Episode 11 - My Princess
29 March 2012
Synopsis: After a bad day, Dr Cox decides to tell Jack about it but in the style of a fairy tale. The real story is that Elliott and JD struggle to diagnose a girl who is suffering badly. Dr Kelso announces that any doctor’s working beyond their shift will be sent home because otherwise the hospital could be liable for their mistakes. JD and Elliott discuss their almost kiss but agree it meant nothing.
The Good: The fairy tale analogy is a clever idea. It should provide the opportunity to make some jokes while telling a serious story.
The Bad: But it doesn’t. This is another of those sad episodes of Scrubs where I struggle to even find a comic highlight. Transposing the regular characters into the fairytale doesn’t lead to anything funny. Just pathetic jokes about fish living out of water, eating babies, horse manure, souls leaking from bums and so on. It’s even worse than the awful jokes that they would have made in a normal story.
The story is pathetically thin. As usual with these stories there is no plausible attempt by the doctors to solve the case by clever medical practise. They just flap around until they remember something which another character said at random. It is completely unconvincing and doesn’t make for interesting television.
The real insult here is that this episode is shown out of sequence. This was filmed very early in the season; it is shown as the season finale because the producers presumably felt it was the best way to finish with something special after the writers strike cut down their chance to end properly.
But it is an insult to regular viewers. JD and Elliott talk about their kiss happening a month ago when we know a lot more time has passed. Keith makes his first appearance for nine episodes and is weeping about his break up with Elliott which makes no sense considering the time which has passed. But Dr Kelso’s role is the real slap in the face. Viewers got an emotional farewell from him (709) and now he is back as Chief for no explainable reason. The producers really make a mistake here as this should never have been the season finale.
Comic Highlight: Turk and Carla are portrayed as a two headed witch. They alternate saying one word at a time. Leading to this exchange when Elliott asks them for help:
C: We
T: Must
C: Go
T: To
C: The
T: Delicatessen? (looks hopeful)
Diagnosis: I assume the producers felt that this episode would be a good season finale because it is different to the average episode of Scrubs. Well I have news for them because this episode is an insult, not only for its out of context character behaviour but also because it's so awful. They would have been better keeping the episodes in sequence and I would bet that there would be no difference in ratings whatsoever. I know for sure that this episode won’t win them any new fans.
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