Headscratchers / Scrubs

Scrubs

• In the season six episode "My Friend With Money," Elliott talks seriously about getting new hardwood floors installed in her....apartment. Which she presumably rents. Which means she wouldn't be able to make any major changes to it, since most landlords don't allow such permanent changes to the building; heck, a lot of apartment landlords don't even let you paint the walls a new color. Did the writers just completely forget this major aspect of renting property?
  • Three possibilities come to mind. First, as long as the tenant reverses the change before moving out, there's usually no issue. In the case of installing hardwood floors and then reverting, this can involve a lot of expense for a temporary change, but it's not out of the question. Second, by a similar notion, the tenant can make the change without permission and decide to just deal with whatever financial ramifications the landlord decides to impose. Third, and most reasonably, landlords are sometimes willing to give permission for improvements if the improvement increases the apartment's value and tenant is footing the bill.
  • Elliot might also simply own her apartment. It's not impossible, and while it might be expensive, she is (a) a doctor, (b) comes from money and (c) is a fictional character (and Hollywood tends to exaggerate exactly affordable housing can be), so she might be able to afford it.
• Why in the later seasons do they keep repeating the plot of Elliot chewing out Cox for never helping her in any way? Aside from the fact that he helps her in every one of these episodes...he punched the chief of medicine for her! Elliot just comes off as an ungrateful bitch in those episodes.
  • To be fair, given how vocally and repeatedly unhelpful and disrespectful Cox is to her, he kind of brings it on himself. While Elliot does have reasons to feel gratitude towards Cox, on balance it seems fair to say that she has far more reasons to feel sore towards him; I think it's fair to say that his moments of unhelpfulness and disrespect towards her greatly outweigh the moments when he actually demonstrates regard for her, and one grand gesture doesn't necessarily wipe away a the sting of a million petty little snubs. If the only way you'll help someone out is if they have to chew you out for not being very helpful, then it's hard not to feel that person to disrespected, and the more frequently this occurs, the more the feeling becomes ingrained.
    • The only issue there is Cox treats JD far worse than he treats Elliot. And lets not forget Doug, poor guy.
    • True, but that only proves Elliot is better at standing up to Cox and calling him out on his bullshit than JD or Doug.
    • One of the things about that explanation is that Elliot always implies that Dr. Cox is going out of his way to help the other doctors and ignoring her. Aside from what he needed to do to complete his job and help his patients, Dr. Cox generally was trying to avoid the other doctors. JD seems to get a lot of help out of Dr. Cox, but this is because JD won't take the no for an answer. It seems like Elliot wants to be treated like she's special.
    • Plus, in his own way, whether he consciously wanted to or not, Cox actually liked helping and mentoring JD, this was implied many times. He clearly just doesn't like helping Elliot or anyone else much.
    • That's exactly why Elliot was annoyed. She works just as hard as JD but because he's Cox's personal pet, he gets away with a lot more and gets a lot more help. He's not nice about it, but he will do anything for JD
    • The major difference between JD and Elliot (and pretty much everyone else) is that when Cox tells them to go away, they do. JD does not, JD keeps coming back and frankly Cox loves that. We know that Cox has a giant ego, it was flat out told to Elliot at one point too, so her just going away does nothing to appeal to it. When JD comes back, time after time after time, and even wants to be hug-buddies, that really appeals to Cox's ego and he's in. JD even tells Elliot straight out that this is why he gets preferential treatment, that Cox wants people to stand up to him. It is near the end of the series when Elliot starts standing up to him that he takes her seriously, and the same with Turk (when Turk out-pranks him). It could be argued that part of what Cox is teaching is the importance of not just going away when told to go away.
  • It is pretty explicit that Cox only respects people who do chew him out. They even had a whole episode about Turk learning to prank-Cox back for his spitefulness to him, and having Cox finally treat Turk as an equal. Elliot letting Cox have it for his spitefulness is actually a form of respect between them.
• Why does Dr. Cox still keep his job at Sacred Heart and is not locked up for straight-up punching Kelso in "My Dream Job"?
  • Because Cox is still the best doctor the hospital has, and because it was done in front of everybody, but no one likes Kelso, so as said by him, everyone said they didn't see anything.
  • Plus deep down Dr. Kelso likes Dr. Cox too, and he probably eventually realized that he was out of line with his treatment of Elliot.
  • As stated in the first episode of Season 3, everyone who was present when Dr. Cox punched Dr. Kelso told the police that they didn't see the altercation. Assuming there are no cameras in the lobby (which makes sense, seeing as Dr. Kelso is very stingy), the only thing they would've had to go on was the word of the witnesses - if the witnesses all say nothing happened, and there's no evidence of anything happening, the only logical conclusion is that nothing happened.
  • Let's also look at it this way: Cox was willing to punch out Kelso just for seeing him bully a junior subordinate. You know what Cox would be willing to do to Kelso if Kelso were to fire him from his job? I don't, but I'm guessing that Kelso probably decided he didn't want to risk finding out.
• Turk and Carla want JD to move out of the apartment, and make it seem it's his obligation to. Why? JD found the apartment and was there before Carla! Pfft!
  • Maybe they agreed to help him find and/or pay the deposit on a new place?
  • Consider that Carla can be quite the control freak. To her, JD's presence was a problem in her and Turk's relationship, and it seemed logical to have the "problem element" move out (and JD wasn't too thrilled with it to begin with). Though later both Mr. and Mrs. Turk recant their decision and take Dorian back in (though he later moves out of his own accord).
  • Yeah but she never considers getting another apartment with Turk and it's ok when they got married but she was just his girlfriend, it's rather rude to throw someone out of their apartment for a relationship that could had ended in months.
    • J.D. moved out after Turk and Carla had been married for a year. So no, she was not just Turk's girlfriend when she kicked J.D. out.
  • All these responses are overlooking the core problem. It's JD's apartment. He was there first. Not Turk, not Carla. They both moved in after he'd already been living there. If they want their own private space as a married couple, then it should be on them to find it, not take someone else's. So why is it always treated like JD is the semi-unwelcomed guest?
    • The "Carla's a Control Freak" answer does address the core problem; basically, as far as Carla is concerned, once she's moved in it's her space and J.D. is the interloper, him being there first be damned. Because she's a bossy Control Freak who tries to take over everything and have everything her own way. Once she's moved in, she doesn't want to move out — therefore, J.D should move out. As far as she's concerned, that's the beginning and ending of the matter. Admirable, no, but an actual personality trait possessed by some people? Unfortunately, yes.
• Turk and Carla's wedding JBM, why is Marco a groomsman? Turk doesn't even like Marco and there was a ton of other people who could have done it; he has two brothers, a ton of surgical workmates, JD and Turks super successful friend from College, so why Marco?
  • A lot of couples do things like that at their weddings when they don't really want to, as a way of keeping the peace between the families. It's a gesture. It can even be convenient, because it eliminates the need to delineate your circle of actual friends into a group that's close enough to be in the wedding party and a group that just gets to come.
  • More importantly, why isn't Turk's brother a groomsman? It was a big plot point in an earlier episode about J.D. having to share being best man with Turk's brother.
    • Well Turk's brother originally couldn't make it due to business commitments, which is why Turk asked him to be his best man to begin with. sure at some point he said he actually could make it, but it's easy to just assume that after that his business stuff changed again and he couldn't get there.

• Why are JD and Elliot hooking up again? I thought we were promised their UST was over and done with at the end of Season 3!
  • Burn the Blasphemer!
    • You believed them? Come on, it was a linchpin of the show and we all knew they would get together at the end.
    • They WERE intended to just be friends. The creators wanted to do something different than have the lead character and the main female character get together. They only got together because fans wouldn't let it go and the writers of season 6 ruined J.D.'s only other major relationship for the sake of some melodrama.
    • Yeah, there was no way they wouldn't get together. Please...
  • OK, they're together now. I'm cool with that. But it really needs to be the end of this particular story arc.
    • It's actually very deftly handled, completely subverting the Ross/Rachel and Niles/Daphne-type precedents.
    • It has to be the end of the story arc, Zach Braff is leaving the show at the end of the season.
  • While one might reasonably argue that them not ending up together would have been the better subversion I did appreciate HOW they got back together. Rather than have some big, melodramatic moment they just took and episode to talk it over, decided to give it another go and, quietly and without fuss, got back together. It was a very mature way to do it and I'd guess that it was the fact that they were not coasting on the melodrama this time that allowed it to work out.
• Really. By now JD should have figured out that he may hold a woman in positive regard without thinking it means he wants to stick parts of himself in her. Of course that's a mystery to most people in television. . .
  • Carla doesn't count? She's probably the only female cast member he hasn't knocked boots with to some degree.
    • She's JD's surrogate mother, so no, I don't think she counts.
    • Well they did kiss that one time.
  • Could also be some Truth in Television here, as this troper knows a few men who can't seem to have female friends without sex getting involved somehow.
  • I think that's a bit unfair. Outside of one, rather stupid joke JD is shown to interact with women just fine but he just happens to live in a TV show so we only really get to see his relationships that have drama to them in detail.
• Carla and Turk's relationship is really hard to justify. She's controlling and condescending, he's childish and inconsiderate. One episode even says that Turk's replicating his relationship with his mother (even when he's Chief of Surgery and she's still a nurse, you get the impression she'll still dominate every aspect of the relationship) but then decides to forget about it. Carla once decides that she won't have sex until marriage, and later gets upset and decides she needs sex. Both times, Turk assents and never complains about how badly Mom- er, Carla is treating him.
  • To each his own, I suppose. It seemed to me that the two of them complemented each other perfectly. Carla likes to be in control, and Turk needs somebody to tell him what to do. She's extremely maternal, and he's childish. It's probably not a very healthy relationship, but they seem to get by happily.
  • The unhealthiness of the relationship may come from the lop sidedness of how they are treated. Turk may be the more flawed individual but he submits and accepts his shortcomings and thus is more capable of improving as a person. Since Turk almost always gives Carla the moral superiority however her own bad behaviour is enabled, so she is rarely made to accept or improve on her flaws such as her controlling or vindictiveness and actually comes off as a less redeemable character. In cases both characters are being equally inconsiderate to the other, it is not rare for Turk to apologize and improve while Carla just continues acting exactly as she had before. This in a sense actually makes Carla the more childish of the two since regardless of her clarity, she insists on having things her way.
  • Turk is, generally speaking, a really chill, relaxed guy. Outside of his job and sports he really doesn't tend to have much of a plan for what he's gonna do with his day and will usually just go along with whatever someone sugests. Carla, being his girlfriend/wife and quite bossy, is the main one who does this but JD, Elliot, various relatives and university friends and occasionally even Dr Cox do it too. If he doesn't want to do what Carla does he'll usually just ignore her and, while she does bluster a bit, she usually lets it go. Only occasionally do they clash seriously and I'd say he only backs down slightly more than her.

