We watch... so you don't have to.
Reader-Requested Scrubs Analysis
Following up yesterday's tear-streaked reaction to Scrubs, I watched the episode myself, feeling much the same as I did while watching "The Sixth Sense," knowing the ending.
So, early in the first act of the episode, Dr. Cox leaves the hospital, leaving J.D. to take Brendan Fraser's Polaroid-happy ("Till the day I die!") character for the tests on his leukemia. Later, when Cox returns, J.D. tells him that "he died twenty minutes after you left," and we're meant to think the dead guy is the heart patient we saw earlier. But clearly, in retrospect, it was Cox's brother-in-law, played by Fraser.
For the rest of the episode, only Cox speaks to Fraser, who (even two days later) is wearing the same clothes he was in the first act, and no longer has his Polaroid (aha!). It is only at the end of the episode that we realize that the event Cox is going to, where the honored guest is completely oblivious to the goings on, is not the birthday party for an infant but the funeral for Fraser's character.
Of course, Fraser didn't really look sick when we saw him, alive, scaring the bejeezus out of J.D. and taking oh-so-many Polaroids. But, of course, that was integral to the misdirection. Although we might be able to explain that one away by saying that it was Cox who was refusing to see his brother-in-law's real condition, which was more grim.
Or maybe he got hit by a bus! Either way, Mister Fraser, he dead.
