Second Look: Scrubs Season 1, Episode 17 – “My Student”

Scrubs Season 1, Episode 17 “My Student”
Written by Mark Stegemann (story), Janae Bakken & Debra Fordham (teleplay)
Directed by Matthew Diamond
Aired March 5, 2002 on NBC

For a series as openly silly and extraneous to the actual world of medicine Scrubs was through its nine-season run (well, ten, depending on how you count the revival), it was certainly a comedy open to introspection, both of its characters and itself as a storytelling vessel. “My Student” is certainly one of those episodes, using three distinctly isolated plotlines to observe some of its main characters and how they’ve grown – or not – over the first two acts of its freshman season. And to a degree, “My Student” works pretty well in its observations, of at least one of those characters – although the results are a lot less flattering, and limiting, than I think was intended.

“My Student” begins from an explicitly unified place, with J.D., Turk, and Elliot confidentially making their way through Sacred Heart at the beginning of their shift, finally feeling like they’re coming into their own as residents and doctors – an assumption it appears the rest of the episode is going to spend pulling apart and examining… which it kind of does, and also kind of doesn’t.

The most clarified of its three stories is with Elliot, who finally gets an opportunity to not be kicked and beaten down spiritually when she gets a particularly ghoulish, nepo baby medical student Philip (played by Adrian Wenner, who would later write and produce for the eternally underrated My Boys, New Girl and Grey’s Anatomy, among others). It does this by pairing her up again with Kelso, whose gruff approach continues to frustrate her, but provides a friction not dissimilar to Cox and J.D., where we see a translation of values from one generation to another, even if the personalities embodying them are quite different. Kelso, in many ways, is Elliot’s spiritual opposite: he’s powerful, demanding, and aggressively confident in who he is as a human being, which are all well-established pain points of Dr. Reid’s internal psyche.

Elliot’s excitement at getting a jerky med student fades away once she learns he’s the son to the CEO whose company owns Sacred Heart, and for a bit, it appears Elliot is going to be stuck being whiny and passive-aggressive until Turk or J.D. step in for her. That is, until she gets ripped into by Kelso, who reminds her that she’s paid to be an effective doctor and teacher – not someone who cowtows to corporate bigshots (which Kelso notes is his job, and also confirming that Philip’s father Whitaker is a rich blowhard). Though it takes a big push from Kelso, her “manning up” is an undeniably effective way to inch her character forward, slowly starting to push her away from crying in the supply closet, towards a bit more self-assured in front of both patients, and her colleagues.

I’m not quite as sold on J.D.’s arc, which features a strong guest performance from DJ Qualls as the clumsy, unconfident Josh, but fumbles a bit on its way to reaching a neat, tidy little conclusion (especially when considering how Scrubs would handle a similar story later in the series, in season five’s “My Cabbage”). There’s a genesis of a strong story, with J.D. seeing a lot of Josh in himself (down to mirroring J.D.’s scene in “My First Day” over putting a needle into a patient); but when it tries to bridge the gulf between the past, present, and future of J.D.’s character, it falls a bit thin. There’s no realistic world where J.D. sees himself becoming Dr. Cox, and to suggest he’s somewhere between wimpy Joshua and the hard-shelled Cox is one of those, “well it’s the voiceover at the end of the episode, we can just hand wave that piece away” kind of endings Scrubs would sometimes settle for, in an attempt to tie everything together neatly. In this case, it works against the story it’s trying to tell, and isn’t quite able to show the growth it implies in the sixteen episodes since the pilot.

The other story is the strangest, and most unfortunate: what begins as a story about Turk coming to terms with the slight Gen-X misogyny within himself, slowly morphs into a story that’s more about Cox and his feelings than it is about Turk. To some degree, this is probably a good thing – the potential for the show to try and throw a wrench into his relationship with Carla for some drama is a tough one to resist – but how it sidelines Turk just so Dr. Cox can be horny for someone nearly half his age is less exciting and enlightening than it sounds (which is not much at all). Sure, it’s fun to see Turk flash his butt at Cox as he tries to help Perry get his groove back, but after the six-minute mark, he’s simply a sidekick in someone else’s story (which is not much else but “Cox is weak to strong women and is still oddly obsessing over Carla”, a observation on Cox’s stagnancy I don’t think the series actually intended), reducing his presence in the newly confident intern trio in the show’s impressive opening tracking shot to a faint whisper by the end of the episode .

Still, “My Student” is one of the first stories where it feels like it has a consistent grasp on what it wants to do with Elliot’s character, finally able to divorce her story from J.D.’s and give it some depth as the show heads into the homestretch of its freshman. It unfortunately comes in an episode that is a weaker one for its other lead characters – this kind of allows her story to shine through even more, though, reinforcing the smart decision to ultimately anchor this story to her, rather than J.D. or Turk.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Todd’s “what the hell just happened?” is one of his greatest reaction shots in the whole series.
  
• Dr. Kelso’s “LL Cool Reid” rant is another great one, in a long line of quality Kelso teardowns across this first season.
  
• Cox: “I love the part right before we start hating each other.” Go to therapy, dude!
  
• “Give me some hungry chickens…. you not hungry enough, give me some more.”