YMMV / Scrubs

• Accidental Aesop:
  • One whole season two episode is dedicated to the fact that all the residents are underpaid relative to their rent costs and living expenses. Turk and J.D. scrape by using hospital supplies "On loan" aka stealing them. Elliott is the only one living luxuriously because her father supports her; he ends up cutting her off when she refuses to go into OB-Gyn to please him, causing temporary homelessness and her stuff to be stolen. While the main lesson is that there is a price to standing up for your principles, the other seems to be that residents ought to be paid better so that they aren't left to the mercy of others.
  • Being Good Sucks and yet doctors have to make the right decision to remove a moral hazard. J.D. reports that the most beloved doctor in the hospital, nicknamed Townsie, made him do an outdated procedure that endangered a patient. Kelso likes Dr. Townshend and is angry at J.D., but simply tells him to move along when erasing Townshend's name from the rounds board, having found out that his oldest friend hasn't used any new procedures in years. In revenge for getting said doctor retired, the Janitor's crew destroy his car. In contrast, when Turk lets a patient drive despite Kelso pointing out she may be legally blind, she runs into Kelso and could have badly injured him.
  • NEVER date patients or family members of said patients. It can create undue and very unnecessary drama. Case in point, while J.D. is crushing on "Tasty Coma Wife" aka Jamie, he invites trouble on learning that Jamie was interested in him. The reason is that everyone in the hospital judges him since her husband is still technically alive. Later, Elliott pegs that Jamie was interested in J.D. because dating him caused drama and the thrill goes away after her husband dies. J.D. brushes her off, but later realizes that she was right. Likewise, Elliott finds out that the father of a sick boy has a wife after she had been making out with him for weeks. When the wife finds out, she spends the whole day chasing down Elliott and not letting her explain herself. Ted is the exception that proves the rule since he slept with a consenting terminally ill patient, who said she wanted to lose her virginity before she died.
  • Being Personal Isn't Professional. Dr. Cox asks Jordan to let the doctor on staff serve as Jack's pediatrician since he shares Dr. Cox's abrasive personality. It seems to work, and the guy is good with kids. Then he and Dr. Cox get into a petty feud when Jack develops a cough, and the doctor tells him to wait and schedule an appointment like every other doctor in his "jackass" manner. Dr. Cox goes so far as to kidnap the guy's favorite puppet, and send a felt hand through the mail. After a What the Hell, Hero? from Carla, Dr. Cox returns the puppet, admits he didn't cut it up, and apologizes. In the end, Dave tells Dr. Cox that his son isn't badly sick, he has the sniffles; if he had said that from the start, none of this would have happened.
• Adorkable:
  • JD is an incredibly friendly and nerdy guy who has fantasies in his head and narrates all the time in his head. It's one of the reasons his patients and friends like him so much because he's so approachable.
  • Elliot is a pretty good combination of this in her early years. She was very shy, short in stature, and had a tendency to cry under pressure; but her determination to become a doctor kept her going. In the later seasons, she shows shades of this, but it's overshadowed by her confidence, neurosis and her many flaws.
  • Keith is a Shrinking Violet in his first appearance. Despite being a Hunk, he's also endearingly dorky, like when he joins in Ted mixing pop rocks and soda or when he gleefully exclaims "I want cool morgue friends! Hey, guys!" His adorable smile sells it.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Bob Kelso's mix of Jerkass behavior along with his rare Pet the Dog moments mean fans will fairly heavily debate as to how much of a jerk he really is.
    • Specifically his abuse of Ted, is it just for kicks, or is Kelso actually trying to get Ted to quit his job as a lawyer, that he sucks at and is unhappy with, so he might find a better place for himself in the world i.e. as a musician? Certain episodes can point in either direction but post retirment Kelso does display some actual care for Ted after all.
  • Some of the fanbase speculates that Dr. Cox is a Jerkass to JD partially because he doesn't want JD to idolize him as he sees himself as a terrible role model.
    Dr. Cox: Newbie... what are you saying? That you want to be like me? [speaking lower and softer] Don't you understand that I just barely want to be like me?
  • It’s never made a huge deal out of, but there’s a lot of throwaway lines in the first few seasons implicating that Cox used to be similar to JD when he was an intern and resident, but had to get hard and mean to be the best.
  • Was Danni's abrupt change in personality really her being herself after being dumped the first time by J.D. or a coping mechanism after her brother died.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • There were a lot of complaints about the episode "My Lunch" where a patient dies and has her organs transplanted into other patients, but it turns out she died from rabies and the transplants get it too and how this was unrealistic. But this was actually based on a real case from 2004. While there have also been more than a dozen other reported cases of rabies being transplanted with organs, including the infection of multiple recipients from a single donor, the real complaint was that one donor would be a match for three patients in the same hospital.
  • In one episode the Janitor invents the seemingly-insane "knife-wrench"... which is something that actually exists, though the real-life ones tend to feature a folding blade to help keep the user from stabbing himself like the Janitor does.
• Award Snub:
  • Other than Zach Braff, none of the cast were nominated for an Emmy or Golden Globe. Particularly infuriating since John C. McGinley has had some of the most phenomenal, intense scenes on the show.
  • Case in point: The ending of "My Lunch". How the HELL did that not get him an award or at the very least, a nomination?
  • And speaking of Braff, he only got nominated for a single Emmy during the entire run of the show.
• Awesome Ego: Dr. Cox is the absolute epitome of this trope; each and every one of his bragging rants is a Moment of Awesome.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Is Carla a well intentioned Spicy Latina whose controlling and overbearing ways stem from a tough childhood and a genuine want to help people? Or is she a bossy and manipulative bitch who has to be right all of the time, and treats her supposed friends and husband like they're beneath her?
  • Is Elliot a sympathetic character? Some feel that her low self-esteem and dysfunctional upbringing justifies it, but others feel that it doesn't excuse her selfish or neurotic actions when she's loathed with self-doubt. There's also how her character changed during Season 2; she was initially a smug know-it-all that eventually became a neurotic Genki Girl - some preferring the former and others the latter.
  • J.D.'s brother Dan. On the one hand, he's a sympathetic loser that's afraid of going somewhere with his life and knows it when he told Dr. Cox that J.D. looked up to him in a way J.D. would never look up to Dan. Moreover, he gets his act together thanks to J.D. being a good influence on him and does help his brother out when things go wrong. On the other hand, he mooches off his brother, teases his brother at the worst times, and once slept with Elliot despite knowing that she and J.D. dated as well as J.D.'s college girlfriend. Whether Dan deserves pity or not and whether he has significantly changed or not greatly varies between each fan.
