(S09E13) Considering ABC decided to burn off the last two episodes of 'Scrubs' largely unannounced, and especially because they decided to lead off a night of reruns with the season finale, there isn't much hope that we're going to see another season.

That's too bad, since this new ensemble has come together quite nicely. Is 'Scrubs Med School' as gut-grabbing funny as the original series? Absolutely not. But what we ended up with are a group of likable characters and storylines that left viewers anxious to see more from. There still needed to be adjustments made, but the season (and probably series) finale showed me that they were on the way to addressing most of the issues.

Notice I said "most." If the show were to beat the odds and come back this fall or next spring, two main issues need to be addressed: 1) The Lucy voiceover needs to be ditched and she needs to become a secondary character, and 2) the central characters should be Denise and Drew.

This isn't news to anyone who reads these reviews on a regular basis; I've been lobbying for Lucy to be de-emphasized since the season started. But with the overwhelming presence of Zach Braff gone, the character's lightweight nature sticks out even more. Her quest to give her group's cadaver, Ben, a proper end-of-semester send-off started grating on me a little bit, mainly because she pushes with all the zeal and obnoxiousness of her mentor J.D. but with none of the charm. We just don't know enough about Lucy to care about her, beyond the fact that she likes horses more than people.

Ironically, we're found out more about Cole the douche this season than we found out about Lucy. His cancer scare last week really focused him, and it was admirable that he wanted to learn surgery from Turk. And you knew that The Todd was going to show up at some point to remind Turk that Cole's douche-itude is what will make him such a good surgeon. "Patent pending five!"

Speaking of Turk, don't you want to see more of him as a mentor? Freed from the bonds of his bro J.D., we saw glimpses of a more fully-formed character this year, one that's starting to assert his leadership qualities while feeling his age (in the tag he had no idea the Eels were a band, for instance). It would have been fun to see him dealing with Cole as a protege, for all the reasons Cox cited to Turk for encouraging someone who wants to learn from you, no matter how annoying. If Cox could make J.D. a good doc after all those years of unicorn journals and hugs, then Cole should be a snap.

It's odd; even though some of the hard edges have been polished off Denise this year -- she no longer has booty calls with chubby guys, for instance -- I still want to see Eliza Coupe explore her character more. What made her such a hard-ass, but one who still seems to desire something that resembles a normal relationship? And why does Drew think more fondly of a car battery than he does of the prospect of living with Denise? All of this would have been fun to watch next year, but it's likely we'll never see it.

Anyway, it was a good experiment by Bill Lawrence and company: can you successfully reconfigure a show even though it still had strong callbacks to the old one? Creatively, the answer was 'yes.' Ratings-wise, though, it didn't work. But at least it may give creators the confidence to try it again somewhere down the line.