(S07E06) I've been getting mixed signals, from commenters as well as fellow critics, about this season of Scrubs. A lot of TV Squad readers have been finding more fault with the episodes this year than I have, and the Star-Ledger's Alan Sepinwall called this season "flat and repetitive" on his blog. But I've been enjoying it so far; I think that the flatness some see is a low-key-ness that we haven't seen since season two or so. And the repetition? Final-season homages to the past. Anyway, I've been liking this season because anything that even slightly improves on last season's general clunkiness makes me happy.

All that being said, this episode didn't do it for me. It just wasn't funny. Even the most reliably funny characters, ones that save otherwise clumsy episodes, just didn't have it in them this week. And even the touching J.D. - Elliot moment rang a bit hollow.

Remember when people used to be scared of Bob Kelso? I've noticed that for the last couple of seasons, the writers have made Ken Jenkins' character into a line-spewing caricature that no one seems to be intimidated by in the least. Even Cox hasn't needed to tell Kelso to "blow it out your ass" in quite a while. Is it because all the main characters are now attendings and there's no need to show Bobbo intimidating them during rounds anymore? Whatever it is, it seems like the old Scary Kelso has gone away and he's not coming back. Even Ted isn't scared of him anymore.

You'd think we'd see a little bit more about how Kelso was dealing with his impending mandatory retirement. But instead, all we got was a guy obsessed with eating his free muffins, drawing glasses on people who ruin the last Harry Potter book for him, and being a grudging sidekick to Carla as she finds out how Janitor was able to hook up with his lady Lady. Janitor, one of those characters that is reliably funny, wasn't much more than pathetic in this one, trying to make himself "normal" in order to keep Lady around. The part where he lets it all out -- "I stuff animals... sometimes with other animals." -- was the best we got from Janitor this week, along with his repeated assertion that he doesn't wear a jumpsuit: "shirt, belt, pants."

Was the RateYourDoc.org competition (which, as per NBC policy, has been made into a working site... check out The Janitorial newsletter) really good enough to be the A story this week? We got a couple of chuckles -- "What's up with Dr. Cox's hair? First he's bald and then the next week he looks like Shirley Temple!" and "But sometimes dat is what I'm talkin' about." -- but the story was really more of a series of lame gags than an actual story. Sure, J.D. wants to win something for once. But we all know he'd rather have a unicorn for a pet than win a contest. That's the reason why Perry Cox has been calling him girls' names for the last seven years (actually, I haven't heard Cox do that in a while, either. I guess he found it hard to do after J.D. helped pull him out of his depression two years ago. Or it just got old. Not sure). Even the unicorn gag wasn't that great, though I liked the recursive nature of the fantasy, ending in nothing but the sad realization by Johnny D. that, no, unicorns don't actually exist.

So, now we come to the first meaty story for Elliot in weeks: the ethical and moral dilemma she faces with an ALS patient she's grown close to. Does she let the patient kill herself in order to escape a disease that will progressively get worse or does she do her duty and tell her nurse to watch for it? While there was some nice acting done on Sarah Chalke's part here, it did feel like the whole plot was contrived simply as a way for J.D. to give Elliot a heartfelt speech about how well he knows her, didn't it? Is it the next step in bringing the two of them together? Probably. But I think the plot would have been better served if J.D. wasn't even a part of it, and it was just Elliot's struggle. By the way, even the most serious Elliot plots usually contain one classic Elliot ramble about her past, but we didn't hear one here. Maybe she was going to do one before she got cut off by Kelso's "let's fall asleep while the private practice doc prattles on" gag.

I dunno. Maybe I'm cranky from lack of sleep or not enough fiber in my diet or something. But this episode really felt like it was mailed in to me. Depending on the outcome of the strike, we either have 13 episodes left or five. Either way, there's too few left in the series to waste them on throwaway episodes like this one.