  • Fans tend to pretty universally agree that Kim lying to J.D. about having a miscarriage, emotionally pressuring him back into a relationship he made clear he no longer could trust, then throwing him out of her delivery room when she discovered he didn't love her, were all despicable things to do to someone. There was a bit of a split, however, between people still sympathetic to Kim as someone making terrible, unfair choices due to being scared and extremely emotionally compromised; people who think that's ultimately no excuse for how she treated J.D.; and even people who believed that she's a deliberately toxic and manipulative person who uses whatever excuse she can to get people to like her and be sympathetic towards her.
• Better on DVD: Scrubs is actually considered to be better on DVD rather than Netflix because so much of the music has been changed for licensing reasons, and not always for the better. Some airings, particularly E4, also heavily censored the show when it was shown before the Watershed.
• Broken Aesop:
  • In "My Unicorn" the Aesop is supposed to be about Murray Marks learning to forgive his father and that whats truly important is the fact Gregory Mark deeply loves his son. Yet apparently not so much that he won't freely admit to having once stolen Murray's college girlfriend and took her to the Bahamas. We're supposed to forget he's a Jerkass who still hasn't apologised for how he treated Murray. It's Murray who apologises in the end.
  • In an early episode when J.D. surpasses Carla in medical knowledge, she later decides to tell off Dr Cox for giving J.D. trouble instead of letting him handle his own problems. This of course leads Dr. Cox to heap even more abuse on J.D. J.D. lashes out at her for giving him advice (in a rather condescending manner while calling him Bambi) during a procedure. He apologizes, but that is not enough for Carla as she later rants at him about not being respected enough and how J.D. looked down on her. So the lesson is to not look down on your subordinates. Yet Carla showed less respect by interfering in his business and telling him what to do.
  • In another episode after J.D. finds out about Kim's miscarriage and he is depressed. He learns from Carla, Elliot, and Turk to stop being a burden to them after he "has driven them crazy for six years". This coming from people who drag J.D. into 80% of their relationship problems (Carla and Turk) and has helped Elliot since day one.
  • My Perspective is supposed to be about J.D. learning how to not force his own problems on other people and he needs to work on them him and seeing things from their perspective. Fair enough, the problem is is that when you look back on the show, you realize that J.D.'s friends are the ones who actually force their problems on him, like Turk forcing him to get in the middle of his fight with Carla to try and get her to come home, despite J.D.'s protests. Not only that, but it comes across as hollow because J.D. is now homeless because he couldn't keep Elliot's apartment and he just broke up with his girlfriend who he believes has miscarried their child. And he's now gotten a condition where he passes out when he poops, which could have led to serious injury if he had hit his head on something. He shouldn't be alone during this.
  • The two-parter of "My Malpractice Decision" and "My Female Trouble" has two contradicting morals with the same patient Turk treated. The patient wasn't satisfied with the quality of his surgery, and thus started harassing Turk every chance he got to treat him again. This culminates in Turk filing a restraining order, and then the patient suing him for malpractice. The moral of the episode is about karma, and in Turk's case, the narration treats what he did as bad, and the lawsuit is his Laser-Guided Karma. Come the next episode, the moral is about the strength of a woman. However, in Carla's case, she ends up threatening the same patient that sued Turk with violence to stop the lawsuit, and gets her way. Carla is praised as strong and independent for threatening a patient with violence, while Turk's lawsuit is treated as a punishment he deserved, even though he never went so far as to threaten the man.
• Broken Base: Season 9. Either the worst thing to happen to the show, or a decent season brought down by huge expectations. Some fans look at it not as a Scrubs season, but a Spin-Off like Bill Lawrence originally intended.
• Catharsis Factor: JD giving the "Reason You Suck" Speech to Carla, Turk, Cox and Elliot in "My TCW" - calling them out on their hypocrisy. He also does a magnificent impression of Cox - to which the latter gives an especially annoyed reaction. Carla and Turk get called out for their Wangst over a bit of arguing since their engagement, and Elliot is reminded of how horribly she treated JD when she used him for sex and then moved on to dating Paul ("for once, it's nice to see you sabotage a relationship from the outside"). Many fans cite this as their favorite scene in the whole series.
• Crosses the Line Twice
  • Todd is a walking moment of this. He makes excuses to insert innuendos into every moment of medicine and trademarks his hi-fives.
  • A montage of doctors describing their "first kills" (making a bad call that directly leads to a patient's death) and J.D.'s paralyzing fear it'll happen to him? Existentially horrifying. Doug repeatedly showing up in the montage saying "My first day...", "My third day"... "20 minutes ago..."? Hysterical.
  • When Ms. Tanner elects to die rather than undergo dialysis, J.D. has an Imagine Spot where a deliveryman asks him to sign for a pile of bricks. The bricks fall on J.D., enveloping him. When the deliveryman politely asks for his pen back, J.D.'s hand reaches out of the pile to give it to him.
  • The first season's Christmas episode. Listing all the horrible things Turk has to see that day? Depressing. Having them sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas"? Hilarious.
  • In Season 2, Sacred Heart is regularly visited by Jamie Moyer, the lovely young wife of a comatose car crash victim. In her introductory scene, J.D. sadly explains that she and her husband, Jack, were deeply in love, and were only married for 3 weeks before his tragic accident. The episode's title is the same as the nickname Sacred Heart's residents have given Jamie: Tasty Coma Wife (T.C.W. for short).
    • It gets worse when J.D. and Jamie hook up in the broom closet at Jack's funeral.
      J.D.: Well, you look fantastic! And, you know, I don't mean 'Hey, dude, check out that hot bitty at the bar!' fantastic — I'm talking about 'I'm sorry for your loss' fantastic.
  • One real Cold Open that isn't J.D.'s Imagine Spot is Dr. Kelso telling the new interns that he's going to call the men Daves and the females Debbies. One girl chuckles and explains Debbie is also her name. Dr. Kelso then says in the interest of fairness to the others, he'll call her Slagathor. It shouldn't be funny, and J.D. has a sympathetic, baffled look, but Debbie's kicked-puppy face is adorably hilarious.
