Great Minds Think Different

I can’t say I’m hugely impressed by this show, but it’s good enough that I keep watching it without really being sure why (much like Dollhouse in early season 1).

To me, its strong point is that it does dialogue better than any comedy on TV right now. I’ve never heard a line that sounded wrong or like it was dreamed up by something other than a human. It’s the polar opposite of Dollhouse in that sense. And despite having perfectly true-to-life dialogue, it still manages to be funny. In episode 4 (the most recent), there was one line that, while very simple, cracked me up for several minutes: Britta saying to Jeff, “You broke my trust. You SUCK!” In a normal TV show you’d expect the second sentence to be some cheesy thing like “You betrayed me!” but no, it’s “You SUCK!”

Community’s weak point is its characters. They all seem pretty two-dimensional to me; not so much that they’re unoriginal or archetypal (they’re not really) but more that they don’t evoke much sympathy. I’ve been spoiled in recent times by other shows: nowadays I can only get really attached to comedies that mix drama with the comedy (like Chuck or Scrubs) or that are at least flat-out funnier than Community. Community doesn’t really keep up a rhythm throughout each episode like more adept comedies do. Too much of Community feels like it’s just killing time.

It also doesn’t help that Community’s main character is kind of a tool. Just a little bit of a tool, though. So I don’t sympathize with him enough to hope he succeeds, and I don’t hate him enough to keep watching to see him get owned. It’s an unfortunate middle ground.

The other characters are good, though, especially Abed and Troy (who in at least two of the episodes so far have done what seems to be an improvised scene over the end credits, and these are usually the funniest parts of their respective episodes). Pierce (Chevy Chase) can also be good, but he’s not as funny as the writers seem to think he is. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ken Jeong as Señor Chang is awesome in his unrestricted unhingedness. A dose of wild absurdity in a show is helpful as long as it doesn’t take over, and it seems like Señor Chang is firmly a recurring background character.

Community definitely has promise, and I’ll keep watching, but it isn’t assured of a spot on my permanent weekly show rotation. It really is exactly the same situation as with Dollhouse in season 1. Perhaps, like Dollhouse, Community will pleasantly surprise me in a few episodes’ time.

Holy shit, the new season of TV totally snuck up on me and now there’s like a billion things I have to talk about.

In dramas, we have Bones, House, and Dollhouse all starting up again. I seem to be the only person left in the country who doesn’t actually care all that much about House — I watch it if someone else in the vicinity is watching, but I don’t follow it myself. I may also be dropping Bones from my lineup. Dollhouse is still in; I’ll probably post about the premiere soon. I’ve also recently gotten hooked on Heroes, but I’m not going to start watching current episodes until I’m caught up, which may take a while since I’m only just finishing season 1.

Also: Gossip Girl. My dirty little not-so-secret.

In comedies, there are a bunch of new ones I’m watching. We have Parks and Recreation, which I haven’t written about before, but I have seen all the episodes and I like it. There’s Community, which is completely new; it looks pretty funny but I can’t say it really holds my attention, except for Ken Jeong’s (Señor Chang) amazing rant in the second episode. There’s (oh God don’t make me say it) Cougar Town, which I would ordinarily give an emphatic “hell to the no” but it’s created by Bill Lawrence, so I have to give it a chance. I may be writing about it.

The only other show I watch regularly that starts this fall is 30 Rock. The others (Chuck, Better Off Ted, “Scrubs” with emphatic quotation marks) are all slated for midseason, as far as I know.

And I swear I have a whole bunch of crap written about the Scrubs (real Scrubs) finale, which I will post eventually.

I’m almost at the end of the first season of Better Off Ted, and it seems to be getting uniformly better.

I mentioned in my initial review that when it started, each character was essentially a single personality trait that was magnified to absurd proportions. That’s still true to some extent (especially of Phil and Lem) but they’ve also started to flesh out the characters a bit. They’re letting Veronica display a bit of a human side, and they’re letting Ted and Linda act a little insane.

I’m writing about this episode specifically because it was a significant step above the rest in terms of awesomeness (with the exception of episode 4, the one about racial sensitivity). Also, there was some actual honest-to-God Japanese spoken at the end. Those were real Japanese people, speaking real Japanese, and they said what the subtitles said. Nothing more to say about that.