• Why does J.D know things when narrating that he doesn't know as an ordinary character? In one episode he says 'I wasn't the only one lying around here', ostensibly in reference to Carla losing Rowdy, even though he didn't find out that had happened until season six. And in 'My Chopped Liver' he seems to know about Turk's frustration at the fact that J.D has ruined 'Turk Night' even though the entire point of that plot was for Turk to come to the realization that he should just not say anything about it.
  • Maybe the "J.D." that does the narration is different than the "J.D." character. Remember the "His Story", "Her Story", "Their Stories" episodes, the ability to narrate can be passed from person to person. Maybe the "Narrator" is actually an entity or a special power that operates in the carrier's subconscious. But now I'm just Wild Mass Guessing.
    • I think the narration voice is in retrospect, the narrating JD is recalling the incident.
    • In 'My Hero' the narration is revealed to be at least partly what J.D has written in his diary. But that doesn't really fix anything.
    • Most of the things he says are just vague enough to work. For example, when he says "everyone lies around here," he could be referencing something totally different, but because that's the way the SHOW works, the CAMERA shows us Carla's story.
    • They did once plan to have the Janitor turn out to be a figment of JD's imagination if the pilot ended up tanking...
    • I was under the impression his inner monologue was actually a transcription of his diary entries? He could be writing in his diary/journal about something that happened long ago, and just have a weird quirk about writing in a near-present tense style.
    • That is were the show parts from reality, at times people are just on the same broad situation as him, but at times he goes into specific terms that don't relate to him, like saying there are lot of reasons to lie, fear, wanted to protect someone, pride etc. but only one of those relates to him, so in normal circumstances he wouldn't had talked about them, and everything else is just the coincidence that other people are experiencing something similar and the camera just takes the opportunity. At the end it's still a show, we can't really expect for everyone to realize, admit or solve their problems at the same time so often, unless all of their periods are in that level of synch.
• Has anyone ever been in a hospital where more than a handful of personnel wear their ID badges photo side out? And has anyone ever seen any ID photo that looks more like the person than "probably the same taxonomic class"? Yet not only can you see everyone's photo, they're reasonably accurate (except Eliot's, which looks nothing like Sarah Chalke).
  • This troper works in a hospital. It's extremely important that all staff wear their ID badges at all times so they can gain access to certain areas of the hospital that random patients or visitors can't. Even a member of a child's family in a ward has to buzz in and tell the staff who they are, but staff can just swipe their cards and go past. Wearing it photo side out is also important so people can identify staff members: in my hospital, because it's an NHS hospital in the UK, every visitor has the right to know exactly who you are if you work there. Seriously, they hammer this stuff into you at induction - you have to have your ID badge on all the time.
  • What gave this troper a real headscratcher after watching all episodes is the fact that the Janitor has been wearing an ID badge all the time. How come that JD in eight years never once glanced on it, thereby easily knowing the Janitor's name?
    • Because the Janitor is exactly the type of guy who probably has a whole bunch of fake ID badges, each one with a different bullshit name on them. JD looks at his badge and gets his name? The Janitor wears a different badge with a completely different name tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that, until JD gets the point.
    • Also, the Janitor had his badge looked at in one episode. The person looking at it read that it said "The Janitor".
• Why is Jordan always at the hospital? Why is Danni always at the hospital, when it's her sister who got their father's seat?
  • Jordan, in (I think) season five gets an additional job there that means she actually has to show up for more than eight days a year. Danni being gets a Lampshade Hanging from J.D ('okay, new rule: hospitals are for doctors and sick people only!') at one point. It's probably Rule of Funny.
  • Danni isn't "always" at the hospital. She was there for a handful of episodes while visiting her sister who was first having a baby, and then she was probably there to see JD. She can't "always" be at the hospital if she hasn't been on the show in, what, three or four years?
    • She was "always" at the hospital for the time period when she was involved with J.D.
    • Exactly, she went there because of JD and since her sister and the closest thing to a brother in law worked there she wasn't thrown out.
• One of the fun running gags of the series is JD daydreaming and then suddenly coming back to reality with phrase that ties into what he was dreaming about, but seems like an utter non-sequitur to everyone else. When the viewpoint switches to another character, as it does in some episodes, I was hoping we would be able to see JD as other people see him: zoning out for a few seconds then bursting out with a nonsensical comment. Of course in this case, we'd never even see what the daydream was, and would be left guessing as to what prompted the comment. However, this never happens, and instead the joke gets re-applied to whoever perspective that episode is being told from. We have Dr. Cox/Elliot/whoever daydreaming then coming out with a weird comment, while JD is never seeing having a daydream we're not privy to or making a spontaneous comment that we don't understand.
  • Not true. In 'Their Story' told from the perspectives of Jordan, the Todd, and Ted, they make this exact joke. The Todd even uses almost your exact words when he observes JD doing it.
    • JD's tendency to daydream has been made fun of a few times. At one point, he starts to have one of his little fantasies, then the camera cuts back to the girl he was talking to snapping her fingers at him, and Turk and Carla telling her "It's no good. Just leave him alone for a bit, he'll snap out of it." (paraphrased, of course), having a conversation, then JD saying something random and waking up.
    • There's also the episode where Elliot has JD on speaker phone the whole episode and at one point prompts him to daydream, except we can't see him because he's at home and thus only get the non-sequitur.
    • In another episode it shows that Turk knows that JD's daydreams about women at never very quick so he takes this opportunity to pull pranks on him.

• Being supremely talented lets you be weird; I get it. Kelso hates everyone but values their skills more because we all know deep down inside he wants to save lives. But damn, there's just some things they should be kicked out for. The Todd for being sexist, J.D. and Elliot for being neurotic, Kelso for being an insane narcissist...in short, they all got Flanderized.
  • None of their quirks makes them bad AT their jobs, though.
    • There is actually an episode which addresses this almost directly - Elliot is upset after finding out that her mentor Molly has a dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend, and asks Dr. Cox how she can be a good therapist if her own life isn't together. Dr. Cox responds that even though he himself has an extremely dysfunctional home life and background, it doesn't affect his job in the slightest because he is a professional. So by the same vein, even though J.D. is absent-minded and childish, Elliot is high-strung and awkward, and Turk is immature and arrogant, these are not things that negatively impact their ability to do their jobs. Many times, these are things that actually help with their strengths at their jobs - Elliot's high-strung nature enables her to perform best when a lot of things are going on at once, Turk's arrogance keeps his desire to be the best strong, so he works harder to get better, and J.D.'s childishness gives him an innocent, charming personality which endears him to his patients.

• The narration is supposed to be JD's diary, at least for the first part of the show (and probably at least until the one with Murray). In the Mist Stories, the Her Story, and the Their Story, what is the narration? It can't be their thoughts, because it?s in past tense.
  • It's the actors describing the events that happened on the show that week in character.
• How does the Janitor keep his job? He's a funny character, but as an employee he's horribly inefficient/lazy, and the things he does or threatens to do to others is past-the-borderline criminal. It's not like he's immune to being fired either; Maddox did that pretty easily. And the Janitor messed with Kelso a lot too, so I can't imagine why he tolerated him. He's like Cox, except he doesn't provide balance and probably look up a lot of the hospital's budget what with his crazy antics and all.
  • Dr Drew Pinski of Loveline fame regularly talks about this show (and House) and expresses his frustration with it, saying things like '..in the real world, all of these people would be before an Ethics committee.' I imagine it's just a case of needing the Mantra.
  • An assortment of characters have actually done things on-screen that would land them in jail. Dr Cox goes overboard on his revenge, the Janitor plays sadistic (and potentially fatal) pranks, Dr Kelso at the very least actively goads Ted toward suicide... Rule of Funny, people.
  • Well first of all, he's not just a Janitor, he's a Janitor who happens to be Almighty. Second, I always took the Janitor as sort of a satire on that one guy who constantly slacks off and screws up yet never seems to face any real consequences for it. We've all met guys like that, the Janitor is merely the literal personification of their collective existence.
  • As we saw in a couple of episodes, especially "His Story III", he spends a lot of time with patients. Granted, in doing so, he's not doing his job, but he is doing a job, and quite an important one.
  • If I recall correctly, he did get fired once. He came back anyway.
  • Well, the Janitor was supposed to be a figment of JD's imagination, so him being able to pull off those stunts was normal for him in season one since he was basically non-existent. It wouldn't have made much sense for his character to suddenly change because he's a real person.
  • He's also bugfuck insane. He torments J.D for eight years because the guy accidentally dropped a coin into an automatic door. If you want to fire him and risk his wrath being turned on you when you can just let him keep his job at minimal cost to you, then you're a braver HR person than I would be.
  • As far as Kelso goes he's mostly Beneath Notice. They clash personally occasionally but day to day Kelso doesn't notice how little he does because Kelso is the kind of guy who ignores blue collar workers.