  • Jordan's Imagine Spot in "Their Story". For context, Cox told her off for giving relationship advice like she's Oprah, so Jordan imagines herself as a talk show host. Her guest is Barbara, who is a cancer survivor and formed a headscarf company. Before Barbara can go farther than a few lines about her chemo, Jordan calls her story a downer and says "scarves are tacky." Everyone is offended, including Barbara. Then Jordan cuts to herself and a little girl (Christa Miller's real daughter) dancing, to the audience's delight. The dance is so ridiculous that you can't help but smile.
  • When Turk wants to be the face of World's Most Giant Doctor, J.D. reminds him that "We tried Giant Black Guy, remember? People ran."
  • J.D. once tried to prove that Turk slept with his college girlfriend Stacy by calling her and asking her about it. He gets Stacy's mother instead, who informs him that Stacy died a while back by falling asleep in a pool. Solemn music begins to play, then J.D. then asks if Stacy had ever talked about banging a black guy during her college days. Stacy's mother hangs up on him while he's describing what Stacy would like about Turk.
  • After Laverne's funeral, Doug reveals that he hasn't seen his cellphone since he did her autopsy. "You don't think if I call it...?"
  • The senile racist who needs to be reminded who he hates and why.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Julie - played by Mandy Moore in two Season 5 episodes - as a female version of JD, only significantly clumsier and more Adorkable. She has her share of fans wishing she'd been a regular.
  • Denise in seasons 8 and 9, thanks to her interesting Foil dynamic with J.D. and her Tomboy personality that makes her very distinct from the other female cast members.
  • In Season 9, Drew, due to his Dark and Troubled Past, Deadpan Snarker attitude and that his character actually is interesting.
  • Jordan, who was originally intended as a one-shot character, but her popularity made her part of the main cast.
  • Hooch only appears in four episodes but he's one of the most memorable and well remembered characters.
  • Stephanie Gooch, despite only appearing in the second half of season 8 and a one-off appearance in season 9, has a lot of fans thanks to being so utterly adorable and good-hearted.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • J.D./Cox is the most popular ship in the fandom, despite the fact that JD and Elliot end up together and Dr. Cox has been in a stable relationship with his ex-wife since season 2. It's also kind of ironic because canon-wise, J.D. and Turk are the ones who have a lot of Ho Yay.
  • J.D./Elliot grew into such a pairing in the fandom as the show continued to run well past the third season where Bill Lawrence had written the ending to definitively shut down that relationship. But he eventually caved under fan pressure, as the fandom weren't interested in any of the new romantic interests and the writers began building more Ship Tease between the two in later seasons and eventually having them get back together and stay together in the eighth season.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Many fans weren't happy with Season 9.
  • Even more fans were unhappy with the implication that Gooch had left Ted in one episode of Cougar Town. Worse that she supposedly left him for Hooch!
• Fountain of Memes: The show in general qualifies as this, but Dr. Cox alone has to go down as one of the biggest meme generators in all of sitcom history.
• Franchise Original Sin: J.D. and Elliot getting back together after their initial breakup. When they got back together in Season 8 and ended the series as a happily married couple (despite Season 1 making it clear that they were horribly ill-suited to each other as romantic partners), it was widely cited as a major contributor to the show's Seasonal Rot. Ironically, though, they first got back together in Season 2—which is widely considered the show's best season, and frequently cited as its Growing the Beard moment. Fans just didn't mind it then, since the writers actually used that plot development as a vehicle for fleshing out their relationship, and it came with believable consequences (they find that they still aren't emotionally compatible and try to become casual sex partners, but find that it puts too much of a strain on their friendship). By contrast: when it happened in Season 8, fans and critics strongly disliked the writers' attempts to paper over their flaws and insecurities to make them seem more compatible, which largely just made both of them less interesting. It also helped that J.D. and Elliot were both single when they got back together in Season 2, so their romantic reunion didn't require derailing their relationships with other characters.
• Gratuitous Special Effects: There was an Imagine Spot Once an Episode that often featured somewhat elaborate special effects. For instance, in an early episode, J.D. imagines that his head blows up in a scene that would be more appropriate in a horror film, not a comedy/medical drama.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Season 2 was when the Character Development of the cast started to become notable with the main cast having to step out of the shadow of their mentors. Elliot in particular being cut off by her dad and was forced to support herself. The show started to find a balance between the dramatic, realistic moments paired with the Rapid-Fire Comedy. Season three took steps to start evolving the relationships further and avoid staying too much on one joke, with Dr. Cox and Jordan becoming parents and Turk and Carla getting married.
  • Season 6 and 7 saw a downturn with a heavier reliance on a wacky Imagine Spot and more cartoonish personalities, season 7 was in fact supposed to be the last but the chaos from the writers strike lead them to seek one more Finale Season to finish it off right. In turn Season 8 was almost universally praised as repairing a lot of the problems of the previous seasons. Better plots, stronger acting, and a return to more grounded emotional moments let them end the show on a high note (regardless of what you thought of Season Nine: Med School). J.D. did in fact grow a beard, possibly in reference to the trope.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Season 2 opens with J.D. apologizing to Dr. Cox for sleeping with Jordan, something Jordan revealed with glee. He explains that he didn't know who Jordan was — Cox's ex-wife— and he wouldn't have otherwise done it. It takes the whole episode for Dr. Cox to forgive him because he knows J.D. would never intentionally hurt him. "My Own Private Practice Guy" later in the season reveals that the title character slept with Jordan, which ruined Dr. Cox's marriage, and he was unrepentant about it. To make matters worse, J.D. goes Entertainingly Wrong about how he thinks they're fighting over him until he realizes they're talking about Jordan.
  • In "My Lucky Day", Elliot's patient asks her if she ever faced her own mortality, and she says no. Then four seasons later in "My Fishbowl" Elliot admits to another patient that she almost committed suicide via drowning. Even worse, in the former she also said that her parents cutting her off made her feel like she was drowning.
  • In "My Dream Job", Dr. Cox blasts JD and Turk for showing up at work after having had a few beers. In "My Fallen Idol", Cox shows up drunk to work after the events of the aforementioned "My Lunch" in which his decisions lead to the deaths of three patients.
  • John Ritter's line in his guest-star appearance: "I'd love to go to your lecture on heart murmurs! I'm a big fan of those things!". Ritter later died of a heart attack.