This episode featured some great Phil-and-Lem moments, as well as two fantastic lines from Veronica: “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel!” and “I wish I had the power to make everyone go away. Oh wait! I do! *leave*” I think I’m going to start using the latter one.

Random note: you know what’s weird? The resemblance between Portia de Rossi (Veronica) and Yvonne Strahovski (of “Chuck” fame). There’ve been a few moments where the physical resemblance has been almost creepy. Plus they’re both Australian imports on American TV shows who do American accents with just the tiniest flaws.

This is a bloody difficult show to write about. It’s not particularly deep (yet) and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so all I can do is watch, laugh and enjoy. There’s little room for criticism or analysis. It’s probably good for me to have a TV show that I can just watch without thinking about it too much.

I just have the season finale of Better Off Ted left to watch, but I’m saving that till tomorrow. Also tomorrow I will be giving The OC a chance to redeem itself after the heinous Chrismukkah episode of the fourth season. The whole time I was thinking “oh man we are airborne over the shark right now” and I’d hate for The OC to have punked out in its last season after a good run.

I know I’m roughly 3 years late to this party, but all I have to say about this episode is thank goodness for actual French people. After the infamous (in my mind) Dollhouse French incident, I’m now eternally grateful for any properly-rendered foreign language on an American TV show.

The dude who played the lawyer is definitely French and spoke honest-to-God fast-speech registre soutenu French, like an actual French lawyer would speak. Autumn Reeser is definitely not French, but she tried so darn hard and got pretty close (while speaking pretty fast and, commendably, continuing to act) so that didn’t upset me unduly. Her intonation of Comment le savez-vous? “How do you know?” is totally wrong* but that’s the worst criticism I have, and it’s mild and understandable.

The translations that appeared in subtitle were good. The only complaint I have is minor, which is that the translation of the lawyer’s line Je vous préviens, je me suis entraîné de ne pas réagir aux larmes misses the funny turn of phrase. It’s translated as “I warn you, I am impervious to tears”. Yes that’s what it means, but what it actually says is “I warn you, I have trained myself not to react to tears”. I don’t see why they couldn’t have subtitled it with that. The English line as it is gets a laugh; why not just keep the funnier literal meaning of the French?

Anyway, this is just another in way in which Josh Schwartz continues to improve the world. Vive la langue française.

And in a frigging awesome coincidence, this is my 404th post.

* Her intonation is flat and low for the first two words, then falling through the last two words, whereas it should be rising through the first word, then flat and high for the rest. This is a pretty difficult thing to translate, actually. And as I will demonstrate, the French phrasing conveys what the English stress pattern should be, and thus some additional meaning. Looking at the English, there are two stress patterns that make sense: “you” stressed or “know” stressed. Which word is stressed determines where the uncertainty is. But in French, you’d determine where the uncertainty is by different phrasing, and not all intonation patterns are correct for a given phrasing. If the “you” were stressed in English, I’d say Comment est-ce que vous le sache? (intonation the same as for the English sentence “how is it that you know?”) and if the “know” were stressed in English, I’d say what was actually said in the show, with the intonation I gave at the beginning of this ridiculously long and pedantic footnote.

I hate to admit I was wrong about this, but my conscience compels me.

In my review of Bones season 4 episode 23, I got all in a huff over what I thought was an erroneous treatment of Japanese personal pronouns and ended up writing:

And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns.

This is, I now realize, blatantly false. It is in fact very easy to infer gender from certain third-person pronouns, those being kare “he” and kanojo “she”. (Random side note: these words can also mean “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” respectively.) So I was completely bloody wrong about that.

In my (feeble) defense, I have this to offer: the use of personal pronouns in Japanese to refer to people is not common; certainly it’s much rarer than it is in English. Most often, people are referred to either by their proper name, by a demonstrative such as kochira “this person here” or simply not referred to explicitly at all (Japanese permits omission of subject and object from a clause when they can be inferred from context). In formal contexts, the demonstratives are usually preferred over the personal pronouns. The most common scenario I can imagine in which a third-person personal pronoun would be used is in reported speech, such as recounting a conversation. Using personal pronouns there would still be relatively uncommon.

Excusatory heuristics aside, I can’t explain away the obvious factual error, which is somewhat embarrassing. I promise to more rigorously fact-check any linguistics-related content in future.

I’ve started watching a new show: “Better Off Ted”. It’s just completed airing its first season of 13 episodes, and it’ll supposedly be back in January for an 18-episode second season. Also, it’s fantastic.

