. The writers are attempting to reignite their romance and this is a particularly dull and implausible way for them to bond. The entire Brain Trust plot is irrelevant. We have been trained as viewers not to care about the smaller characters. In their different ways they are all portrayed as being unreal and so to base a plot around their conflicts is entirely purposeless. We don’t care if Ted and the Janitor don’t get on and we know they will be back to normal next week anyway. Doug and Todd swapping sides for no reason underscores how little reality there is here. The humour throughout is poor or non-existent. JDs long flashback about Turk getting a prosthetic ball is slightly creepy and disturbing. The shop owner being dragged away is unnecessarily violent and not funny. Then there are the self referential remarks which have been creeping in all season (here JD mentions his long flashbacks and later how every week he takes wisdom from someone else’s life and applies it to his own). These comments are not funny, they simply slap the viewer across the face with the message “this isn’t even a tiny bit real so don’t give a crap about it.” I know you may think that in a comedy show you aren’t supposed to care about characters but believe me if people don’t care, they won’t watch. Comic Highlight: We flashback to Ted’s first day on the job. Dr Kelso asks him to do him one tiny non-work related favour. Soon Ted is cleaning Kelso’s car. “Make sure you get the back side of that grill. I hit the neighbour’s cat last night. Quick little bastard, I had to cross two lanes to get him.” Diagnosis: Uh, this is awful. Scrubs has rarely looked quite so pathetic, so contrived, so humourless and so irrelevant. And never has an episode been so aptly named.
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