  • In "My Tormented Mentor", Dr. Kelso attends a mandatory sexual harassment seminar after he and male staff members receive complaints about their inappropriate behavior. The episode is now depressingly relevant given that in recent years people have spoken out against toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in the workplace thanks to #MeToo and #TimesUp.
  • In "My Urologist", Carla, loopy from pregnancy hormones, begs Elliot not to dump her boyfriend Keith and due him stepping in when Carla was yelling at Elliot for no reason, she stays with him...... for another season, then she leaves him the week before their wedding. Keith would have probably preferred it if Carla had let Elliot end it then.
    • For that matter, in "My Therapeutic Month" when Carla is complaining that Elliot and Keith aren't taking her advice, she tells them they are like every other couple. When they get defensive, they say their love is special and Carla bluntly tells them it isn't. Unfortunately for Keith, she was right.
  • In general, the numerous jokes playing sexual impropriety for humor can be uncomfortable to watch after Eric Weinberg, one of the show's writers and producers, was charged with multiple counts of rape in 2022, and and even before his arrest, was revealed to have had a history of inappropriate behavior towards women that got him fired from the show after its sixth season.
    • On the DVD extras, the Scrubs set having a "no assholes" policy is pointed out a few times, and a disgruntled crew member hiding Rowdy (inspiring a plot line in the Season 4 finale) is treated as the most heinous thing done by any of the people working on the show. While Eric Weinberg isn't featured in most of the extras, not only is he talking about relationships in one of the extras he did appear in, but the fact that showrunner Bill Lawrence was aware of his behavior at the time makes the extras seem like they were trying too hard to claim that the production of the show and the people involved were without serious issues.
  • The Caucasian Dr. Cox spending an entire episode taunting the African-American Turk about him actually being white because of the things he says/does/likes—and Turk actually questioning his identity because of this was pretty uncomfortable to watch even when it aired. Nowadays it would undeniably be considered racist bullying on Cox's part.
  • As well as the scene where he openly stares at Dr. Miller's chest when she's talking to him. When she blasts him for it, he responds by unapologetically making a snide comment about how she's dressed, effectively telling her that she deserves to be harassed because of it. This would get him slapped with a complaint these days.
  • In "My Own Private Practice Guy", Jay Mohr plays a doctor who was once Dr. Cox's friend and student until he slept with Jordan while she and Perry were married, resulting in their divorce. In Ghost Whisperer, Mohr's character gets an idea of how Cox felt when he discovers that his wife had an affair while she was alive.
  • In "My Inconvenient Truth", Dan reveals he took J.D.'s advice and finds a successful career flipping houses. This was toward the end of the series, right before the 2008 housing crisis. He may have been better off staying in the bartending business...
  • In "My Unicorn", guest star Matthew Perry plays Murray, who at one point complains that his father gave him an "old man's name". He demonstrates this by randomly yelling out "Murray!" after which all the doors in the hallway open, and old men step out from their rooms to ask "What?". This gag is done again seconds later, followed by J.D. clarifying "The youngest Murray!", at which point most of the old men return to their rooms aside from Perry's character and an old man saying that he's 68 years old (followed by Perry's character stating that he's only 34, making the old man grumpily return to his room). This scene feels more morbid after Perry's death in 2023 at the age of 54, never being able to match the age of the "youngest" Murray from this scene...
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • J.D despairs in season 8 when he chooses an intern named Denise who doesn't know how to show empathy towards patients. A few episodes later, Denise emphasizes to him that it's exactly why she's happy he became her mentor; she knows it's a failing of hers that she needs to correct. J.D. ended up making the right call.
  • In "My First Day", after helping Elliot during rounds, J.D. has a fantasy where he is married to Elliot with a kid and the end of "My Finale" involves J.D. wondering about his future and imagining such possibilities as he and Elliot getting married and having a child, his son and Izzy as adults getting engaged, and Cox giving him a sincere hug. As he leaves Sacred Heart, he's optimistic that these moments could actually happen (unlike the zany stuff he usually fantasizes about). By the start of Season 9, J.D. and Elliot are shown to have gotten married, and she's expecting.
• He Really Can Act:
  • If there was any doubt about John C. McGinley's acting, they were erased in "My Lunch". The scene of Dr. Cox breaking down as he realized that he killed three of his patients is absolutely heartbreaking and is often considered to be one of the best moments in the entire show's run, an accolade especially notable thanks to the episode falling in the divisive season 5, and was the cause of quite a few recommendations for an Emmy nomination.
  • Likewise, while Ken Jenkins' acting had been solid throughout the series, the ending of "My Jiggly Ball" provides a standout moment for him as Kelso exits the hospital. With nothing but a single facial expression, Jenkins perfectly captures the remorse Kelso feels about the events that had just unfolded, firmly showing that there is indeed some humanity in the character after all.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the main characters is named Perry Cox. Both Matthew Perry and Courtney Cox guest starred in the show.
  • In "My Hero", J.D. sings the praises of Tony Shalhoub for his performance in Wings. Shalhoub later went on to win an Emmy for Best Leader Actor in a Comedy Series for his role in Monk, beating Zach Braff who was also nominated for that category. This lead to his declaration in "My Own Worst Enemy".
  "Suck on that, Tony Shalhoub!"
  • During one of Dr. Cox's epic rants, he names Hugh Jackman winning an Oscar as one of the worst things that could possibly happen in the world. In 2012, Tom Hoopers' big budget adaptation of Les Misérables (2012), caused many critics to place Jackman (playing Jean Valjean) at the top of their lists for potential Best Actor nominees/winners. Dr. Cox's relief can be assumed, since the Oscar wound up going to Daniel Day-Lewis for his role in Lincoln.
  • The "My Way Home" episode parodied The Wizard of Oz and was directed by Zach Braff. Come 2013 and Braff co-stars in Oz the Great and Powerful.
  • In "My Big Bird," Jason Bateman plays a garbage man/amateur ostrich farmer. In Season 4 of Arrested Development, ostriches are an Arc Symbol and frequent Running Gag.
  • In "My New Old Friend," Kelso tells Turk that he needs to remember that "everybody lies" when they're speaking to a doctor. A year later, this would become the catchphrase of another misanthropic doctor.
  • In "Our Driving Issues" Denise comments that Drew "kinda has a serial killer vibe." Guess what role Michael Mosley plays on Castle?