The show revolves around main character Ted, who is a mid-level manager at a generic megacorporation called Veridian Dynamics. The other primary characters are Ted’s emotionless, unscrupulous boss Veronica; a duo of perpetually squabbling scientists, Phil and Lem; and Linda, an underling of Ted’s. You might already be thinking that this premise offers few paths that have not already been taken. But “Better Off Ted” manages to find one.

Unlike “The Office” (both British and American), “Better Off Ted” does not aim for realism in its portrayal of generic megacorporation office life, but instead engages in wildly over-the-top parody. It takes all of the setting’s little absurdities, magnifies them to epic proportions, and shows Ted (who is a relatively normal guy) dealing with them. For example, the scientists Phil and Lem are constantly getting into the kind of little kerfuffles that long-married couples stereotypically have, culminating in shamelessly bizarre situations like the two of them squeezing themselves into one hazmat suit.

On the other end, there is Veronica, whose main function is to relay the whims of the nebulous upper ranks of the corporation to Ted, who, as head of R&D, must get his underlings to fulfill such duties as creating beef without the use of a cow, and weaponizing a pumpkin. Though she is emotionless and unscrupulous, she avoids all the tired “evil boss” archetypes. Again, it’s the show’s total abandonment of realism that accomplishes this. The things she says and does are so absurd that her coldheartedness doesn’t come across as an unusually strong bad trait like it does in, say, Bill Lumbergh, but just as a normal trait that is exaggerated like everything else in the show. It doesn’t make her evil; it’s just how she is.

Stylistically, the show bears a striking resemblance to “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s extremely fast-paced, full of random and abrupt segues, and has a main character who habitually breaks the fourth wall. While fourth-wall-breaking normally bothers me, it seems natural enough in “Better Off Ted” that I’m OK with it. The only thing wrong with it is that it feels like a vestige of “The Office”’s mockumentary format.

Of course, since it resembles “Malcolm in the Middle” so much, by transitivity it resembles “Scrubs” quite a bit too. But it doesn’t resemble Scrubs in tone at all. Like “Malcolm”, and unlike Scrubs, “Better Off Ted” plunges itself headfirst into comedy with nary a dramatic moment. It’s all about the silliness. However, three of the thirteen episodes were directed by former Scrubs directors, Gail Mancuso and Michael Spiller (who, incidentally, has directed some “Sex and the City” too).

Through the absurdity, the show often musters some absolutely vicious social commentary, especially episode 4, the latest one I’ve watched. The plot of the episode revolves around some new motion detectors the company installed to save money by, for example, turning off lights when there is no motion in a room. Trouble is, the motion detectors operate by detecting light reflected off skin, and as a result, cannot see black people (like Lem). Hilarity (really good hilarity) ensues.

There’s one area of the show that’s not quite like the others: the relationship between Ted and Linda, which is, predictably enough, fraught with sexual tension and emotional confusion. It doesn’t involve the same unabashedly ridiculous situations as the other plotlines, but it’s great nonetheless. Early on, after they end up holding hands during a tense moment, Ted claims that he didn’t hold her hand; he held onto her hand after she held his hand. Linda, first coyly: “Oh, that’s how we’re playing it?” Then disgustedly: “We’re gonna play it STUPID?”

In contrast to this obviously meant-to-be relationship that just causes a lot of awkwardness, there’s the relationship between Ted and Veronica, where they occasionally hook up, think nothing of it, and experience no awkwardness as a result. It’s all very quirky, funny, and in the strangest of ways, believable. It’s the only believable part of the whole show.

Granted, I’ve only watched four episodes, but I have high hopes for this show. For its potential to entertain me, that is. Naturally, since it is a very funny, offbeat comedy with a devoted following, it has terrible ratings and probably won’t survive beyond two or three seasons. Such is the cruelty of television: a great show like “Better Off Ted” gets shitty ratings and has its first season cut short, while stupid bullshit like “Hell’s Kitchen” rolls along for infinite numbers of seasons and has viewerships in the zillions. Such disappointment is the price of having good taste in TV shows.

I just got around to watching the unaired thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, made famous by Felicia Day on Twitter amid some contract-related angst and FOX asshattery.

