‘Scrubs’ Episode 5 review: “My Angel”

The big gut-punch moment of Scrubs Season 1 Episode 5, “My Angel,” happens almost right at the end. J.D. is lying under a woman who has just announced herself as “Minerva: Divine Sex Witch.” And right then, he sees a pizza box on the bed. And his entire body leaves the room.

He goes back 25 years. The show cuts to actual footage from the original series — Sarah Chalke, twenty-something, her hair a different length, a different quality of light on her face — and the effect is vertiginous instead of nostalgic. Because there’s a kind of grief in looking at the people you used to be, and Scrubs has the audacity to make that grief the whole emotional subject of its midseason episode.

I’ve been charmed but slightly cautious about the revival. The first four episodes have been warm, occasionally funny, and aware of their own limitations in a way the original show’s later seasons were not. But “My Angel” is doing something more ambitious. It’s asking whether a man who spent the better part of his adult life becoming someone can un-become that person. And the answer the episode gives (albeit in the margins of what is technically a half-hour sitcom comedy) is: probably not. And maybe that’s okay.

The J.D./Elliot situation.

Part of what made the original will-they/won’t-they of J.D. and Elliot work was its predictability. They’re two people who clearly should be together, but they keep not being together. Mostly due to J.D.’s emotional immaturity, but also the show’s need to keep its central tension alive. There’s a reason why they  don’t date longer than one or two episodes until the second half of the final season. And it’s also why this revival is almost required to begin with them divorced.

The eventual resolution of that Season 8 finale was indeed satisfying in the way that all long-deferred resolutions are. We felt it, then it passed. Most of us remember the longing much more than the arrival of the actual relationship, which is the point.

What the revival has done, with surprising sophistication, is invert the dynamic. This time, Elliot called things off. That fact hangs over every scene the two of them share. And “My Angel” finally explores some of the romantic consequences.

To be clear, it’s obvious J.D. still loves her. Elliot seemingly doesn’t know what she wants from him in return, which is a more interesting and more painful position than the one she occupied in the original show. Back then, her wanting was rarely the thing in question. She wanted a marriage, a life, a wedding maybe most of all. All that’s done. So, what’s next?

Sarah Chalke plays that airy “what’s next” mood with enormous understatement. The scene where Elliot tells Sibby that sex is probably overrated, that it’s too late to start over, isn’t much played for laughs, exactly, though it earns them. She plays it as someone trying out a new narrative about herself that doesn’t quite fit.

And then the pilot lands with the liver, and he asks where to get coffee, and she walks him somewhere. And J.D.’s narration comes in, right on cue. “Only the heart knows when it’s ready to let someone in again. But sometimes, the heart just needs a little more time to heal.” The shot holds on J.D. watching, understanding something he doesn’t want to understand. The show has the restraint to not make this an immediate crisis packed with drama. It’s just a moment. The heart needs time. That’s all.

The new newbies.

Slowly, but surely, these characters are really growing on me. The expected Asher/Amara/Blake triangle crystallizes in “My Angel” in a way that feels true to how these things actually work in real life. See, until this episode, the show played it as a simple setup. Asher likes Amara, Asher just needs courage to ask her out. Simple. Predictable. Very J.D./Elliot in 2001.

Then the episode reveals that Amara has feelings for Blake. It’s not really a twist, but it is something that feels like it would happen in a real-life workplace. Where people are all living in close proximity, dealing through shared pressures like getting mugged. The foreshadowing is right there with Turk mentioning how often Dr. Park sleeps around with “attendings or above.”

(Side note. Speaking of sexual deviancy, where the actual hell is the Todd? It’s one thing for Carla and Dr. Cox to essentially become infrequent guest stars due to their commitments to other shows, but this is a real “Disappointment Five.”)

Asher manages to figure out Amara’s newfound crush right before asking her out, and apparently by looking at the side of her head. Regardless, he decides not to go through with it. He can’t risk the rejection and bails.

