Second Look: Scrubs Season 1, Episode 11 – “My Own Personal Jesus”

Scrubs Season 1, Episode 11 “My Own Personal Jesus”
Written by Debra Fordham
Directed by Jeff Melman
Aired December 11, 2001 on NBC

For a show with so many different, competing elements and characters, Scrubs has shown a rather strong ability to find conscious throughlines with its stories. Unfortunately, that experimentation – and willingness to stuff an episode to the gills with jokes and ideas – works against “My Own Personal Jesus”, an episode that offers rather limp, ham-fisted observations on its characters, in the context of a holiday and the supposed opportunity for ‘miracles’ it provides.

If there’s one piece of this episode that works, it’s the simplicity of J.D. and Cox’s story, which centers around one of Perry and Jordan’s mutual friends having a baby (and Cox’s attempt to get J.D. to film the birth, which he fails to do, despite being in the room the whole time). Jordan’s first appearance since “My Bad” is a welcome one, bringing back her sharp humor and personality, which always challenges and unsettles Cox in the way few things do.

But the episode is less about J.D. and Cox’s relationship, or the child birth Jordan’s shown up to witness; their whole story is engineered to get Perry and Jordan on the same page emotionally, if only for a moment, perhaps the one instance in this episode where a “miracle” is presented as something realistic and earned; though Cox clearly still holds a lot of bitterness over their divorce, him embracing his ex-wife while they stare at someone else’s kid (something they both admitted not enjoying) is a touching conclusive moment for their plot in the episode, and the one time “My Own Personal Jesus” seems to fit its own theme of observing miracles at play.

The rest of the episode centers on Turk, whose Christmas Eve overnight shift turns into a moment of religious crisis for him, after experiencing patient after patient who clearly needed God’s help and guidance, but were denied it on supposedly the most holy day of the year. On its face, this story would work if Scrubs had invested any time into Turk’s religious upbringing (remember, his family are Jehovah’s Witnesses) and how that informs his worldview; of course, that would require the writers of Scrubs to contend with some really challenging ideas (even in 2001) that it’s clearly not equipped for.

However, what it offers instead is almost insulting; disappointed in his friends and frustrated at a god who would let so many people suffer at the same time, Turk sits alone on the Sacred Heart hospital roof, looking up at the North Star for guidance – and then is magically inspired to run towards the star, ending up in the town square, where he finds Elliot’s patient (a young woman who found out she was eight months pregnant on Christmas Eve, which sends Elliot into a panic) getting ready to give birth. And not only does it have a moment where Turk, during a crisis of faith, has a moment of inspiration that can only be explained by divine intervention, somehow knowing where the pregnant girl is, despite never talking to her or hearing about her throughout the episode.

It’s a moment that feels cheap, and bit beneath a series like Scrubs, which has shown some capability of exploring serious, existential questions between all of its 70s and 80s sitcom references and slapstick cutaways. Turk’s faith, which is a topic in this episode and I believe precisely zero others in the series, is an interesting bit of character to explore in the hospital setting. It’s a cliched observation, yes, but examining the intersections between medicine, science, and religion (notice the only stories are of birth and death in this episode, often bookended with each other) has a lot of potential to make for fascinating material, especially in examining the mind of a healthcare provider who witnesses the worst, saddest, and most depraved results of humanity every night in emergency rooms (there’s even a bit in the beginning about Elliot and Kelso working in the free clinic on Christmas Eve, which the episode speedily abandons).

That’s a fascinating concept for the series to dip its toes into; so it’s quite disappointing to see Scrubs back away from more interesting, complex examinations of faith, for something where Turk is rewarded for his lack of faith, through seemingly no action at all (even divine intervention; Turk literally just stares at the night sky until he realizes something completely unknown). Even there, the nascent beginnings of a more interesting episode can be found – unfortunately, “My Own Personal Jesus” is to beholden to the superficial Christian underpinnings of Turk’s story to make his crisis of faith, and its eventual reward, to be anything but cloying and artificial, its unconvincing portrayals of doctors in crises of faith ultimately working in competition with each other, rather than finding the kind of thematic harmony that could elevate some of the episode’s trite material.

Grade: C-

Other thoughts/observations:

• If there’s one thing I love this episode, it’s Kelso’s absolute disregard for everything going on around him.
  
• So J.D.’s child patient miraculously wakes up from a coma…. aaaand we never hear about it again.
  
• What is this episode trying to say about Elliot? She spends the whole episode asserting herself that she doesn’t want to be a “female” doctor (aka working in in OBGYN, pediatric, or family medicine, as Kelso points out will be her likely outcome, based on statistics), and then “aww look at the baby”-s herself at the end of the episode. It’s dumb.
  
• There are two redeeming factors to this episode: Jordan, and the minute-and-a-half long cutaway featuring Turk as a jheri-curled evangelist preacher.
  
• Cox: “What is it with friends and the whole wanting to be in your life thing?”
  
• A girl punches the Janitor square in the dick, which I think clearly resolves the “is Janitor a figment of J.D.’s imagination” thing.
  
• Cox: “… I like the sun, newbie. It made me hopeful.”
  
• J.D. says that without his faith, Turk feels like he’s “fading away”. It’s really odd how his faith defines him in this episode and LITERALLY never again.
  
• Weird birthing doctors are a thing on sitcoms (Friends had the Fonz-loving doctor in “The One Hundredth”, to name one example we talked about here recently); on Scrubs, it’s a man who welcomes babies by exclaiming “yet another soldier in the fight against communism!”)
  
• Scrubs gets in its obligatory Fast Times at Ridgemont High homage in the opening scene, where J.D. creepily waits for a nurse to go on break.
  
• For the record, it’s 12 beaten children, 11 drive-by shootings, ten frozen homeless, nine amputations, eight burn victims, seven strangled shoppers, six random knifings, five suicides, four beaten wives, three overdoses, two shattered skulls, and a drunk who ran into a tree.
  
• J.D., covering up for his errors: “We shaved the baby! Shave and a haircut… two bits.”
  
• NO HIGH FIVES ON CHRISTMAS? What is this nonsense? Season count: 11; Todd count: 9.
  
• Up next: J.D. takes on the “girl in an MRI” cliche in “My Blind Date”.