• The Unreveal at the end of the series! I mean, there's this big tension about The Janitor's Real Name. When shortly after he gives the name Glen Matthews some guy comes up to him and calls him Tommy? I mean WTF? There better be a Wordof God Confirmation soon because this is just annoying.
  • That was the whole point. The Janitor's name is a mystery, he lies about that just as much as he lies about everything else! We're not meant to know it, and we probably never will. But, in his own strange way he's being kind to JD by letting him think the mystery is solved, but still having the last laugh.
  • Due to the confirmation that he was in The Fugitive, This Troper still thinks the Janitor's name has to be Neil Flynn, and J.D. should have called him on it "because I watched the credits!".
    • He's a pathological liar! You can't trust anything he says, including The Fugitive thing.
    • But he was in the damn movie, how in the hell would he be able to fake that?
    • It doesn't have to be him. Neil Flynn could look like The Janitor. The Janitor could have changed his appearance to look just like Neil Flynn in The Fugitive. Neil Flynn and The Janitor could be brothers. The Janitor could be an evil clone of Neil Flynn. The Janitor is a pathological liar so any answer could work. Personally I'm for the clone theory.
    • Or the Easier Explanation. Actors tend not to use their given names, preferring stage names. Just ask 'The Duke' about being named Marion.
    • Let's face it: The Janitor is probably the kind of guy who'd actually get plastic surgery just to mess with someone one day.
  • One of the theories behind this was that it was lampooning an earlier fandom theory that the Janitor was named Tommy because an extra in a (considerably) earlier episode seemed to say "Nice one, Tommy" in reference to a joke the Janitor made. I'm gonna go ahead and say that his name is Glen
  • I sort of doubt he has any particular chosen name as far as the writers are concerned. It's kind of like speculating on what The Faceless looks like. Incidentally, being in The Fugitive doesn't guarantee that he's Neil Flynn — it could just be a 'coincidence' that the Janitor played the same character, with no Neil Flynn existing in the Scrubs universe in the same way that there's no Zach Braff, etc. via Celebrity Paradox.
  • Apparently Word of God has confirmed that his real name is Glen Matthews.
  • I took it somewhat differently. I believed that when the Janitor said Glen Matthews to JD, he was being honest because JD outright asked what his name was, and although Janitor is a complete psychopath, he has been shown to show respect at certain times, and I felt that this was one of those times. He could have told the random doctor that his name was Tommy as just another of his mind games, similar to the episode in which he posed as Nigel the British guy, Klaus the German, and Efram the stutterer to various different people around the hospital.
  • If it helps during season one episode commentaries Bill Lawrence said the Janitor's last name would be revealed in the final episode.
    • Though this helps little, since as discussed he's given two names in his final scene.

• I'm really confused, Turk wanted J.D. to hook up with his nanny because every girl J.D. hooks up with appears really ugly to Turk. So like, earlier, why was he having sex dreams of Elliot doing really kinky stuff to him?
  • A few other times it's shown he finds her attractive. One time saying "outside the hospital she is a slamming hottie" along with saying he likes the way she does the "hivy" when she's dancing.
  • Maybe his repulsion only arose part-way through the show? That, or Elliot's just that hot.
• After the episode in question aired, it struck me that Elliot's irrational hatred of red-haired people?which, I admit, is probably little more than yet another quirk in an already-extremely-quirky character?is belied by her previous relationship with the marine biologist Sean Kelly (read: an Irish-American played by Irish-American actor Scott Foley). I wonder if I'm the only person who caught that...
  • Scott Foley's hair is brown. Elliot hates redheads, not the Irish.
  • Judging by her brief stint with Colin Farrell in an episode I think its safe to say Elliot doesn't mind the Irish ;)
  • Trust me, even the Irish make fun of redheads too. And here's another shocker - not every single Irish person in existence has red hair. It's common there but brown hair is just as common.
    • Red hair is nowhere near as common as brown or blonde hair anywhere.
• Regarding the episode when the main four are essentially put on trial to decide whether they killed a patient:
  • 1. If J.D. and Turk left the building without having anyone officially covering for them they should be sued and fired. And have their medical licenses revoked. Since this was not brought up, I have to assume either the writers are really against doing the research (and they have a medical consultant on staff!) or they really really didn't care.
    • It's kinda referenced poorly that perhaps Turk was between shifts because he is at the Ostrich guy?s house when his shift supposedly starts. Maybe.
    • I'm pretty sure Elliot was the doctor who was meant to be covering for JD.
    • IIRC J.D arranged for Elliot to cover for him, only for Elliot to get caught up in her own bullshit as well. So while it's not his finest hour, he did technically cover himself. As for Turk, again IIRC his shift hadn't officially started when he gave J.D a ride and he left before J.D to get to work, but got caught in traffic and so was delayed.
  • 2. The interns are the only ones around when the guy starts to die? Seriously? Isn't a dying patient instantly the responsibility of any of the on-call doctors that are present?
    • You assume that the other on-call doctors weren't, you know, busy. It's a hospital. They were likely dealing with other patients or attending to other duties.
  • 3. How is this Carla's fault in the first place? If the entire nursing staff decided to ignore their duties to take part in the lottery on company time, than it's the entire nursing staff's problem, not just Carla.
    • Carla was the ringleader for the whole "let's blow off work and go watch the lottery because I personally want to win money" campaign?
    • Plus she's the head nurse
    • And Carla shooed away one of the interns who presumably came for help while they were watching the lottery.
  • 4. Even if you presume that J.D. is somehow at fault because it's "his" patient, how is Turk involved? As this is clearly taking place during the day, there have got to be extra surgeons around in case of emergencies.
    • Turk was the On-Call Surgeon who Carla told Keith to get.
    • You would still think that there would be more than one surgeon on call for the whole hospital though.
    • Apparently they weren't. If there were, they could have been, you know, busy with other things. In any case, hospitals aren't made of money; certainly not enough to have loads of doctors hanging around getting paid for doing absolutely nothing just in case they're needed. Besides which, Turk was on-call precisely in case he was needed for something, and when he was needed for something he wasn't there because he decided to help out J.D with a personal matter instead. That's why he was in trouble; any other on-call doctors presumably weren't dicking around with personal matters when they should have been available in case of an emergency.
  • And another: how is Elliot to blame? A patient's wife duct tapes her to a wall.
    • Because she made out with her husband, confronted her about it and started a fight with her.
    • A misunderstanding, which she tried to clear up, but the wife didn't want to hear it and started a fight (watch the episode, she was already going to do something to Elliot before Elliot confronted her and made it worse).
    • The patient's wife is definitely being an asshole in that situation, but in her defence she's not the one employed at the hospital as a doctor. It's Elliot's job — duty, even — not to confront the wife and exacerbate the situation, and to get out of any confrontation sharpish if it does happen, and not by running away but by shutting the wife's bullshit down before it even starts. Okay, there's been a misunderstanding and it's making things complicated and awkward, but Elliot's job is to take care of sick people, not resolve misunderstandings in her personal life; she can sort that out in her own time. And if the wife is absolutely determined to start some shit? Tough, Elliot's the doctor there, not her, and Elliot is perfectly entitled to summon security and get her the fuck out of there, sick husband or no, if the wife is incapable of behaving herself or intending to cause trouble. The last thing Elliot should have done in that situation was to run away and hide, or engage with her and make things worse.
    • Minor correction; the patient was the guy's son, not the guy himself. Not that that changes another point; Striking up a romantic relationship with your patient's relatives is, while probably not actually aganst the rules, quite unethical.
  • What gets me is Cox being such an accusatory Jackass about it all to the main character. He was sitting right there, taking the piss out of the nurses for believing in the lottery. Why weren't you there when he coded Cox? Especially since everyone gets paged for a code in prior episodes.
    • When the code came in, IIRC Cox was off the clock and at home. He can't be realistically or fairly blamed for what happened if he wasn't even on call at the time. And what annoys Cox is that they're out there celebrating when, even if they didn't actually cause the patient's death, they still should have been doing their jobs rather than letting their personal lives take over. While Cox took a moment out to make a snide comment about the lottery when he was presumably on a break, he was otherwise still focussed on being there if he was needed. The others weren't. He's pointing out that while they ultimately weren't at fault for causing the patient's death, they've got nothing to celebrate either.
    • Cox wasnt at home, that was his fantasy about winning the lottery, he was sat right next to where Carla was standing when an intern came asking for help and he did nothing. So if the rest cant celebrate being found not to be at fault for someone dieing then Cox cant complain to them either.
    • That's flawed logic, frankly. Again; Cox is pointing out that they've got nothing to celebrate because they genuinely weren't doing what they should have been doing and only escaped any consequences on a technicality. This is an entirely valid point for him to make, because whether the person would have died regardless of them being there, the broader point is that they still should have been there. And while Cox himself could have helped out more than he did, this doesn't make him wrong to point out that the others still shouldn't have been farting around trying to solve their personal problems when they had a job to do, and so have no grounds for celebration regarding their conduct; again, he at least was where he was supposed to be if and when he was needed. Furthermore, given what we know of Cox's personality, it's not a huge leap to surmise that there's a bit of self-recrimination in Cox's attitude.
    • It's a valid point of view and doesn't make Cox wrong about what he's saying but does make him a massive hypocrite. He was right next to Carla when the interns came running for help and didn't lift a finger to help, yet now he's berating the others for not being committed enough to be there and help. It brings the point of view as being if Cox couldn't be bothered to help what leg does he have to stand on to tell others they should have?
    • His "leg" is that he's not wrong. Maybe he's being a hypocrite, but it is still possible for a hypocrite to be right about something. Maybe Cox could have helped more — but that doesn't change the fact that everyone else also could have done much more, and could at the very least have not been dicking about obsessing over their personal problems when they were supposed to be doing their jobs.
    • Also, Cox is not just berating them for not doing enough to help the patient. He's berating them for triumphantly celebrating being acquitted by the tribunal as if they proved their innocence, when in fact it was nothing more than pure luck that it turned out they couldn't have done anything to help the patient anyway. It's not so much a "you could have done more" guilt-trip as a "you've got nothing to crow about here" guilt-trip. You will notice that, whether he could have helped more on the day or not, he is afterwards pointedly not in a celebratory mood about anything. Whether he's being a hypocrite about helping out or not, he is most certainly not being a hypocrite about that.
    • The problem with the two posts above is that, yes, he's *right* but you're asking to ignore his hypocrisy which is very hard to do. He was sat right next to Carla when the interns came running for help and did fuck all, so in the end, why should any if the others listen to him when he's criticising them later? We shouldnt be in a celebrayory mood? You seem pretty happy to be telling us that, why didnt you put your newspaper down and go help? Whats that, you didnt? Then fuck off for berating us.
    • First, the above attitude is exactly the same thing that he's right about, namely finding a reason to dismiss valid criticism. The others recognise that he is right and, rather than try to find a way deflect that realisation by blaming someone else they take it on board to improve themselves. Which is the mature response, regardless of what one thinks of Dr Cox. Second, Dr Cox is not in fact responsible for every damn patient in the hospital and this wasn't one of his. In the scene Carla speaks to Keith then turns around to speak to Dr Cox who is not "sitting right there, taking the piss out of the nurses for believing in the lottery," he's stood up, facing away and reading a chart, presumably for one of his own patients. He only looks up from the chart once Carla directly addresses him. All in all there's no evidence he even heard what Keith said and Keith, it seems, didn't think to ask him for help, most likely because Carla just told him to go find Turk. So no, Cox is not a hypocrite, he was unaware of the issue until it was too late to do anything.
  • This episode drives me crazy for another reason - Why, why on EARTH were there no disciplinary actions? The head nurse was busy watching the lottery, the doctor on call was tied up in her stupid love drama, and the guy who was supposed to be on the shift was CHASING A PATIENT AROUND TO GET A THANK YOU OUT OF HIM. The problem is that they tried to pay lip service to the fact that the characters antics would have consequences, but then wouldn't follow through with it. The hospital should have been sued into the stone age, and every one of the characters should have ended up on the street and blacklisted from medicine.
    • It's a technicality; what caused the patient's death turns out to have been something that should have been caught well before any of them had gotten involved, and IIRC they probably wouldn't have been able to save him even if they had been there. Furthermore, IIRC each of them technically covered their own asses somehow (J.D arranged for Elliot to cover for him and was technically following up on a patient; Elliot was attacked by someone else; Turk was stuck in traffic and late into work; Carla isn't a doctor, so couldn't diagnose the problem and identify the correct course of treatment even if she had gotten involved), so while it wasn't exactly their finest hour each of them had were sufficiently able to pass the buck or offer justification to avoid serious punishment. Granted, it's a bit of a hand-wave and they still probably have faced some disciplinary actions for, well, all their dicking around, but the show's still a piece of entertainment and not a medical law textbook, so they fudged it a little bit.
    • Also, let's face it; Rule Of Comedy, Rule of Drama and Status Quo Is God. If all the main characters faced realistic consequences for what happened... the show would be over.