  • In the scene with Carla's Even the Girls Want Her moment towards Julie (Heather Locklear) Elliot spends the whole scene being scandalized. Fast forward to the numerous such moments Elliot gets as the series goes on, to the degree that she appears Ambiguously Bi. Not to mention in Season 1, JD has an Imagine Spot of ending up in Elliot's 'friend zone' full of potential love interests, which has a girl optimistically saying "she'll come around".
  • In "My Dream Job", Turk and JD got out for drinks a day before work with their old friend Spence (played by Ryan Reynolds), which gets them into trouble with Dr. Cox. Years later, Donald Faison revealed a rather embarrassing incident involving him and Reynolds that occurred while he was drunk at a party.
  • In "His Story IV", The Janitor suggests that the US should be looking for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2011, bin Laden was located and killed in Pakistan by SEAL Team 6. Given the Janitor is something of a Memetic Badass among some fans, this has resulted in jokes that the Janitor killed bin Laden.
  • In "My Long Goodbye", Kelso jokingly asks Cox, who has shaved his head, if he will be "too busy fighting Superman". John C. McGinley would later voice Metallo in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies who did indeed fight Superman.
    • Even before then, McGinley had battled Superman, in a fashion — he went up against Dean Cain (who played Superman in Lois & Clark) in a Celebrity Edition of American Gladiators years prior to Scrubs.
  • The show would often make fun of Grey's Anatomy, which is funny as Donald Faison would later appear in a crossover Cigna commercial alongside Patrick Dempsey.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • While the first few seasons were about J.D. learning how to improve himself as a doctor and a person, later seasons progressively were examples of this instead. A controversial example was after he found out that Kim lied to him about having miscarried. While he did do some things wrong in dealing with it (like running out when she wanted to talk), after he upsets her (ironically she was one of the only people to say he had legitimate reasons for it) everyone turns on him when they find out.
  • Poor JD gets this yet again when he and Elliot sleep together seconds before Sean returns, having implied that she wanted to get back together with him. Elliot then rekindles her relationship with Sean, and when JD rightly points out that it isn't fair, Elliot responds with a rather cutting 'you're supposed to be my friend'. Once again JD is considered to be in the wrong for being upset.
  • Kim herself got this in her first on screen appearance. J.D. finds out that Kim passed on performing a risky surgery to keep her stats up and gives her a Reason You Suck speech; Kim "learns a lesson" from this and does the surgery, even though the other doctors (including Doctor Cox) treat her passing on it as a fairly reasonable thing to do considering the demands of her job. This is especially glaring when another episode sees Turk pass on a risky surgery for more or less the same reasons as Kim did and yet the episode treats it as a good thing.
  • Elliot's interns are apparently being jerks because they're mad Elliot is showing preferential treatment to Keith, whom she's sleeping with, but at the end of the episode J.D lectures them on being jealous because Keith is the best intern. This does nothing to address how unfair it is to give him preferential treatment, which is swept under the rug.
  • In "My Mirror Image," Jordan tells Dr. Cox he needs to work on his anger issues when he gets angry at Jack throwing food at him and responds by doing the same. When the episode ends, Dr. Cox "learns his lesson" and when Jack throws food again, he just ignores it...because letting your child getting away with being a brat is good parenting?
• Iron Woobie: Dr. Kevin Casey, who has severe OCD, a really horrible condition to have when you're a doctor and surgeon who has to interact with all sorts of body parts and diseases. Despite this crippling disability, Dr. Casey shoulders his responsibilities and suffering alone, refusing to pass it on or complain about it, because everyone has their burdens, and as a doctor his pain is not as important as that of his patients.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Kelso being revealed to be a heartless jerk was supposed to be a twist in the pilot episode, and the friendly demeanor he presents through most of the episode is all fake. Of course, if you never saw the pilot, but have seen most other episodes, then you already know going in Kelso is mean, and is just putting on an act right from the start.
  • "My Bad" features the surprise plot twist that Jordan Sullivan is actually Dr. Cox's ex-wife. Given that she eventually became a prominent recurring character, it's more-or-less impossible to discuss her in the later episodes without bringing this up.
  • "My Screw Up" ends with The Reveal that Ben has been dead for most of the episode, and Dr. Cox was just imagining talking to him. This is now the single most famous thing about that episode, and it's a big part of why it's one of the show's most acclaimed episodes.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Dr. Cox. His father was physically and emotionally abusive and showed love by throwing bottles and intentionally missing and his mother just stood there and watched silently as it happened and it was so bad he can't see his sister without all of the memories coming back. And despite his best efforts to make his marriage to Jordan work, she cheated on him with his resident at the time and he spends everyday in self-loathing and no matter how hard he tries, he can't stop screwing things up that might make him happy and he has to deal with patients dying on him all the time no matter how hard he tries to help them.
  • Carla. She's often bossy, stubborn and a control freak and her relationship with Turk is incredibly unhealthy in many ways at times, but at the same time, she has a lot of insecurities and her mother dies during the early seasons.
  • Kelso in "My Jiggly Ball". He doesn't always feel good about the decisions he has to make for budgetary reasons.
  • The Janitor. On one hand, he's lazy, mean-spirited, and cruel to JD. On the other, he's also virtually ignored or disrespected by the entire hospital staff, has a hopeless crush on Elliot, is implied to have been abused by his mother, and in some cases, his issues with JD are in fact provoked by JD causing him physical harm (Pulling the ladder away in My Brother, My Keeper and closing the elevator door on him in His Story, for example).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Where do you think we are?" ^ExplanationThe scene where JD asks this of Cox who hasn't quite accepted the death of his best friend. has become one on 4chan, used when posters express shock or concern over something another poster has said.
  • "Bajingo" is still widely used as a euphemism for "vagina" thanks to this show. (Elliot used it due to being uncomfortable talking about sex)
• Narm: JD's goofy expression at the end of "My Lips Are Sealed," unless it was supposed to be funny.
• One-Scene Wonder: Dr Cox's Season 2 episode girlfriend Julie, played by Heather Locklear, only appeared in two episodes but is among the more memorable girls of the week.
• Pandering to the Base: Bill Lawrence made it frequently clear the first few years that J.D. and Elliot were never intended as an endgame couple, with the writing making it quite clear they were not a good couple even if they might be very close friends. The fans, on the other hand, did want them to end up together, and the writers pulled back from what might have otherwise been several Ship Sinking moments to try and wring more drama out of the pairing. Eventually the fans got what they wanted, with J.D. and Elliot getting back together for good by Season 8.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Hiro from Heroes was a recurring lab technician.