This isn’t the choice J.D. would’ve made at 25. But Asher isn’t J.D., and the show is wise enough to know that. What the two storylines share is not their outcomes but their central question. How do you let yourself want something when wanting it means risk?

J.D., now at 50-something, is the chief of medicine. He’s recently divorced and still working out the same thing Asher has to work out at the beginning of his career. What this revival has to workout in its early days. That continuity is what gives the episode its peculiar emotional heartbeat. The sense that these questions are going to linger and get more complicated for a while.

The flashback moment.

It would have been easy — and frankly good enough — to do the flashback with Zach Braff‘s voiceover and a few still images. Or with a quick original-footage clip that reads as fan service or something. The show instead uses real footage from the original series, Episode 15, “My Bed Banter & Beyond,” integrated into the current scene.

In that way, we’re briefly watching the original Scrubs inside the revival. The past literally flickers up through the present. The implication is that J.D. carries this footage inside him. This is what memory looks like. The other woman, the present circumstance, the safe word (“raisin” — the show has not lost its instinct for the perfect absurd non-sequitur) all dissolve. And what’s left is that old tape playing.

It’s easy to be critical of revivals and reboots that use nostalgia as a substitute for emotion. Particularly ones that rely on the audience to supply the feeling because the show itself can’t generate it. “My Angel” is doing something bolder. The flashback works because the cutting makes it J.D.’s memory, not ours. We are inside his grief, not just adjacent to it.

It’s almost like the already knows that its superfans are the main ones giving this new show a chance. So of course the vast majority of them are going to start thinking about Season 1 the second that pizza box jumps into frame. The flashback itself only solidifies the suspicion and makes the fans feel rewarded. Good job for remembering. It’s important that you remember this.

The comedy still works.

Lisa Gilroy as Lily/Minerva is some seriously great casting. Her gear-shift from harp volunteer to “Divine Sex Witch” has the perfect level of both intensity and commitment. The role reversal (J.D. declining; Lily insisting that she paid for dinner) earns its laugh through subverted expectation rather than just the shock of the thing.

Sadly, there’s also an instantly-dated running bit about AI chatbots that is far more annoying than it is timely. The revival season has been sporadic about its technology jokes, but this is a real miss. Mainly because it comes across more like an advertisement at best and a first draft of a 2024 standup bit at best.

The Turk material is also less developed than hoped. Donald Faison can do more than the show is currently asking of him, plain and simple. It was apparent in Episode 1, where Turk’s big moment caught vitality online for how relentlessly poignant it felt and still feels.

But that was four episodes ago. Every check-in with Turk since has basically insisted that he’s probably fine now? Because J.D. is back? Maybe address that mildly alarming para-social dynamic?

In this episode, Turk is mostly a mouthpiece. During the scene where J.D. is in the car apologizing, I assumed it was Turk the entire time. It wasn’t until the punchline, when we see Turk sitting there, that I realized the intent was for the audience to expect Lily there. Which…huh? It’s a very odd choice in how the joke constructs itself.

Where this is going, and whether to trust it.

The revival only has nine episodes. We’re at the midpoint. The JD/Elliot arc has been set up with care. The show has introduced their asymmetry, the unaddressed trauma on Elliot’s side. Also that J.D. isn’t ready to say the thing we know he’s going to say. The pilot will probably come back and be the new “Sean” until the real Sean (and hopefully Kim) finally returns with a vengeance.

Fittingly, “My Angel” earns the “hope” that they’ll stick the landing in these next few episodes. And that’s in spite of the truncated fraction of a half-season. Because this is an episode that explores what it means to be in the middle of something. Whether it’s a life, a heartbreak, a career, or a show about people who were young and now they’re not.

And it somehow finds the comedy and the sorrow in that middle place without forcing either into the other’s lane. The heart needs time, J.D. says. On the evidence of this episode, so does the show. Let’s give it both.

Scrubs Reboot Season 1 Episode 5, “My Angel,” is now available on Hulu.

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Images courtesy of Hulu.