When “Scrubs” goes off the air in this seventh and final season of the NBC medical comedy, fans anticipate the solving of a mystery: What is The Janitor’s real name?
There is a potential problem in granting this reveal: the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America, which may stall the march toward the series finale.
Creator and executive producer Bill Lawrence has always said The Janitor was not originally meant to be a real person, so as he’s evolved, his plans for the character changed. As played by Neil Flynn, the hospital’s janitor delights in tormenting zany Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff).
“Originally, The Janitor was going to end up being a figment of J.D.’s imagination (I never expected the show to last more than a few episodes so that would have been possible — and why he only interacted with J.D. at first),” Lawrence wrote in a recent e-mail. “We just always thought of him as more menacing as a nameless sketchy antagonist and decided not to reveal his name until the end.”
There’s a case to be made for never learning the name of the character: TV history tells us a finely tuned character known by just a surname needs no other form of I.D.
Most sources cite a one-time reference to Gilligan as “Willy,” for instance, but who thinks of the Skipper’s Little Buddy as anything but Gilligan. (Skipper, by the way, was revealed as Jonas Grumby — more the answer to a trivia question than how he’s remembered.)
Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo never did get a first name for the long-running character, although some books and articles say that on the spinoff show starring Kate Mulgrew as his wife, “Kate Columbo,” she referred to him as Philip. “Get Smart’s” Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) didn’t get a name, either — although when she married Maxwell Smart, she used the false identity “Susan Hilton.”
Jack Klugman played “Quincy, M.E.,” for seven seasons without a first name ever being uttered, although a business card seen briefly read, “Dr. R. Quincy.” The actor is quoted on several Web sites as saying the most common question he’s asked by fans is, “What’s Quincy’s first name?” To which he always answers: “Doctor!”
“Home Improvement’s” partially seen neighbor was referred to as “Wilson” by Tim Taylor and family. When someone questioned whether that was his first or last name, he explained that his full name was Wilson Wilson Jr.
On “MacGyver,” the title character was called “Stace” in the first episode of the series, but mostly Mac thereafter. His first name was finally revealed as Angus in the seventh and final season.
In recent television series, such reveals have come relatively quickly. Jack Coleman’s good guy/bad guy Mr. Bennett was known mostly as “Horned-Rim Glasses” (or HRG) until it was revealed in the first-season finale that his name was Noah. On ABC’s “Lost,” Hurley turned out to be Hugo Reyes and the leader of the Others was not Henry Gale but Ben Linus. And that ne’er-do-well Sawyer had, like many other things, stolen his identity and was really James Ford.
In those cases, the plot twists that caused the names to be unveiled were more compelling than the names themselves.
Not so two such “reveals” that stand out among recent series:
On “Sex and the City,” the series finale focuses on a cell phone message showing that Mr. Big is … John (no last name given — could it be Big?).
On “Seinfeld,” in the Season 6 episode “The Switch,” we learn Kramer is … Cosmo!! (Kramer’s pal Newman never did get a first name; even his Post Office business card read just: “Newman.”)
So what of The Janitor? Lawrence promises there will be a resolution to all things having to do with “Scrubs.”
“If the strike cuts the series short, I will still find a way to deliver the end of the series to the loyal fans that kept us on all this time,” he writes. “Even if that means writing the episodes (post-strike of course) and reading them to people over the phone. A more likely solution would be to have them be part of the seventh-season DVD somehow.
“Of course, I refuse to seriously consider any of this yet, as I continue to hope for a strike settlement.”
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