• So let me get this straight; a girl buys a piece of land with J.D. even when they know they can't afford to build a house on it yet; then she says she's too young for a long-term relationship? Um, why did she encourage him to buy a piece of land again? Hasn't J.D. essentially ruined his credit for decades to come?
  • That is pretty crazy, but JD's credit would only be ruined if he is unable to pay for the land. Unless I missed an episode in which he fell behind in his payments or was foreclosed on, his credit is fine. Buying the land and making regular payments would actually improve his credit rating, not to mention providing an asset he can borrow against in future.
  • Depending on how large it is and where it's located, buying a block of land can be surprisingly inexpensive; it's actually building something on it that really puts the costs up. I don't know how much it was at the time of the episode, but in 2015 an acre of land in the United States cost, on average, about $3000, which certainly isn't nothing in terms of money but isn't ruinously expensive either; less than a decent second-hand car. Depending on your finances, you could theoretically raise that in cash without even needing a loan (and thus not having to risk your credit). While J.D isn't exactly raking in the big bucks, he's still a doctor, so he's probably making a decent enough income to allow him to scrape together enough to afford a large enough block of land to build a reasonably nice house, if not a ranch or anything. So depending on how much J.D was able to raise, where the land he bought was located and how large it was, he might be a little out of pocket and stuck with a piece of land he's got no real use for (but which, as noted above does provide him with a financial asset to his name), but probably not financially destitute.
  • To add to the above, in the episode, it's a half-acre (so about $1500) and he's going in with someone else (so about $750). Still a bit of a hit to the wallet, but unless J.D's finances are truly fucked then it's far from crippling either.
  • Remember also that J.D. and Julie bought the land together; meaning, she paid for half of it. Perhaps when they broke up, as J.D only bought the land on her suggestion she decided it would be a dick move to get him to buy her out and just waived her rights to the property since she didn't want it.

• Putting aside the question of whether J.D. ever technically asked the Janitor for his name, are you telling me that absolutely everyone in the hospital only refers to him as Janitor and nothing else? I'd think when Kelso was forced to praise him over the P.A. a real name would be used. Besides, wouldn't Carla have access to the personnel file so J.D. can look it up himself?
  • The Janitor falsified his personnel files. He says it at one point, "Feel free to read mine, of course it says my name is Captain Stinkwater, and I'm half chipmunk."
  • He's the Janitor, the only two people at the hospital that have ever been nice to him (besides his caretaking buddies) are Elliot and Redhaired Doctor, people don't care about him. Probably nobody ever asked him and it just became commonplace to call him Janitor.
  • Still, he's wearing an ID badge all the time, just like everybody else. Yet we are to believe that nobody has ever looked at it?
    • This is the Janitor we're discussing — the man is constantly lying about himself. What are the odds that he has a whole pile of fake ID badges with a whole bunch of different bullshit names on them that he constantly switches around? You look at his ID badge to get his name, he just wears a different one tomorrow.
    • Also, one episode showed his badge to say "The Janitor" after someone snatched it off of him when he refused to say his name.

• So Kim lied about still being pregnant to not be tied down to J.D., then comes back and expects to be able to continue their relationship. Um, what? If you decide to lie about having a miscarriage, you have decided you don't want this guy in your life or the life of your kid. Ask him to help financially support the kid or babysit twice a week, lady, but the instant you lied you officially gave up any right you have to be with him romantically or domestically.
  • What exactly was her plan in the first place? I understand she thought J.D. was only with her because she was pregnant, but it seems highly irresponsible for her to lie about having a miscarriage unless she planned to abort, which she didn't. Did she really think he'd never find out that he had a son?
  • To quote Dr Cox "Pregnant women are one of the few people in society allowed to be crazy."
    • Which always annoyed me. Telling JD "You cant wear red while I'm pregnant" would be allowed crazy, telling him she miscarried his baby and breaking up with him, only to, months later, be all like "hey I didn't, I'm still pregnant" and wanting to be back with him is not allowed crazy by any definition.
  • What really bugged me was when JD tells her honestly that he doesn't want to be with her everyone turns on him like he's some kind of jerk. They even say that he should lie to spare her feelings because she's pregnant. Telling her that he wants to be with her only to say "yeah that was a lie" is the kind of thing that should be unforgivable. And of course he goes through with the lie only to have to tell her the truth while she's in labor.
  • Well I thought that it was because the emotional stress could had repercussions on the baby, it would had been awkward later on but then he could call her out on it that what she was asking was pretty selfish and jerkish of her.
    • The biggest problem is that Kim was about the only character who admitted J.D. was in the right about this. And she mentioned that she didn't expect him to forgive her, she only asked if there was a possibility that he would. Sure, not exactly the best question to pose on the guy who you lied to, but still far better far better than what J.D.'s so called "friends" were guilt tripping him into doing. It was the other characters who decided that J.D. was in the wrong when Kim was getting overly emotional about what she knew was her own fault. But the writers and thus the other characters seem to have had it out for J.D. and thus that's why everyone is pushing him to forgive her even though she's the one telling him he has every right to be mad at and not want to get back together with her. Her switching gears in Season 7 due to the powers of plot convenience is far less excusable, though. When the character who everyone is defending is also the one pointing out that she did something horrible to their friend, you know someone didn't think through this script.
  • Kim didn't intend to get back in JD's life. They ran into each other by coincidence at a medical conference, other than that they lived in different states. When JD saw her and saw that she was still pregnant, he called her on her lie, and she knew she had to face up to it. At this point, rather than try and work things out and try and salvage something of their relationship, JD ran back home and Kim followed to try and, from her perspective, make things right between her and JD. At which point, granted, she tried to renew a relationship with him for nebulous reasons, but at the outset, she honestly never expected to see JD ever again.