  • Gift Shop Girl is Ellie Bartowski.
  • Spence, J.D's and Turk's college friend, is Deadpool.
  • The father of the Patient of the Week in "My Nah Nah Nah" is FBI Agent Peter Burke.
  • The little boy who the Janitor terrorized with 'the ghost who hates spills' went on to play a teenage Nathan Drake.
  • Irwin from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy was a minor character named Becky in a few season 1 episodes.
  • J.D.'s brother Dan is the Reverse-Flash.
  • While Elizabeth Banks had shown up in the Spider-Man Trilogy and cult hits like Slither, she'd become more famous in the mainstream thanks to The Hunger Games, Pitch Perfect, The LEGO Movie etc.
  • After Ed got fired, he moved to Pawnee to became an administrative assistant in the Parks and Recreation department.
  • Elliot's patient in "My Number One Doctor", a woman with ALS who chooses to take her own life, is Michelle Slater.
• The Scrappy:
  • Kim. Mostly due to the fact she lied to J.D. about miscarrying their child just because she didn't think a relationship would work between them. And then when he gets back with her for their child's sake and he tries to tell her he's not ready to say he loves her or anything like that, she rips into him and dumps him and then the show immediately makes him the bad guy. Even her introduction in Season 5 is hated as she apparently has been in the show all along and J.D. ignored her because she had a wedding ring, which made J.D. look absolutely shallow.
  • Ed the intern, the not worthy of being a doctor whatsoever since all he does is slack off and start stupid trends. Many were relieved when he was pulled from the show due to his actor having commitments with another network.
  • Cole from Season 9, for being damn near exactly the same as Ed, but given more focus. They tried to make him sympathetic by giving him cancer for one episode but it didn't work.
  • Dr. Miller was introduced in season 3 as Turk's personal "Dr. Cox". Unfortunately, she was an unlikeable shrew as she had all of his Jerkass qualities and then some, to the point of her almost being a caricature of Feminism, with none of the Pet the Dog moments. She was also a terrible mentor: she was only in six episodes, and in that time she managed to threaten Turk’s career multiple times (and ruin his wedding) over petty personal differences. Character Shilling from Elliot (herself already starting her slide into Scrappydom) didn’t help matters, and she was promptly written out of the show after her one season.
  • Carla's brother Marco was also introduced around the same time as a massive Jerkass towards Turk because he mistook him for a valet at his mother's funeral and has hated him ever since, and unlike The Janitor, who plays pranks on J.D., his actions come off as spiteful and mean-spirited rather than funny.
  • Jimmy the Overly Touchy Orderly. His one-note shtick of touching people is more disturbing than funny.
  • Dr. Cox and Jordan's son, Jack, since he acts like a brat a lot of the time but since he's their Morality Pet, they almost never punish him or correct his behavior (Or more likely because Cox and Jordan think their son being a brat to other people is funny).
• Seasonal Rot:
  • Seasons 5-7 are generally considered this, though opinion varies on when precisely it set in (halfway through Season 5 is a popular choice) and how bad it actually got. The show leaned more heavily on Imagine Spots, quick gags, cheap jokes, and many of the plotlines fell flat; Season 7 in particular suffered from being cut short by the WGA strike, which prevented many of the planned storylines coming to fruition, along with the network airing the episodes out of their intended order. That said, season 8 is generally considered one of, if not the best, season of the show.
  • It should also be noted that for all the flak season 5 gets, its 20th episode "My Lunch" is widely considered to be one of the best episodes the show has ever had, thanks in no small part to an absolutely stellar performance by John C. McGinley.
  • And of course, some fans claim that Season 9 is so awful that they're willing to defend seasons 5 to 7 despite having ragged on them earlier.
• Signature Scene: Ask any fan to talk about a scene from the show off the cuff and nine times out of ten they'll start talking about Dr. Cox's breakdown in "My Lunch". Thanks to a combination of a downright amazing performance from John C. McGinley, the cinematography's very subtle Rule of Symbolism, and the music choice of "How to Save a Life" by The Fray, this moment is essentially every single emotional aspect of the show combined into one absolutely tragic scene.
• Spiritual Successor: The show has been described by some television critics as the 2000s' answer to M*A*S*H—that other darkly humorous medical drama known for combining wacky characters with surprisingly profound observations about life, and the occasional moment of absolutely devastating tragedy. The comparison is even mentioned in the first season's critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Squick: In "My Cake", when J.D.'s father dies, his brother Dan spends most of the episode in the bathtub wallowing in his own misery. Dan spends so long in there that, by the time Dr. Cox goes to rally him to get J.D. out of his funk, Cox and Dan agree that there is a higher percentage of Dan's piss then water in the tub.
  • Also, when J.D. asks Dan for a beer in the same episode, pulls three beers out of the tub water and sips all three before handing the third one to J.D. who rightfully tosses it into the toilet. Bones squick points for the first two beers Dan sipped being mostly bathwater and backwash respectively.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Drew. Being the favorite to Cox, softening up Denise and providing a great backstory made for an interesting character, but was stuck in the hated Season 9.
  • Carla. Despite being a main character, she remains a rather static character who never develops outside of being Turk's partner and wife and her role as a Nurse in the medical side of the show never had any hope of matching the progression of Turk, JD and Elliot's medical careers or the later development of Cox taking over from Kelso. And when given the chance to advance her career as a nurse, she decides against to care for Turk. By the time of season 9, she has become a full-time mother.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • J.D. having vasovagal syncope. It could have lead to many possibilities for a character arc for J.D. that would have been a continuation of his time in Sacred Heart for his appendectomy back in Season 1. Instead it's played for laughs, mentioned less than half a dozen times and then is forgotten.
  • Keith. While most remember Keith as Elliot's Satellite Love Interest, a look at the "My Intern's Eyes" episode where he and his "generation" of interns are introduced, has him being the POV character whose goal in the episode was to "Find the courage to talk". Had they stuck with that shyness, he probably would have made a more interesting character even if events unfolded the same way during his arc.
  • Season 9 was an utter waste due to network execs who refused to support "Scrubs: Med School" happening as a Spin-Off, which created a hybrid that angered the fans of the show for a multitude of reasons.
