What I’m Watching: Scrubs (Season Finale)

Scrubs: Season 9, Episode 13 “Our Thanks” (C-)

You may have missed it since the airdate of this episode came from pretty much out of nowhere, but if you’re like most, you’ve had enough of saying goodbye to this show. This season is much different, of course, since familiar characters like J.D. and Elliot are gone, and this finale also doesn’t try to neatly wrap everything up in order to pack up and conclude the show. Instead, it’s a salute to the end of the students’ first semester of med school, running through the lessons they supposedly learned and the ways that they’ve questionably grown as people. What it reveals more, however, is how this season was a failure. It’s not that Scrubs: Med School was necessarily a bad idea from the start, but this experiment did not work. The first half of this shortened season was plagued by a constantly disappearing and reappearing, but never maturing, J.D., and once he was finally gone and it was time to start focusing on the med students, they hadn’t gotten any more interesting. There’s simply too much pessimism and negativity running rampant in this show, and no constantly sunny character to liven up the days and hours spent at the hospital. It’s not Lucy, since she’s more often than not fretting about something or other instead of smiling and trying to make everyone else happy. Cole’s new interest in being a surgeon comes from out of nowhere, and nothing that occurred up to this point suggested that he secretly wanted to be a surgeon so badly that he would suddenly shape up and get serious in order to shadow Turk. It literally comes about as a result of a prank pulled by Dr. Cox to annoy Turk, and therefore it just doesn’t stand up against how Cole has acted all season. When they’re not trying to destroy the universe with their sour attitudes, Denise and Drew are constantly switching roles in the relationship since both of them are made out to soulless and emotionless robots whose sole purpose in life is to mock Lucy and Cole. When one randomly wants to try and grow as a person, it doesn’t work. That’s pretty much true of everything on this season of “Scrubs,” and I don’t think there’s anyone out there really clamoring for a renewal. If this show does mysteriously return for a tenth season, it will become the least appreciated series on the air to earn endless renewals since “According to Jim.”

Season grade: C-
Season MVP: Kerry Bishé (regardless of her character’s flaws)