• It's a small thing but it bugs me, in the SARS episode the whole thing is started because Kylie asked what was wrong with a patient, as a joke JD said SARS and shows her the patients chart but the episode before this was completely dedicated to how JD can't break the Doctor/Patient confidentiality thing. So, JD can't tell a girl that if she sleeps with her boyfriend she could get an STD but he can show her a patient?s chart?
  • Big difference between sharing information of person A when person B is very close to them and knows them outside of the hospital and talking about somebody that person B doesn't even know. Admittedly showing the chart is a big no-no but realistically there's not a hell of a lot Kylie would've been able to deduce about the guy's life from it (as opposed to telling a girl her boyfriend caught an STD off another girl). The chart shouldn't have that much personal info on it anyway given how easy it is to walk into a ward - the detailed files would probably be at the nurses? station. Not to mention JD was pretty much only thinking with his crotch at that stage.
  • Plus, technically JD didn't divulge the patients condition, he only guessed at that it might have been SARS, and as it turns out he guessed wrongly anyway.
• In "My Porcelain God", Elliot's first scene has her intubating a patient, and treating it as an entirely routine thing, to the point where she's able to do it without any problems while continuing a conversation with JD. Her next appearance has her completely unable to do the same procedure, with no explanation for why or when this happened. Was there some crucial scene that was deleted? And if there was, why cut the scene that explicitly sets up that subplot and keep the scene where she's shown doing it without any problems?
  • She screwed up the procedure and accidentally inserted the air tube into the patient's stomach, not his lungs. This destroys her confidence and renders her too scared to perform the procedure even though she has the skills to do so. She spends the rest of the episode trying to get her confidence back.
    • Well, it would have been nice if someone, anyone in the episode actually mentions that. I just saw the episode the other day and nobody ever brings this up.
    • Erm, it was mentioned. Explicitly. During the original scene. Cox comes in and has a big rant about Eliot blowing air into the stomach, not the lungs and how she failed a procedure she should have learnt within the first week. Go back and watch it again.'
    • That must have been edited out in the Comedy Central reruns, because I don't remember ever seeing that part of the scene at all. Every time I remember seeing the scene, it cuts from her talking to another scene, without Cox coming back into the scene.
    • Perhaps it's on the Season DVDs, but I was watching this episode on the CW today: Cox comes in and gives JD a little rant about being a "Best Girl" and then it cuts right to JD and Turk dancing in their tuxedos. There is however, a vestige of the missing scene: right before the cut, Cox looks offscreen with one of his pissed looks, towards where Elliot is intubating.
• That whole justification that JD had never seen Kim before because women with wedding rings are basically invisible to him bugs the crap out of me. Carla has a wedding ring. Laverne has a wedding ring. He must have had female patients with wedding rings. What was the point? Couldn't they just have Kim as freshly arriving at the hospital, rather than some nonsensical, lame joke?
  • No, because they had to make her a Mary Sue. Not only did the wedding ring thing bug me too, but also, the whole "She's been there for EVERYTHING" crap. I don't care what they say, Kim was NOT in the elevator with JD when he was singing "Kung Fu Fighting". That would mean she would have been there when the Janitor was about to tie JD up, which would mean that she should have tried to stop it. And, of course, the biggest Mary Sue thing they made her do: fixing the X-ray in the theme song.
    • Ruleof Funny. As for the x-ray, they did that because the shows creators have received hundreds, if not thousands, of letters pointing it out and they thought it was a good way to acknowledge it without having to change the intro (which they had tried before to the fans outrage)
  • The one that bugged me most was putting her at Ben's funeral. Her with JD in the Elevator bugged me in that scene is one of my favourite parts of season one (and the bit just before it where Dr Cox is with his therapist). However, having her be at the funeral is like it's trying to ruin one of the iconic sad moments of the show!
  • You're taking it too literally. The wedding ring means that they aren't available to date, so they're invisible to someone looking for a date (portrayed as them being literally invisible for Rule of Funny since we know he can see married women). This still doesn't exactly excuse Kim's sudden appearance (though I kinda found her being added to existing scenes a bit humorous, so YMMV).
    • Except the plot of My TCW from season 2 literally contradicts this. As JD struggled internally about whether to date a married woman. And that woman WASN'T invisible to him. If TCW was an exception, why? The show never answers this as TPTB clearly didn't think this plot device through.
    • Maybe because Jamie's husband was in a coma, and unlikely to come out of it. So sure they knew she was married, but she was partly available. And it's Amy Smart - she's just that hot.
  • It meant that he never tried to start any kind of relationship with someone married, he saw her lots of times but never took enough care to at least notice or remember her face.
  • Their paths simply never crossed during the first four years at the hospital like they did in her debut episode. He simply didn't take any notice of her for the first few seasons because he already had a long-term love interest. Elliot, Lisa, Jamie and Danni. He just ignores this one woman wearing a wedding ring because he's too busy pining after all the others.

• Elliot leaving her stuff in a truck in the hospital parking lot. I have no pity for her. "Hey Elliot, if you don't have money to rent a storage unit, ask your friends for a loan, and even then take a box of your most precious belongings into the hospital with you." Seriously, even if there wasn't sufficient locker space I'm sure Laverne could've kept an eye on it for her. What's more, her life was a mess and everyone was saying she needed some time to gather herself; give her a few days off to find a new apartment and get her stuff behind a locked door again!
  • Elliot is used to her father doing everything for her. She's never had a place to leave her stuff. She's also probably hugely embarrassed about the truck thing and probably doesn't want to impose on everyone. In her mind she's going to get things sorted immediately (which technically she does - she finds an apartment pretty quickly) and her pride won't allow her to ask JD or Carla if she can leave her stuff at theirs.
  • Also, what loan? They all struggle for money (huge debts, remember), and they weren't that close with Lavern.
• J.D. does something immature, and Carla gets on his case about how he needs to grow up. Turk does something of either equal or greater stupidity, and she just shrugs and says that he's her man that she loves no matter what.
  • As seen in a episode of a later season, she doesn't mind their silly antics, it's when J.D.'s immaturity have an effect on his life of the lives of others, while Turk knows when it's time to roll up his sleeves as seen when he was worried about his income now that he has a child and Carla is thinking of being a full-time mom, how he always makes time to do filing and reports when at home, and how he takes surgeries very seriously.

• Carla being mad at Elliot for being a control freak in "My Rabbit". When nearly every episode has her trying to control everyone else. At least they didn't make it that Elliot was the one in the wrong at the end of the episode.
  • If Carla's a control freak herself it makes perfect sense to be annoyed if Elliot is being a control freak, because then Carla isn't in control herself.

• In the last few episodes when everybody is on Hawaii for the marriage of the Janitor Turk and Carla are fighting because he wants to have childish ocean sex and she always phones their daughters babysitter. Carla points out that he is a manchild and goes away being grumpy and in the end returns to the beach to have ocean sex without any explanation. WHUUUAAAAAAT?
  • Did you see it on one of the syndicated airings? I could've sworn there's at least a scene or two in there where someone tells Carla to lighten up, or shows her realizing that she's being a stick in the mud.
    • During the wedding scene, all the characters realise that Love Conquers All.

