Scrubs Season 10, Episode 4 Review – “My Poker Face”

I’ve struggled with the opening hours of the Scrubs revival, particularly the two episodes following “My Return”; while Scrubs was always an incredibly busy series, it was also a somewhat ambitious one, both narratively and comedically, and those tenants felt lost in the cascading series of half-baked stories and underwhelming, often reductive attempts to re-establish itself in the 21st century, failing to toe the line between endearing a generation of millennials who came of age with the series to return for some midlife reflections, but also appeal to the next generation of television viewers with a more modern sense of pacing and humor. It’s a mix the series just hasn’t been able to properly calibrate – and it turns out, a lifeless Matt Rife guest appearance in “My Poker Face” is not the answer to rejuvenate the Scrubs revival.

To its credit, “My Poker Face” (written by longtime Lawrence collaborator Mike Hobert, who played Lonnie the delivery man in the latter seasons of the original series) is the closest Scrubs has felt to its old self, although its resemblance is mostly found in the skeleton of its story. After opening with yet another scene reminding us how frustrated Turk is with the current state of his life, him and J.D. decide to get a poker table to organize a poker night at the hospital, “My Poker Face” leads with two diverging patient stories, both of which play into the episode’s titular theme; one who arrives with lower right quadrant pain, and Rife’s Logan, a fitness influencer with scurvy.

Logan’s story is classic Scrubs fodder; ignorant patient presents a series of symptoms that are diagnosed, but reveal a deeper, more serious problem for the doctors of Sacred Heart to contend with. More importantly, it gives Scrubs a chance to really engage across its generational divide, in a way that’s more meaningful than J.D. trying to organize a poker game around the hospital, or try to sound cool by awkwardly engaging in what I’m just calling “meme talk” with the younger interns. By pairing off Elliot with Sam, it presents Elliot with an opportunity that’s been rare afforded her in the opening trio of episodes; to really engage and reflect on herself as a doctor, using the lessons she learned from Kelso and Cox throughout the series to both inform her personality as an assertive, confident doctor – but also as a counterpart to the soft mentorship of J.D. and the increasingly-absent leadership of Turk, someone whose path through medicine was defined by her personal struggles and journey.

Scrubs nudges up against this idea, but as is symptomatic with just about every storyline this season, it backs away from anything particularly challenging or profound, undercutting its own potential with the most glib, safe resolutions it can provide to its stories – often at the last minute, leaving no time for any kind of reflection or growth, two of the other tenants of Scrubs throughout its original run. In its place? A thin plot about an emerging eating disorder, which is paired off with the other patient story – in which a young father learns he has advanced lung cancer – essentially to smother each other, as Scrubs turns its attention back to J.D. and Turk, as it continues to tease an looming existential crisis for the clearly-depressed Turk.

Turk’s story is another interesting case study; he’s basically been reduced to two notes, J.D.’s comedic sidekick and a man tired of a life full of energetic women. These are palpable stories, ones that neatly find their parallels back to Cox (and at times, J.D.) in the original series, and their own struggles with finding themselves amidst the increasing noise of adult life; but when “My Poker Face” tries to tie them together with not one, but two underwhelming patient stories providing the thematic foundation for the episode, it feels more like an episode feigning at emotion, rather than embodying it. Sure, everyone’s face gets appropriately somber when it should, and J.D.’s concerned face while Turk talks about wanting time alone let us know that These Are Serious stories – but these moments are welcomed with an unremarkable score and ploying dialogue, explaining itself in a way that would embarrass even the original series (Lawrence and Braff have both talked about the difficulty and silliness of the J.D. third act voiceover trope). Nuance was never a strong suit for Scrubs, but New Scrubs feels like its openly trying to avoid engaging with its own stories in any meaningful way, rendering them thematically hollow and emotionally inert.

At least “My Poker Face” is a marginal improvement over “My Rom-Com”, in that it at least suggest interesting directions for its characters to go – though that is exclusively reserved for Turk, Elliot, and J.D., as the younger generation are still being left as comedic fodder or a delivery device for stories ultimately about other characters (the most developed of the younger doctors is arguably Sam the influencer, which is rather telling). Unfortunately, it’s an improvement that helps Scrubs on the margins, but does nothing to improve some of the core problems with narrative and theme “My Poker Face” and its preceding chapters have struggled mightily with – and with nothing but an incredibly unfunny, flat Matt Rife performance to fall back on, it’s not exactly an episode that inspires hope for the second half of the revival’s first season.

Grade: C-

Other thoughts/observations:

• “Waiting for Godot? More like Waiting to Go Home, amirite?”
  
• there’s a half-assed subplot about Sibby and her installing a “wellness room” for doctors to express their emotions in… there’s potential with this character, but Scrubs is floundering trying to give her character presence and purpose.
  
• how the fuck is a medical intern freezing her eggs at the cost of 15-20k per visit? We’ve gone from three episodes hammering at affordability storylines to this lol.
  
• J.D. has studied at Criss Angel’s Sleight of Hand Symposium for Wooing Women. Yeah, he deserves to die alone.
  
• The continued retconning of season nine continues to annoy me.
  
• Why are Turk and Carla working so much when he’s the chief of surgery? He’s probably making somewhere near a half million dollars a year? The show’s concept of money is so all over the place.