• Tough Act to Follow: One of the main reasons Season 9 is looked down on is that it was coming after Season 8. Many fans feel like Season 8 was the perfect ending to the show and was seen as a resurgence after the lackluster Seasons 5-7. It is worth noting though, that Season 9 does have fans who concede that it is a poor follow up, but a good show in its own right.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • While the show's portrayal of doctors and medical interns is applicable to any time period, the show has otherwise become a 2000s time capsule thanks to the lack of social media and references to 2000s pop culture cornerstones like House, along with Sacred Heart Hospital lacking more modern technology hospitals today use. The "adult-alternative" (read: Joseph Arthur, post-Men at Work Colin Hay, Shawn Mullins, the Eels) soundtrack and the presence of flip phones just confirm it is a product of the 2000s in case there was any doubt.
  • One episode centered the presence of a patient who was an Iraq war veteran causing a rift between pro-war and anti-war hospital residences. At one point, Kelso also attempts to control the situation by bringing up the then-recent news that Pluto had been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet. Oh, and at the end of the episode, The Janitor says that he believes the US should look for Osama bin Laden (then at large) in Pakistan.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Jordan flirting with her 17-year-old neighbor is treated as an off-hand cougar joke. Nowadays, a married person in their 40's flirting with someone under 18 is seen as a Moral Event Horizon, regardless of the genders involved.
  • Jordan sleeping with JD in her first appearance also qualifies. It's presented as consensual, even though Jordan is introduced as "a very important board member" and JD looks visibly uncomfortable when she makes a move on him. Given the power imbalance between them (Jordan is a board member with strong family ties to the hospital and JD is just an intern), JD likely wouldn't be in a position to refuse. The fact that he found her attractive beforehand is presented as damning that it was consensual.
  • Season 1 has an episode where Elliot is persuaded to flash her breasts to a preteen boy. It starts a Running Gag where she thinks flashing patients automatically heals them...only to realize it doesn't when she does so in a room full of staff. The former plays exposing herself to a minor as comedy, while the latter would be classed as workplace sexual harassment today (or at the very least, indecent exposure).
  • The general existence of The Todd. In the post #MeToo era, his general shtick of being a horndog that hits on his coworkers, occasionally male, and constantly makes lewd jokes definitely wouldn't go over these days, even when it's revealed later that he's a damn good doctor when he becomes serious and his innuendos are a coping mechanism. Safe to say that his attending Carla's sexual harassment seminar was long-overdue. And The Reveal that he's actually bisexual of course has him end up hitting on everyone, which perpetuates the now-hated stereotype that all bisexuals go after anything and everything that moves.
  • Dr. Cox's characterization as a "tough but fair" Jerkass—especially towards JD and Elliot—and his behavior being excused because he's good at his job likewise hasn't aged well. He frequently demeans everyone, calling JD by girls' names because he's not manly, and frequently chews the interns out for the smallest mistakes. Carla even makes him attend the sexual harassment seminar when J.D. submitted a complaint about this. These days, Cox's demeaning behavior would be classed as workplace bullying, regardless of how good he is at his job, and JD's viewing him as a good mentor would come across as romanticizing an abusive friendship.
    • In particular, the episode where he repeatedly taunts the African-American Turk and tells him that he's white because of all the things he says/does/likes. It was uncomfortable to watch even then and is flat-out racist now.
    • Or the scene where he stares at Dr Miller's breasts and then basically tells her she was asking for it because of how she was dressed. She should have filed a sexual harassment complaint for that.
  • There's also a lot of light homophobia that was normal in the late 90s and early 2000s, frequently playing it for laughs whenever a male character is unmanly and framing that kind of bullying as justified or understandable.
  • The bullying of service, maintenance and technical workers by the doctors and the nurses isn't considered acceptable to millennial and zoomers viewers like it was by the core Gen X audience when it was airing. In modern times if Cox went on one of his trademark rants at the lowly coffee shop workers, it would get filmed on a smartphone, uploaded to social media where Cox would get viewed as an angry white male Karen and disciplined if not outright fired.
    • Ironically, the show had quite a few episodes about the disrespect nurses get, making the use of service, maintenance and technical workers as frequent punchlines seem rather hypocritical.
• Values Resonance: Aside from the occasional derogatory gay jokes, the show itself presents JD and Turk as layered characters still full of valor and virtue - with their close friendship being portrayed as a very positive thing. Overall, they're good subversions of toxic masculinity.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: "Scrubs" has been widely praised by professionals as one of the most accurate mainstream medical shows ever, sometimes even the most accurate one (relatively speaking, at least). Impressive, given that it's a wacky comedy.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Denise, the Token Good Teammate of the trio of interns that push the main cast's buttons. She's put alongside them in "My ABCs" when Ed is lazy and Katie is manipulative. J.D. laments how she seems to lack empathy for patients and tries to challenge her to be compassionate. On the other hand, she was able to spell out to a grieving mother that her husband would suffer more if not given a DNR order, which allowed said woman to make the decision. Then we find out Denise knew about this flaw of hers; she tells J.D. she wanted him as a mentor because she knows a doctor needs a better bedside manner. The narrative keeps pushing that she's flawed for not being able to feel or express empathy when we see that she's working on it, and gradually mellows over time. At one point Denise says that she envies people who feel heartbreak because she can't even feel that, making her look like a kicked puppy.
  • Hooch. Sure, he's crazy, and his occasional bouts of random violence can be genuinely disturbing at times. But considering Turk and J.D. regularly go out of their way to play cruel pranks on him (apparently just because they find his over-the-top reactions amusing), it's hard not to feel sorry for him. It's easy to imagine that he'd be a lot better-adjusted if his coworkers weren't harassing him all the time.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Elliot. Despite her massive self esteem issues and her massive amount of issues and then her father cutting her off, it doesn't change that Elliot can be a huge bitch quite often or pushes her issues onto other characters, like getting on J.D.'s case for saving a patient's life when she was going to do it instead because she doesn't feel like she's a doctor. Plus there's all the times she assaults J.D. for the smallest things and it's supposed to be okay. For a character that is constantly having personal problems and complains about them, Elliot is very intolerant when other people do, like when Dr. Cox is busy dealing with the fact that Jordan's baby is actually his, Elliot guilt-trips him for not counseling her about Dr. Kelso.