• Why exactly was everyone getting so mad at Kevin Casey? Yeah, he was showing them all up, but he wasn't doing it on purpose, he was just really good. JD, Cox, and Turk all show up at some point to chew him out, but what exactly was their argument gonna be? "Hey, you! Stop being such a good doctor and saving people's lives like that! You're making me look bad!" How did they not realize that if they did that, they'd all look like petty jerk-wads? And why was his OCD the only thing that made them decide not to tell him off?
  • No, they did realize that they would've looked like petty jerk-wads for telling him out because they saw him struggling with his OCD. They thought he was an extremely perfect "superdoc" that made his OCD work to his advantage, but after seeing him wash his hands for several minutes to no end, extremely frustrated that he can't let it go, they realized that he wasn't the perfect show-off they made him out to be and they were only jealous.
  • Well, I just don't get why it was seeing the OCD that they already knew about that made them reconsider, and not the fact that yelling at him was a really stupid idea in the first place. Yeah, we all get jealous of other people sometimes, but actually planning to tear a strip off of him for being a better doctor? Even if Kevin didn't have OCD, that'd still be pretty pathetic. Especially considering that he was actually a pretty nice guy. Besides, it wasn't like he was after their jobs or anything, he was just visiting. He'd have been gone in a few days anyway, so what difference did it make?
  • They knew about the OCD, but up until that scene it was treated the same as the other characters' little quirks, something they either work around or work with, and Casey had been noted earlier as using it to his advantage (compulsively rereading the books is great for studying, for example). I.e., that his OCD was not a big deal. That scene made them realize this wasn't just some quirk, this guy had a real problem, and suddenly they weren't going to be griping at someone who was better than them or annoying (which they do all the time), they were going to chew out a guy who was really suffering.
  • The point was the using it to his advantage part, they thought he was just showing off and was using that as an excuse, they thought his OCD wasn't that bad since it varies, plus they were just too hotheaded at the moment and when they saw that it was real and serious they stopped which also helped in cooling their heads since they were not just focus on their anger anymore. That's why they tell you to breathe and count to 10 to calm down.
  • Missing the point here! Question was: Why are they mad at him? Answer: Look at Turk in this episode! He could become a better surgeon, but he'd have to let Carla down. More training and learning equal in greater skills, however, everyone has to draw the line for themselves. This is maybe the best episode from an ethical point of view: Lives are at risk, yet you have to find the right balance. They are mad at Dr Kevin Casey because he reminds them that you can always do more. They feel guilty because they work hard and then there comes this guy who just works even harder. Every doctor wants to do the same thing in order to help the patients, but enough is enough. Just not for Dr Kevin Casey as he suffers from OCD.
    • No, I'd say the above tropers grasped the point of the episode quite well. The other characters were jealous of Casey's mad skillz. To rationalize their jealousy, they decided Casey was being a deliberate show off just to make them look bad. But when they saw him washing his hands over and over again, practically in tears as he tried to stop himself but couldn't, they realized how petty and selfish they were being. Suddenly Casey wasn't some arrogant asshole who shows people up just because he can, he was a guy with a serious problem who would trade all his mad skillz in an instant just to be normal and healthy, like they were.
  • It is also entirely possible for people to intellectually understand a situation in general terms without entirely understanding the full implications of that situation if they haven't seen or experienced it first hand. Intellectually, they understand that Casey has OCD and it's probably a bit of a problem for him. But emotionally, all they've experienced is this guy they think's a bit of a smug know-it-all sweeping into their lives and showing them all up as being inferior to him on their home turf; they're jealous, embarrassed and resentful, and none of those emotional responses are particularly conducive to coldly logical and rational thought. When they see Casey obsessively washing his hands, however, they get a first-hand glimpse of his OCD, for the first time it clicks, and they consequently realise that any satisfaction he might have gotten any superiority he might have towards them to them is more than outweighed by his misery at the situation that his own mind has trapped him in, and that their resentment is, yes, just them being a bit petty.
• I have a major issue with the episode where the janitor installs a toilet on the roof. Dozens of hospital employees line up to use it, but what I want to know is did they wash their hands afterwards? There is clearly no sink on the roof, so even if they did they would obviously have to do so inside the building, meaning they would be walking around for at least a little while with unwashed hands. In a HOSPITAL, where cleanliness is considered important. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
  • Like you said, in a hospital cleanliness is very important. Ergo, there's dozens of other places to wash your hands. Or, possibly, the Janitor put a bottle of Purell up there.
  • First of all, Rule of Funny. Second, are you sure you're not overstating the problem? There are bathrooms on every floor of every hospital. They just have to make sure not to touch anything in the short time it would take them to reach one.
  • I understand it's TV and that she might not actually even have been using the toilet, but I've always had a bigger problem with the fact that Elliot doesn't even pretend to wipe herself when she gets up. She just pulls her pants right up and walks away. Gross.
    • ...Why would she pretend to wipe if she didn't do anything? No one was watching her, and how do you even pretend to wipe anyway?
    • Assuming Elliot actually did use the bathroom, it could also have been a number one rather than a number two; hence, on that particular occasion, no/less need to wipe (I'm willing to assume).
• When Turk and Carla get married, the priest keeps telling them he'll have to cancel the wedding because another one is scheduled right after. When Turk goes to the wrong chapel and Carla calls, it shows her sitting by the altar in an empty chapel...so where's the other wedding?
  • I think it was that "he" had to go to another wedding.
  • I don't know about church weddings, but UK town hall weddings, you get the entire hall for the entire day (even if you booked the smallest room). Even if the church was in really high demand, I doubt they'd double book a wedding with such a small time frame to prevent this kind of thing.
    • Is that really church policy, though? I've never been married but I would think that priests wouldn't perform weddings at other chapels. I mean, wouldn't the other chapel have its own priest to perform weddings?
    • Perhaps it was an outdoor wedding, or one held at a hotel?
    • Also, yes, that is really church policy. At least, in some churches. Specifically, this troper grew up Catholic and we had our pastor as well as 4-5 other regular priests at any given time. However, many of those priests also served a few days a week at other churches. People getting married could request a specific priest to do the ceremony, but that may conflict with that priest's duties at another church. My grandmother's Methodist church also has a pastor who is the sole pastor at two churches. There's also the factor that some couples want to get married at a certain church but would like a pastor from a different church to perform the ceremony (if their church isn't big enough for all their guests, but they would like a priest they are familiar with, for example). So yes, it's totally legitimate to say that the priest had to go to another wedding at a different church or chapel.

• In one episode, Elliot wants to roleplay that she and Keith are having a baby. This freaks Keith out, and he says: "Alright, I'm putting on a third condom." This is troubling on multiple levels:
  • 1. Using more than one condom actually increases the risk that the condom will break. Using three pretty much guarantees it. Those condoms are going to break. This is something that any doctor would know. Are we supposed to think Keith and Elliot are both that stupid? Or are we supposed to think that only Keith is really that stupid and that Elliot is keeping quiet in some grand attempt to get pregnant?
    • Rule of Funny and Viewers Are Morons. I for one had no idea that multiple condoms increase the chances that they will break. Most viewers probably felt the same. Regardless, I doubt anyone will be trying this any time soon.
    • Fridge Horror: What if a viewer, like yourself, didn't know that multiple condoms dramatically increases the chances of breaking and, thinking it would help lower the risk, actually tries it?
    • If you're relying solely on a sitcom joke to provide guidance about sex, that's more your problem than the show's.
    • Also, to be honest, anyone who seriously tries to put on three condoms on at once after seeing it on Scrubs (and presumably reacting rather over-literally and humourlessly to what is obviously a joke) will quickly discover how uncomfortable and impractical doing so is long before they reach the penetration stage. One condom by itself is tight; the more you put on, the more tight, uncomfortable and restrictive they become.
  • 2. By adding a third condom, the dialog implies that wearing two condoms is the norm for Keith. Is Keith really REALLY that stupid? Is Elliot? Or is Elliot really so desperate for a baby that she would risk sleeping with a guy who has effectively only ever had unprotected sex?
    • It doesn't imply that Keith regularly wears multiple condoms. It implies that he's already freaked out by Elliot's behavior, which was what caused him to put on two condoms in the first place. He later decided to put on a third just to be safe. (Not correct condom usage, I know, but that's not the point of the joke.)
  • It's not troubling at all; it's just being taken rather over-literally here. Keith is a trained medical professional, he is almost certainly not actually going to put on three condoms; he is just emphasising how utterly freaked out and turned off he is by Elliot's obsession with the roleplay in order to (in-universe) maybe get Elliot to calm down and dial it back a little and (meta) make a joke so the audience will laugh.

• When the cast is at the Bahamas, JD's big declaration of love is that he loves her more than anything else in the world. Even Turk...erm, what about his son?
  • It's kind of a given that most people love their children more than anything else, and it's pretty much unconditional in most cases. Saying he loved her more than Turk was his way of saying that out of the people he actively chose to love, he loved her most.
  • Also, come on. We're just being unnecessarily pedantic here. It's a romantic sentiment coupled with a joke about J.D and Turk's man-love, not a complete scientific list of everyone J.D loves in strict order, let's not get up the guy's butt about anyone he might have left out.

• Something that has always bothered this troper about Dr. Cox's character is his tendency to talk shit about Sacred Heart. He constantly refers to the hospital as a "dump" and seems to have very little respect for it. In one episode he was named the best doctor in the area, so why doesn't he go work at a better hospital? And if he hates it so much there, why does he take the Chief of Medicine position?
  • He also constantly berates JD and calls him the worst doctor he's ever seen, only to admit in private and when pushed that JD is in fact one of the best he's ever seen. Dr. Cox complains about and berates everyone and everything, including his ex-wife who he's clearly actually in love with.
  • Perhaps it's not that Sacred Heart is a lousy hospital but Cox's standards are just way too high. Maybe in his eyes, every hospital is a dump because they don't match up to his discriminating standards.
  • Leading from that, maybe he's just despondent that the hospital doesn't have the staff/beds/equipment it SHOULD have to help everybody, as financially and realistically impossible as it is.
  • Or, alternatively, he calls it a dump so that it looks like The Great And Powerful Dr. Cox is what's keeping the whole thing together.
  • Given his disdain for private practice, Sacred Heart might very well be the best public hospital available to him even though it's still far below the standards of a private hospital.
  • I think we're probably overthinking this. As mentioned above, it is repeatedly demonstrated that Dr. Cox is just one of those people who talks shit about everything, especially the things he loves the most. He talks shit about and belittles J.D all the time, but in practice J.D is clearly one of his favourite interns, a doctor whom he greatly respects and a close, even best, friend. He talks shit about Jordan all the time, when it's abundantly clear that she's probably the love of his life. He's emotionally closed-off and hates revealing his true feelings about anything because to him it's a sign of vulnerability, so he over-masks it with snark and snideness. So the fact that Cox talks shit about Sacred Heart most of all is just a sign that deep down, for all its flaws Sacred Heart is probably his favourite place in the whole world.

• They named a character Gooch. That just doesn't make sense. Did they not know what gooch is slang for?
  • I knew a guy named that in High School.
  • If you're going to throw out any name or reference that someone could see as an innuendo, you're not going to be left with many names.
  • But those were names first. I'll admit I only know the term from jackass so I don't know if it's been around longer than that, but to me it's still weird. There's a difference between Peter and Dick and then you thrown in Gooch, Pussy and Schlong.
    • The last name Gooch exists, as does Cox. I'm sure there is someone out there with the last name Schlong, too.
  • Hope & Faith had a character with that name too. Awkward names happen, and maybe it's an in joke at the actress's own last name that sounds dirty: Kate Micucci (pronounced Ma Coochie)
  • It's interesting how we're defaulting to assuming that the writers of a comedy show might not be aware that they've given a character a name with some rude connotations instead of considering the possibility that they maybe deliberately gave this character the name because of the rude connotations.

• In season 6 (again...)one episode features Turk being freaked out that Carla is considering not going back to work, so she can stay home with the baby(the same baby she soon after admits to having homicidal thoughts about and leaves alone with a small child , but lets not get into that). Turk becomes obsessed with money, so much so that he wont even buy J.D. some cotton candy and starts doing some pretty shady back-alley doctoring deals, but then literally THE NEXT EPISODE, Turk is fighting with Carla wanting her to stay at home with the baby instead of coming back to work like SHE wants. WHAT!? JUST WHAT!?!?!
  • At the start of that episode, weren't they crunching the numbers for babysitter vs stay at home? Turk may have just gone from being worried about losing that extra paycheck, but then realised the other costs involved with babysitters etc.
• The annoying girl from MADtv dies of a cocaine overdose. Dr. Cox decides to transplant these cocaine-infused organs into other people. The people die, not of the effects of cocaine on an already weakened body, but of RABIES, and we are told there is NO WAY Dr. Cox could have known about this. Do they just grab any old body and swap the organs out? How could she possibly have matched three random patients on the several factors that must match to keep the body from utterly rejecting an organ? I realize they were just trying to set up Cox's Heroic BSoD, but come on, they didn't even TRY to make sense.
  • A cocaine overdoes doesn't "infuse" all of someone's organs with the drug. That's just not how drugs work. A cocaine overdose in particular would kill you by either respiratory failure, stroke, cerebral hemorrhage, or heart-failure caused by an elevated heart rate because of what the drug does to a user's brain chemistry. Not because your organs are "infused" with the stuff.
    
