Scrubs, "My Full Moon": Let's see how far we've come

Spoilers for tonight's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I do the Hivvy...

In looking back over last week's review, I feel like I came down too harshly on what's overall been a pretty good victory lap season. The problem is that the show came back from a long hiatus with a pair of below-par episodes, and that made it easier to forget that there's been a lot more to recommend this season than just the introduction of Denise and the Glynn Turman episode. And one of those recommend-worthy things has been the way the episodes will occasionally slow down and give the characters a chance to reflect on the long journey from who they were in the pilot to who they are now.

"My Full Moon" was pretty much wall-to-wall reflection, with pauses for the occasional fart joke, and it was a nice showcase for Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke, the only regular castmembers to appear this week. Despite being (or perhaps because they are) JD's best friend and his sometime-girlfriend, Turk and Elliot don't get a lot of shared screentime together without other characters present (the episode that featured this dance is one of the few I can think of), but the characters and the actors have enough of a shared history that their bond was obvious, even as they came to different conclusions about what the experience has meant for them: Turk loves being a surgeon, while Elliot might give up her career if she ever has kids (not in an anti-feminist way, but in a "I've realized medicine makes me miserable and I just need a good excuse to quit" way).

And there were some good jokes other than the fart ones -- though, as an overgrown 12-year-old boy, I'll never object to a good fart joke, and Turk's obsession with proving that women do it was a very good one. With all of the regulars taking the week off for budget reasons, the interns picked up the comedy slack nicely. We've come to expect good things from Denise, but Howie had a bunch of nice moments as he tried to deal with the patient obsessed with exact replicas(*), Sunny was again funny, and for a guy who only turned up last week (as a belated Aziz Ansari replacement, I suppose), Derek fits in nicely.

(*) And was I the only one reminded of the classic Steven Wright routine about coming home to find that everything in his apartment had been replaced by an exact replica?

And, of course, Turk also got to do a great rant about JD going to Disneyland without him (a much better joke about Zach Braff's absence than the cell phone running gag from "My Absence"), while The Todd tried to assert his high-five supremacy, so the veterans can still bring the laughter when asked.

A low-key episode, and not a laugh riot, but a very satisfying one. It has me in a much better mood about seeing the rest of the season out.

What did everybody else think?