Scrubs, "Our Histories": His last words

A quick review of tonight's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I hear Ted and Gooch's song for West Virginia...

Though the show is still struggling to serve too many masters - telling the story of the med students, saying goodbye to characters like Ted and Gooch, keeping JD a prominent part of the picture - when a clean break might have been wiser, "Our Histories" was a definite improvement on last week's episode. (Also Cole with Dr. Cox is a pairing that we must see as much as we can.) I imagine we can't really judge the show till after Zach Braff's gone and the focus narrows, but this one gave me the same feeling as the season-opening double-feature: I didn't love it all but was glad to still be spending time at Sacred Heart.

We got more concentrated time with the med students (even if Aussie Supermodel Doc still doesn't have a defining character trait other than being hot and Australian) and Cole managed to not be a complete tool without taking away from what can make the character funny. By confronting JD's age head-on and making his denial of it the point of the JD/Turk story this week, their antics went over much better than they did in the first three episodes(*). And while Ted's goodbye wasn't really necessary - landing Gooch was essentially Sam Lloyd's farewell last season - I'll never object to some Ted/Kelso time.

(*) Also confronted head-on: the obvious similarities between the Paul Dooley story and last season's incredible "My Last Words." The problem with a show that's on this long is that all the stories get repeated, even if they're being repeated on new characters - even "My Last Words" was designed as a sequel to "My Old Lady" from the first season. This wasn't as effective as either of those, but it ultimately wasn't going for tears as much as it was trying to put these four characters together to see what happened.

What did everybody else think?