    • In "My Own Personal Hell" Elliot gets extremely upset with J.D. when he doesn't defend her against Dr. Cox when he refuses to let her then boyfriend Keith off one of his shifts despite Elliot having switched his shifts earlier. Later, to make up for it, J.D. comes to Elliot's rescue when the other interns threaten to make a formal complaint to Dr. Kelso about Elliot's preferential treatment of Keith when she gives him a case all the interns wanted. The problem is, regardless of whether or not J.D. hates Keith or not and regardless of Keith being the best intern or not, Elliot clearly is giving him preferential treatment and expects the other interns to just suck it up because she is their boss. Cox and Kelso have every right to shut her down and quite frankly, even if he's not doing it for the right reasons, J.D. is under no obligation to help her just because their friends.
  • Carla has a ton of insecurities and she is underpaid and not appreciated for her job as a nurse. At the same time, she's also a massive control freak who belittles and insults everyone in the main cast and gives out The Reason You Suck Speeches because it gives her a rush to do so and her relationship with Turk is incredibly unhealthy in many many ways with how controlling and insulting she is towards him.
  • J.D. might fall into this for some viewers. For a person who we're constantly told cares too much about other people, he makes quite a lot of selfish, impulsive, or plain idiotic decisions, and doesn't seem to think about how they'll impact his friends or his partners. This continues well into the later seasons, when he's supposed to have learned how to be a better person and should know better. There's also the one time he made his girlfriend Julie cry just because she had a slightly annoying habit of saying "that's so funny," which is easily forgiven by everyone else (including her). However, this is often undercut by the show's tendency to treat J.D. as the bad guy when he isn't actually doing anything wrong.
  • The Janitor falls into this at times. He feels unappreciated at the hospital and like no one treats him like a real person, but he goes out of his way to make many people's lives hell for the most minor of reasons. The ways he messes with people range from as minor as lying or playing harmless pranks to leaving them in potentially fatal situations like locked in a dark water tank or abandoning them in the wild. Yet we are expected to feel sorry for him that he's an outcast or considered a difficult person to be around.
• Wangst: Elliot is prone to this, to the point where the majority of her storylines are focused on some problem of hers, which is usually self inflicted. She then insists on dragging everyone else into it, while often ignoring the advice that she's given. Notable mention goes to when she cheated on Sean with JD, but then accuses JD of being a 'bad friend' when he threatens to tell Sean the truth.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: The show acknowledges that romantic relationships can be dysfunctional:
  • Carla and Dr. Cox discuss this, regarding his feelings for his ex-wife Jordan since he started hooking up with her. Dr. Cox keeps saying that any reasonable person would not want to be with someone who broke their hearts and left, more so when we learn she cheated on him with a private practice doctor. Carla says that may be true, but she can tell Dr. Cox can't deny the heart even if the brain has many rational explanations. She says if he confesses his renewed love to Jordan, then at least he'll know and in the worst-case scenario, he gets a clean break from her and a fresh start. This is exactly what happens, and Dr. Cox has the strength to move on with another woman. What's less rational is he takes back Jordan when she shows up pregnant, claiming to be carrying another man's child. Even Dr. Cox doesn't know why he did so, telling J.D. he doesn't want to be a parent to this kid and freaks out on learning Jordan lied and he is Jack's father. Season 3 at least has Jordan and Dr. Cox working through their marital problems, setting boundaries for their relationship, and Jordan refusing to break his trust again for Jack's sake if not Perry's. Dr. Cox at one point bluntly refuses to cheat on Jordan when she was teasing him about having a crush on the new Chief of Surgery, saying he knows what it's like to be on the other side of that.
  • This trope is also explored in the season 3 finale. J.D. feels guilty that he broke Elliott and Sean because Elliott wasn't available at the time and seemed desirable. He goes to Sean's apartment, apologizes, and comes clean about everything — including the fact that Elliott cheated on Sean with him— while encouraging them to make up. The other man is in Heroic BSoD and hasn't showered for days. Sean at least agrees to clean up and go talk to Elliott at Turk and Carla's wedding reception. In the case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, they don't get back together; while Elliott is still mad at J.D., she also admits that if she weren't having problems with Sean, then she wouldn't have jumped into bed with J.D. so easily. The best she and her ex can do is clear the air, with Elliott conceding she faced Laser-Guided Karma for breaking Sean's heart and doesn't deserve a second chance with him.
  • Everyone, including Turk and Dr. Cox, says that J.D. shouldn't just reconcile with Kim after she lied about miscarrying their baby. They point out that she broke his trust and made him suffer for nothing. J.D. ignores them for the baby's sake because he doesn't want their child growing up with an absent father. Dr. Cox has to point out, after J.D. and Kim break up for good, that broken families don't always lead to broken children; he and Jordan divorced to improve their relationship, and J.D. became a damn great doctor despite his father not winning any prizes for good parenting. J.D. takes this to heart and becomes Amicable Exes instead with Kim, who finds a happy ending with Sean of all people.
• The Woobie:
  • Elliot in the first two seasons and some of Season 3. Ted in all of them. J.D. in season 6.
  • Keith Dudemeister. He's an excellent intern, but J.D. hates him and treats him like crap and he then gets together with Elliot who dumps her huge pile of crazy on him throughout half of Season 5, all of Season 6 and then when they're about to get married, she dumps him and then sleeps with him and dumps him all over again.
  • Hooch. Most of his time on-screen involved J.D. and Turk incessantly playing various mean-spirited pranks on him, some of which amount to harassment; Turk even persists despite knowing/believing him to be on the verge of a mental breakdown.
  • Nick Murdoch is a talented, friendly, likable guy that has to quit his job and leave the hospital not long after finishing med school because watching people that he's doing everything that he can to help get worse and die anyway is too hard for him. Actually having the job he spent years studying to get broke him.
  • A lot of the patients are woobies, below are just a few examples:
    • Jill Tracy. Despite her annoying tendencies, her life is an absolute wreck to the point where she has tried to commit suicide. Even her death is tragic as it's from a disease that's very rare in humans and her subsequent organ donation kills three more patients.
    • Brian Dancer, a incapacitated soldier in Iraq whose injuries were too severe for him to continue to serve in the army, which was the only place he felt at home. Even worse, he has the name of Private Dancer.
    • Elliot's patient Shannon in "My Number One Doctor", she's paralyzed and it's getting worse and worse to the point that she'll be trapped in her own body and unable to move in the slightest and there's no cure.
    • George Valentine, a patient in Season 8 who is dying from Ischemic bowel disease and has no one to be there with him as he dies, so J.D. and Turk stay with him. He puts on a brave face and lies that his family is coming to see him, but when Turk and J.D. insist on comforting him, he thanks them.