    This, like other Scrubs cases, was based on a real event where, yes, someone died of rabies and that person's organs went into others before they realized it. Keeping them all in the same hospital was a conceit made by the episode to show the effects more directly.
    • Right, the cocaine teleports into your brain, it doesn't circulate through the same blood that flows through your entire body. And I hope the doctors in the real-life case were sued for malpractice; at least dying of a cocaine overdose gives a reasonable explanation for why they didn't test for rabies. If someone died of an unknown illness, why would you NOT find out what it was before you transplanted their organs?
    • Because they didn't think she died of some unknown disease, but from an overdose. Like a troper below pointed out, she probably DID die of the overdose, she just happened to have rabies too.
    • Actually, yes. As I understand it, snorting cocaine through your nose does more or less put it directly into your brain. Cocaine isn't some poison that's going to infect and contaminate every organ it touches, damaging it irreparably. It's a chemical that has fairly specific effects on the body—primarily, the brain. Note how that article mentions nothing at all about other organs except how they're affected indirectly by the brain's activity. Given how accurate this show usually is, which is to say, very accurate, I'm inclined to believe they would know something about the expected effects of a cocaine overdose on a body.
    • They didn't have time to find out exactly what she died from because those other people were in desperate need of those organs.
    • Actually it was more like, she's a suicidal person, they discover high amounts of cocaine in her (don't remember them saying she dies from cocaine but ok) AND they needed the organs, not to mention that like J.D. said a rabies test with absolute no basis is not done (she probably DID die of an overdose and that's why J.D. and Cox didn't noticed any symptoms of rabies in the time they spend with her)
  • They cover this in the episode - two of the patients are "circling the drain" (dying) so it's ok to take the risk. The reason Dr. Cox gets so upset is that one of the patients who died was healthy enough to have waited a few more months.
  • The OP is talking about what she died of; they are saying that organs have to be matched to the person they are being donated to in the same way that blood is. The odds of her matching all of those patients are extremely slim but even if she did, there is no indication that they even checked that. In other words even if her organs were perfectly healthy, realistically the odds are those patients would still have died because their organs don't match. And the show has done this right before (eg. the Matthew Perry episode, where Perry's character was sought out because he was a match for his dad- even if it turned out to be his stepdad) so this is more noticeable.
    • She probably had what's known as the universal donor blood type. I'm not sure what it is offhand, but one of the blood types can basically be slotted in anywhere. And, as with many Scrubs episodes, this actually happened—the main stretch was that all the organs went to people at the same hospital, but there is a case where an organ donor with rabies had their organs transplanted without being tested for rabies and the other patients died.
    • Blood types is one thing, being a match for an organ transplant is an entirely different thing. If your blood type is A- you cannot donate organs to anyone with A- blood, there are a huge number of other factors involved. In fact, even with blood transfusions it's not that easy. If your blood type is 0- (ie "universal donor") you can give red blood cells to anyone but for plasma it works invertedly, meaning you can only give plasma to another person with 0- blood. That's why donor registries are nation wide (in some cases even international, as with the Tobias registry) - few people are a complete match.
    • You are right that it is highly unlikely that she would be a match for three patients in the same hospital she died in but several previous replies have already noted that this is the case. It is done that way for the sake of the drama, in much the same way that the villain in an action movie just happens to put their plan in motion on the day the hero was visiting the area. The result is certainly a Contrived Coincidence but it is not an impossibility. As for "there is no indication that they even checked that" well, there is usually no indication that the characters have brushed their teeth on any given day but we can probably assume that they did. Not every single part of the process has to be on screen.

• During Season 3, Elliot's recurring boyfriend Sean had gone to New Zealand for the purpose of doing scientific research. In one episode while he was there, Elliot called him, ostensibly during the day for her. Note that Scrubs is set in an indeterminate city in Southern California; the actual hospital where the show was shot is in Los Angeles. Her call apparently came in to Sean during what was ostensibly the middle of the night (or the wee hours of the morning) for him. When watching, I simply accepted that premise at face value, figuring that since New Zealand is almost literally on the other side of the planet, the time difference ought to be obscene. Had a close friend of mine not gone to New Zealand in real life, I doubt that I’d ever have realized that that scene made no sense whatsoever. Even assuming the worst-case scenario (New Zealand on daylight savings time and the United States not), the difference between what time it would be in California and what time it would be in New Zealand is 5 hours. New Zealand would be 19 hours ahead of California in that scenario; that essentially means that they’re 5 hours behind but a day ahead (thanks very fucking much, International Date Line). Depending on what time of the year it was supposed to be (and I’m not sure what that was), the difference between what time it would be in Cali and what time it would be in NZ could be 3, 4, or 5 hours. In each case, NZ would be a day ahead. Elliot would be hard-pressed to call Sean during her workday and reach him in the middle of his night, unless maybe she called him bright-and-fucking-early, first thing in the morning.
  • Sheldon is that you?
  • It's not like she has a 9 to 5 job. It is entirely possible that she called him early in the morning.
• Is it just me or does the show put too much emphasis on Elliot being so pitiful and pathetic in Season 2? This may just be because this troper doesn't like Elliot that much, but it's like they made it completely impossible for Elliot to handle any situation until the start of Season 3.
  • It's a set up for her Character Development later on. Yes, Elliot started as a neurotic mess who hardly achieved anything, but she grew, and she changed. Granted she became flanderized to the point of being a bitch in later seasons, but even that was improved on eventually.
  • It seems like a character retool to make Elliot more sympathetic. In Season 1 she's at first shown as a smug, competitive know-it-all. Making her more neurotic and pitiful serves to make her a little more sympathetic.
• So Carla has the nursing staff spy on Turk during Season 8 and 9 and he's ok with this? He doesn't try and fight it? Does Carla expect him to cheat on her or something?
  • I don't think they are actively spying on Turk in the same way one might hire a PI to spy on someone. It's heavily suggested throughout the show that the nursing staff is fairly gossipy. Nurse Roberts would regularly "spy" on people to obtain juicy gossip. Turk refers to them as spies when they're really just giant gossips who are close to his wife.
• Carla and Turk take ONE home pregnancy test and announce the news to the entire hospital staff. As far as we can tell, no blood test is done (and Turk certainly can't get a blood test before he and JD decide to surprise Carla with the news). Does this not seem incredibly irresponsible for three people who work in the medical profession?
  • It's a pregnancy test, how is that irresponsible? if it turns out that it was a false positive what would had been the harm? that would had made more sense if they weren't actively trying to have a baby.
    • The risk of miscarriage and other complications are far less after 12 weeks — as medical workers would know — and many couples wait at least that amount of time to announce their news to family, let alone co-workers. Recanting a false positive is one thing, but having your entire workplace know you miscarried is probably extremely uncomfortable and stressful.
    • Uncomfortable, stressful (and only in the event of miscarriage happening), yes, not irresponsible, specially since the risk of miscarriage in the first 12 weeks "when you know you're pregnant" is already low. Even more so when both parents are hospital workers and thus can monitor the fetus more closely and more resourcefully.
    • Some people just get very excited to tell people and don't wait the traditional 3 months. Of course, if a miscarriage happens, then they have to go and "untell" everybody. The rate of miscarriage decreases once the heart develops (as seen by high-level ultrasound at 7 weeks). However, being a hospital worker won't decrease your chance of miscarriage before then. You can monitor all you want, but the very young embryo is pretty much on its own to live or die. About the only thing that can affect the outcome is progesterone supplements (and that's only if mom has low natural progesterone).
    • It's only "irresponsible" towards Carla and Turk themselves, and if they decide they don't mind people knowing she's pregnant while still in the period where she could still have a miscarriage, then there's no problem. It's not like someone else is revealing she's pregnant during this time without their consent; it's entirely their decision to make, they have the right to make that decision, it's no one else's place or business to judge them for doing so and the only people who are going to be negatively impacted by any miscarriage in any way that matters are them. Some couples are more comfortable keeping the pregnancy secret until after the twelve-week mark for these reasons, but that doesn't mean that all couples should be or that it's irresponsible if they're not.
• From the episode where Turk was sick of helping the short doctor because it was hurting his back, why didn't he just get a chair? Then he could sit down and assist. It's not like he was doing anything critical anyway.
  • I'm pretty sure surgeons are supposed to stand at all times while they work. Having a chair in the operating room increases the chance of someone tripping over it.
• In "My Case Study", Kelso reveals to Turk that he fakes being nice one day a year so that his employees only bug him that one day of the year. But how would he even manage to build up this whole facade around himself if he's the kind of a man who easily blurts out his secrets?
  • Maybe it's one of those things where everyone knows the secret, but each one of them thinks they're the only one who knows the secret.
  • Let's face it; it's not as is Kelso being a massive prick 99% of the time is any great secret or anything. Chances are, most people probably already figured out Kelso's little game already, but they go along with it because what else are they gonna do?
• Jack Cox? Since Perry and Jordan are divorced and Jordan is using her maiden name, shouldn't he technically be named Jack Sullivan?
  • The same reason why so many children from unmarried couples have their father's last name.
    • Speaking as a Bastard here, I can confirm that I was given my father's last name. Generally, from what I can tell, when naming the kid it is up to the parents to decide which last name s/he would have.
  • My knowledge of US law relating to legal names is limited, but I'm pretty sure whatever they decided to write on Jack's birth certificate is Jack's legal name.
    • When Jack was born Cox and Jordan were still legally married, too.
    • The last name the baby takes is entirely dependent on what the family chooses. I am the child of two separated parents and I was given my mother's last name because that's what she chose. Even though the father's/husband's name is commonly taken in both marriage and childbirth, technically speaking, the baby's last name could be Kelso if they really wanted it to be. They don't actually state if Jordan took Dr. Cox's last name or not when she married him, but it seems that she most likely kept her maiden name. So the baby probably didn't get Dr. Cox's last name legally, but rather, by choice.
• Why are Carla and Elliot so insecure? I know that even grown women aren't confident 100% of the time, but seriously, they spend half of the first few seasons being insecure over the slightest things, like Turk looking at other women, despite being in a committed relationship/engaged to Carla.
  • Because everyone on the show is insecure. The show might as well be titled, "JD's insecure about everything." Turk is plenty insecure about a lot of stuff. Everyone has their insecurities.
  • Yes but the show seems to have so much more focus on Elliot and Carla's insecurities and they get so much sympathy and everyone else's insecurities barely get any and especially in J.D.'s case, the response is generally "Get over it."
  • Simply this, YMMV, Carla is only insecure on a handful of episodes, and several episodes the other character get tired of constantly having to deal with J.D.
  • This is definitely YMMV territory. I think, objectively speaking J.D. and Elliot are the two whose insecurities are the most explored, but as stated above, one of the main points of the show is that everyone is insecure. So Carla and Elliot aren't being specifically targeted.
• Does anyone else get bothered by all of the double standards in this show? Is Bill Lawrence whipped or something?
  • He's married to a scary person
• Why wasn't Doug fired? They fired Cabbage long before he managed to get anyone killed, and Murphy kills tons of patients, yet they still kept him.
  • Doug was funny
  • Sinister explanation. Dr Cox had spoken on several occasions that a lot of the older patients are beyond saving, or at least beyond leading a productive life, and is of the opinion that most med students and interns are murderers (it is his opening rant to them on Scrubs:Med School) anyway. As long as Doug is only practicing on the patients that are already CTD then Dr Cox at least will probably not care too much, and Dr Kelso will probably be happy with all the beds opening up to take in new patients ready for their own wallet-ectomy. Since Doug generally is too nervous to show initiative and generally only goes where he is told, he isn't a problem. Cabbage, he isn't nervous enough. Cabbage isn't even as self-aware as Doug, so he kills people that could be saved, people that might go onto productive lives. He's gotta go.
  • Doug does have some medical talent buried deep, otherwise he wouldn't even make a good coroner, but Cabbage is just a screw up.
  • Leaving aside the obvious "Rule of Funny / it's fictional" answers, Doug appears to be otherwise Book Smart in non-coroner related medical matters; he has and retains the knowledge, but struggles to put it into practice, and he tends to panic and stress out which makes things harder for him. With Doug, it can be answered as a matter of finding where his particular talents are best applied. With Cabbage, he just doesn't have sufficient talent to make it to begin with. I mean, he doesn't wash his hands after touching used medical gloves; that's basic, 101, even-people-with-otherwise-no-medical-knowledge-whatsoever-know-this knowledge that even Doug has probably figured out.
• There's one episode where the main characters bring a teenaged burn victim to his high school graduation and as he is walking across the stage, he collapses and starts screaming in agony because it hurts to walk. What bothers me is that the doctors knew he wasn't completely healed and that it might hurt, especially since they took out his IV. Why couldn't one of them walk across the stage with him? It doesn't seem like there would be a rule against it.
  • I got the impression that he wanted to do it by himself, just graduate like normal. It might be stupid but both teenagers and patients do stupid things against advice all the time. If that is the case then all they can do is be there to pick up the pieces.
  • A doctor can strongly advise a patient that something is a bad idea, but they can't force the patient not to do it if the patient is absolutely determined to do so and is otherwise in sound mental health. As the troper above says, all they can do is pick up the pieces afterwards and hope the patient learns a lesson from it.
• At the end of "My Cabbage", Mrs. Willick comes in contact with the newly-fired Cabbage, and picks up an illness he had unknowingly been carrying. Willick dies the next episode. This is sad and all, but it begs the question: Why didn't Cabbage die too? He was the one that gave Willick the illness in the first place, yet he remained alive for the rest of the show!
  • Because he is young and healthy and she is old and has an already stressed and compromised immune system.
  • Also, we only saw Cabbage get the disease on one of his hands. If he washed his hands shortly afterward there would be no problem. Mrs. Willick, however, got it on her hands and then on her face. From there it probably entered her body through one of her mucus membranes, and then it was too late.