I’ve always been strongly drawn to post-apocalyptic stories (with the notable exception of zombie-apocalypse stories). It’s why I like Stephen King’s The Stand, and the Half-Life series, so much. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’m helplessly fascinated by pondering the circumstances and events in which civilization as we know it can collapse — and what happens to ordinary people as the world falls to pieces around them.

Best of all is when, in a series of fictional works, someone stumbles across a ruined relic from the far-distant past — a relic that was covered in the present time of a previous work in the series. The first time I can remember this happening is in the Redwall series: in “The Long Patrol”, the characters stumble across the buried ruin of the castle from “Mossflower”, which appears to have been set hundreds of years before in Redwall-time. Many years after I read the Redwall books, that is the only one that truly stands out in my mind, exactly because of this post-apocalypse fixation I have.

Epitaph One does exactly this. OK, the time difference is only 10 years, but it was apparently a very eventful 10 years. From what I can gather, the Dollhouse’s technology got into the wrong hands and turned wireless, so the concept of identity was largely meaningless, and then civilization busted apart. In parallel with this, somehow Echo, Ballard, Boyd and possibly the other main-character Dolls were working on subverting the Dollhouse. I don’t quite understand what they were doing as the world was ending, but eventually they led a bunch of people out into the world, from being holed up in the Dollhouse, and we don’t know what became of them.

Quite apart from the end-of-the-world grittiness, we learn several very interesting facts about “present-day” Dollhouse-world:

• DeWitt has a conscience, and there is an ethical line she does not want to cross.
• The larger Dollhouse organization was the shady puppet-master ultimately behind the world’s destruction, and apparently the tipping point was when they started selling Dolls’ bodies for people to live in. It’s unclear (and a very interesting question) whether or not they were fully aware of the consequences of this.
• Topher was not the original architect of the Dollhouse’s technology. He made it much better, but it still means that there is or was someone else in the world who created it.
• Ballard and Boyd were apparently both double agents. Is Topher the only major male non-Doll on the show who isn’t?
• Whiskey/Dr. Saunders did a variety of things that I still can’t get my head around. She developed a way to resist the imprinting process (while imprinted as Dr. Saunders?), then remained in the Dollhouse for 10 years in her blank state? Does this mean Dr. Saunders (the original, briefly seen at the end of the season in flashback) was a double agent, and that got preserved in the imprint? Or did Whiskey somehow develop this urge while imprinted? Or something else? Who knows?
• Echo continued in her composite-of-imprints state for some time, apparently, after the end of the previous episode.

Now that we know all these facts, the futures of the main characters, and the future of the world in ten years, what is going to become of Dollhouse the show? In particular, is this foreknowledge of the future going to dampen the intrigue of the present-day Dollhouse story?

I really don’t think so. As I noted above, stories are entertaining when set both during and after apocalyptic events. I’m still interested to see what Echo and company are doing to subvert the Dollhouse, how that goes for them, and especially to see the world begin to crumble (and to see Echo and company deal with it) as the technology leaks out and starts to be used for more and more reckless purposes.

Just because the world in ten years is a total wreck doesn’t mean there isn’t still hope. This episode leaves the ultimate fates of Echo and company unknown; perhaps they’re still alive. Perhaps the world isn’t irrevocably broken. Perhaps there will be heroism in the downfall.

In fact, this glimpse of the future, of the ultimate consequences of the Dollhouse technology, serves to darken the backdrop of the present-day show. The mystery of “what trouble could this technology cause?” is gone, but the answer is rather horrifying, which puts Echo and company’s present-day struggles into perspective. We already know that if their aim is to prevent the technology from harming too many more people, they’re fighting a losing battle, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested to see how the battle plays out. It’s like watching Star Wars Episode III. You know what’s going to happen in the end, but watching it can still be entertaining.

To sum up: Epitaph One answers a lot of questions, but raises quite a few as well. This is what’s known in the trade as a game-changer: the loose ends have not been tied up, but merely rearranged.

I have a few other random notes. Eliza Dushku still can’t act, though fortunately this episode let her play to her (few) strengths. She also probably didn’t speak Russian very well. I don’t know Russian, but I know that she sounded like a person making sounds she doesn’t perceive as words. And I’m still scarred from the French incident, so I assume any foreign language spoken on Dollhouse is done badly until proven otherwise.

