The following examples illustrate strange behavior with the shell REPL's handling of objects with an _id field. Note that all of these should be valid, and should print the object itself:
> {_id:1}
1
> {'_id':1}
2014-02-04T11:51:48.382-0500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token :
> {"_id":1}
2014-02-04T11:51:54.014-0500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token :
> var a = {"_id":1}
> a
{ "_id" : 1 }
> var a = {_id:1}
> a
{ "_id" : 1 }