• How can Carla be an RN if she never went to college? At first I thought she was a CA but in order to administer medications you have to be an RN and that is a four year college education.
  • Two possible answers for this one: 1) Carla has been a nurse at Sacred Heart for more than ten years, as she states. This is more than long enough to prove her medical know-how, and with how understaffed the nurses are, they likely needed someone smart with a lot of experience to take the position of RN. Carla is a great fit for this role. She might also be getting tips on this from Laverne, who is likely also an RN. 2) It's Artistic License. No regular viewer is going to know the difference.
  • Kelso also likes Carla and would probably see her as a good fit for the position since she has a good ten years of experience, is a hard worker and displays plenty of leadership qualities.
  • Licensing requirements and hiring preferences for R Ns have become stricter over the years. When Carla started in the eighties or nineties, it was possible to obtain an ADN through a program run by a hospital, instead of through a school, and then take the RN exam. These programs have largely been phased out.
• In one episode, it's revealed that for three years JD's parents called him "Joanna" because they had been expecting a girl. I'm sure it was just a one-time joke but this still bothers me: how the heck did it take them so long to get from Joanna to John, one of the most common boys' names in the country?
  • Rule of Funny
  • If we do need an explanation, it's probably also less that they couldn't think of a boy's name and more that they called him "Joanna" because it made them feel better about not having a girl and helped ease their disappointment a bit, and at that age he probably wouldn't care too much about being called a girl's name anyway. When he started to reach the age where it might get a bit more awkward or potentially even psychologically damaging, they chose a simple boy's name to make the transition easier for all concerned.

• In season 3 Elliot tells a story about how a guy she slept with had told all of his friends what her "orgasm face" looked like. Earlier in the series, she told Carla that she had never had an orgasm and Carla taught her to masturbate so she could experience it for the first time. Discontinuity?
  • Maybe she faked the orgasm with the guy.
  • Could have been making up a story to break the ice with a patient.
  • Maybe she didn't orgasm but made a face that the boy thought was an orgasm.

• A few early episodes deal with the younger characters' financial problems. J.D.'s are legitimate, with him saying he's over $100,000 in debt from med school. But what about Turk and Elliot? Turk has the same standard of living as J.D. (even stealing food and supplies from the hospital to make ends meet), and Elliot says she can't pay her bills after her dad cuts her off. But both are debt-free (having had their educations paid for by wealthy relatives) and steadily employed. Does the hospital really pay that badly (and if so, how is J.D. making it at all?), or are they both just that bad with money?
  • JD flat out explains it in a voice over. New doctors work tons of hours and make very little money. The Janitor teases JD about looking at his personnel file and seeing that he makes more money than JD does. Given that the Janitor has likely been working there for a good while and that JD was at that point very early in his first year of residency, he was very likely telling the truth. Combine this with the fact that nobody but Elliot grew up with much money, college and medical school is obviously very expensive and this is their first job after medical school- so yes, it is reasonable to believe that JD, Elliot, and Turk were that poor. Heck, Carla probably made more than Turk early on.

• In "My Missed Perception", Mrs Wilk really did give JD every indication that she knew she was dying. JD informed her that her organs were shutting down and that any treatment he could give her would only buy her some time. Her response was even 'I've had a great life' which she later claims was said because she meant 'I want to keep living a great life'. So doesn't that mean she knew her condition was terminal? Otherwise, it just makes no sense for her to have said it. JD is still at fault for not having been clearer, but this particular patient was pretty dense.
  • JD cut her off before she could officially make her decision. He jumped to a conclusion and, considering it was a decision of whether Mrs Wilk would let herself die or not, a pretty irresponsible one at that.

• Maybe this is just due to different definitions in different countries but, why does the Janitor do all the cleaning? Wouldnt that be the cleaners job? And the janitor would be someone who did other stuff such as fixing the lights etc? Im in the UK and everywhere I've ever studied or worked, the janitor has never done the cleaning. They've always been on the maintenance side of things.
  • In the US, "janitor" is a catch-all term for any maintenance worker, who do the cleaning as well as repairs, maintenance, etc.

• In the S1 episode "My Two Dads", Dr. Cox gets mad at JD for telling Kelso about a dead patient being scheduled for a procedure. Cox's reasoning is that another patient needed the procedure but had no insurance while the dead guy had great insurance. So unless I'm off, was Cox trying to commit insurance fraud?
  • Yes. One of Cox's character traits is that he hates the American Healthcare Insurance System and sees its very existence as defrauding patients, so he is prepared to defraud the insurance company and hospital to the benefit of a patient; to him it is a victimless crime.
    • Also, Cox (and others) genuinely want to help patitents and dont think someone should miss out of a life saving procedure or something that would dramatically improve their quality of life, just because they cant afford insurance to pay that. Therefore when they get the chance to use someone elses insurance to do that they will. Hell even Kelso was happy to do that with his homeless friend in one of the later seasons.

• S5 My Own Personal Hell, why is Elliot framed as being in the right for giving Keither preferential treatment? And why is it treated as J.D learning a lesson to have to love Keither because his friend is dating him? This side-steps the issue entirely.

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