Speaking of which, the dialogue writing is still bad. A lot of the worst writing was during the future scenes, when during an otherwise intense moment, some guy in the group would spew out a line that sounded like something written by a first-year poetry major. When I heard someone say, “Nice little display case for our potential corpses,” I had to pause it and yell out “WHAT”. Then I replayed it to make sure that was what he actually said. I swear, Dollhouse in its 13 episodes has racked up more People Don’t Talk Like That violations than basically all the episodes of every TV show I’ve seen.

Near the beginning, when Felicia Day’s ragtag group of “actuals” is approaching the Dollhouse, they come across an old radio blaring something meaningless. I can’t help but be reminded of Portal. I know the chances are slim, but I’m choosing to believe that was a deliberate homage to Portal (a post-apocalyptic story of its own, in a way) because that makes me happy.

This surprised me: even though I’ve only ever seen Felicia Day in “Dr. Horrible”, I could take her totally seriously in this episode. This is in contrast to Neil Patrick Harris, although to be fair I’ve only ever seen him in things where he’s in a role that makes it impossible to take him seriously anyway (like the Harold and Kumar movies).

Dollhouse sure does have a deep and enduring love of shower scenes, doesn’t it? Especially shower scenes where someone bites the dust. (Speaking of which: how did a person in a child’s body manage to reach high enough to conk that girl on the head? And how did she do it with enough force to knock her down?)

I sure feel sorry for anyone who actually wants to follow the plot and starts watching season 2 without watching this episode.

I will certainly be watching season 2. If only this show can be like “Chuck” — stumbling at the beginning, picking up towards the end of the first season, and knocking it out of the park in the second season. I’d be pleased.

You have to be cynical about the chances of a show like this, so I imagine that this was the last episode of “Dollhouse” that will ever air on TV. You have to keep this context in mind when considering the implications of the finale, and the creators’ intentions for this episode.

My lasting impression was simply that they tried to do too much in too short a time. And you can understand why. They wanted to bring the story to the kind of point you’d like to leave it at for the end of a season. The story needed two episodes to cover that distance; FOX wanted one.

It does seem unfair. While it lasted, “Dollhouse” developed enough of a world, raised enough questions and provoked enough thought that it deserved a proper ending, even after such a short run. I don’t mind the fact that the story was left completely open — they had to allow for the possibility of more “Dollhouse”, however remote it is — but I do mind the fact that whatever led up to this point in the plot was not adequately explained.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Ballard tends to serve as the audience’s representative because he seems to be the only good guy. And at the end of this episode, now he’s working for the Dollhouse? I feel like something must have happened between him catching the hard drive with Caroline’s brain on it and him agreeing to work for the Dollhouse and all of a sudden wanting to free November instead of Echo. (This is one of the more obvious casualties of the time constraints: Sierra and November get imprinted, and then what? Sierra is never seen again and November is suddenly being freed. Buh?) And what about Echo? What made her decide to just remain a Doll? I’m sure with her multiple-personality badass powers she could have escaped.

On the plus side, if the show does return, this gives us the dynamic duo of Boyd and Ballard, who for some reason I really enjoy seeing working together. I get the feeling that neither really understands the other, but they have a quiet confidence in each other nonetheless. And now they’re both centers of considerable moral ambiguity, which is always interesting. Boyd’s motivations have never been explained (and he dodges Ballard’s question on the subject). Ballard’s moral compass has obviously shifted somewhat; my best guess is that he’s working for the Dollhouse so he can have a role in protecting the Dolls from Alpha, figuring that if he can’t bring down the Dollhouse he might as well protect its victims as best he can. But it’s far from certain that that’s what he’s really up to. Hell, as far as we know that’s what Boyd is up to as well.

Alpha is this episode’s strong point. The actor, Alan Tudyk, was brilliant, the only downside to his performance being the way it exposed Eliza Dushku’s performance as mediocre (par for the course there). He made Alpha a genuinely frightening villain. He stole the most graphically disturbing scene I’ve ever seen on a TV channel that isn’t HBO: him slashing Whiskey and then gouging out his handler’s eyes. He convincingly conveyed a person with tons of personalities struggling for control and ending up a wildly, dangerously unstable psycho. I haven’t seen an insane villain played so well since “The Dark Knight”.

Obviously, there’s an awful lot more of this story to be told. Unfortunately, it looks doubtful that any of it ever will be. So in the end, am I satisfied with what’s been told so far?

My relationship with “Dollhouse” has been strange. There were only a few episodes that actually held my attention closely. Yet I kept watching because despite everything I was curious to see what was going to happen next. Watching “Dollhouse” didn’t give me as much pure enjoyment as, say, “Chuck”, but I did want to find out more about its world every week. So in that sense, yes, it was a good show. At least it didn’t completely lose my interest like, for example, “Lie to Me”, which I stopped watching after the second episode.

“Dollhouse” was built upon a very deep premise and had the potential to be a show truly out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary, to be sure, but it did not astound. It really did come quite close at times to being excellent, particularly during those moments when my head hurt trying to think through the tangle of deception that the audience was allowed glimpses of, and those moments where they took the lid off the more disturbing parts of the world. The show’s premise is inherently disturbing, and to the show’s credit it never held that back. Much like the beach landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, that’s the only way it could have been done right.

So what killed “Dollhouse”? I can identify several reasons. Let’s look back at my midseason review and look at the four points at the top. In my mind, the first three of them have either cleared up or the show works in spite of them (with the possible exception of the sympathetic-character one; I’ll get to that later). The fourth is still a problem, and it’s gotten to be a bigger problem as the show goes on. Eliza Dushku just does not have the kind of versatility and talent the role requires. Though most of the other Doll actors are relative unknowns, they all manage the shifting-persona thing better than Dushku does. The non-Doll actors do fairly well for the most part. Tahmoh Penikett as Ballard occasionally starts acting a little too much like Keanu Reeves at critical moments. It conflicts with the establishment of the character’s obsession with bringing down the Dollhouse, to the detriment of his own life. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz are probably the show’s acting-quality strong points. It may be because they play largely one-dimensional characters (evil and obnoxious, respectively) but they each do so quite well.

The reason I brought up the sympathetic-character beef again was that in the later part of the season, we mostly lost him. Around mid-season, I latched onto Ballard as a guy you could root for and sympathize with, because he showed up a lot and did good things. Then he mostly disappeared from the show, appearing in occasional scenes to stick out his manly jaw as he angsted about how his girlfriend’s a Doll. Then he went into the Dollhouse, and without too much fuss started helping them eliminate their biggest threat. Well, so much for the good-guy thing, then.

I can’t say I’m heartbroken that “Dollhouse” is probably toast, but I do have to admit I watched it with some interest and would almost certainly watch it again if the planets aligned and it were renewed. But I’m not holding my breath.

This is just a quick post before tonight’s finale. And I swear I’m working on a “Chuck” post; it’s just really long. And sometime in the next week there’s going to be an immensely long post covering all the Scrubs that has ever been.

While this episode’s Janitor subplot didn’t involve the Janitor actually doing anything, it did give us one of the more fantastic Janitor moments of all time: when he answers “Yes?” to Jordan in that insane tone of voice with a Sun Chip in his eye. Of course there was also his rant to the kid at the beginning. “Would you be willing to change the location of your eyes…to here?” I just don’t understand how one person is capable of making this kind of stuff up on the spot. At least Neil Flynn has a bright future in improv comedy after Scrubs is over.

There was another fart joke: “Dr. Mantoots”. I don’t know why the writers’ brains have regressed to seventh-grade level, but I am certainly not one to complain. There were more JD/Turk gay jokes. Although that storyline took a turn for the serious at the end, they kept it immature by having JD’s pants around his ankles the entire time.

Gooch and her extremely oddly-proportioned head were back. So was Denise, who was great as usual. “I just wanted to do something I know I could do right, like bangin’ a dude.” No random guest stars from the past this episode, but the finale should be loaded with them, from what I hear.

This episode’s primary dramatic concerns reflect the theme of season 8 as a whole. The characters’ lives as they know them are coming to an end. Certainly the future holds tons of possibilities for all of them, but they are a story for another time, another place. “Scrubs” has followed these people from the beginning of the beginning of their careers to the end of the beginning. The rest will be interesting, but “Scrubs” has told its part, and we’re watching the characters make the transition into the next part. There could have been more of this theme in the rest of the season, but I guess they didn’t want to beat it into the ground. You can bet the finale will beat it into the ground, though. But that’s OK. It’s the series finale; that’s what it’s supposed to do.

42 total minutes of Scrubs remain. I hope they’re good ones. So far this last season has done the rest of the show justice, but it all comes down to tonight.

ABC in talks to renew Scrubs

Guys, seriously. I love Scrubs, but its time has come. Just let it go out with a good last season, and then leave it alone.