If you're a fan of 'Scrubs' and were holding out hope that the show was going to return... well, you weren't paying attention to the signs. ABC burned off the final two episodes unannounced this month; the season finale aired before a night of Wednesday comedy reruns. Then a number of show writers and producers took to their Twitter and Facebook feeds to mention that last week's episode was the "series finale" and not the season finale.

But if you need to find an "official" word that the show is done, you pretty much can't get any more official than Zach Braff himself. He told his Facebook fans that "it appears that "New Scrubs", "Scrubs 2.0", "Scrubs with new kids", "Scrubbier", "Scrubs without JD" is no more. It was worth a try, but alas... it didn't work."

(S09E10) After last week's seemingly out-of-order interlude with J.D. and Elliot, we're back to the purity of following the med students around, and I have to say, this was the best of those episodes to date.

Given the proper elbow room, you can see even some of the more one-note characters, like Lucy and Drew Cole, grow and change. And, given the fact that even Bill Lawrence thinks it's a 70/30 shot against renewal, it's a bit of a shame; episodes like this make me want to get to know these characters a little more and follow them through their med school trials and tribulations.

Again, the pacing of the episode was slower, and we didn't see as many flashbacks and fantasy sequences. Which is fine with me; I want to get to know these characters with regards to how they interact with each other, not how they fantasize.

(S08E18) Since I have no idea whether this is truly the end for Scrubs or not, I hedged my bets on the season vs. series finale label. I will say this, though: If this is indeed the end for the folks at Sacred Heart, they couldn't have gone out any better than they did tonight.

Tonight's finale hit on all the same themes that have carried the show for eight years: people grow and change, but life at the hospital just keeps going. Someone leaves, someone dies, someone makes a life-changing decision, and life keeps going. "It's just a day," as Cox almost-convincingly said during one of J.D.'s attempts at getting an emotional goodbye from his mentor. He's right. And as Sacred Heart didn't make such a big deal out of J.D.'s departure, neither did the show. He didn't even turn to look back at the ICU as he turned the lights off. Well, he did, but I'll talk about that after the jump...

(S08E17) After the roll the show's been on lately, it was kind of weird to see Scrubs hit a bit of a creative pothole right before the series/season/show-as-we-know-it finale. Lots of personal character movement happened during this one, but the laughs were few and far between. And, despite the upheavals, we're still dealing with some of the interns, signifying life goes on at Sacred Heart. It was just a weird mix, and it made for a decent but not great episode.

(Update: Bill Lawrence himself responds to my plea in the comments.)

Oy, not again.

First we heard, straight from Bill Lawrence's mouth, that Scrubs could get a ninth season. Then we heard it was definitely done at the end of this current eighth season. Now, The Hollywood Reporter is hearing that talks to renew the show are back on, with Lawrence and company trying to figure out how to bring back most of the cast, at least in a recurring fashion.

They have to be recurring, since Zach Braff has vowed that he's done with the show, and Neil Flynn, John C. McGinley, and Donald Faison are all attached to new pilots, with Scrubs being a second option in case they're not picked up. Heck, even Lawrence is busy on the new Courteney Cox show Cougar Town.

I'm here, as one of the show's biggest fans, to beg ABC and Lawrence to let the show die. Please. It's the best thing they can do for it.

(S08E16) We're in the homestretch now, folks. Things are advancing in the world of Sacred Heart. And when characters who've been living more or less the same lives for eight years all of a sudden get new jobs, urges to return to old ones, or pangs to move away, you know a finale is a-comin'.

It's kind of too bad, since this season has been pretty satisfying for the most part. As Bill Lawrence and his crew have gotten down to basics, the show has gotten funnier, more personal, and more dramatic (when drama is called for). In fact, this has probably been the best season since season four, and it's good to see that the show still has hilarious episodes like this one still in them.

(S08E15) There's a reason why you don't see too many sitcoms do two-parters or one-hour episodes more than once every couple of years; the comedy momentum set in the first half-hour usually doesn't continue during the second. Although the second part of Scrubs' Bahamas adventure was still pretty good, it definitely wasn't as funny as last week's first part.

But two interesting things came out of this episode, one character-based and the other actor-based. And, even though I had an inkling the latter was coming, it still surprised me when I saw it. More after the jump.

(S08E14) As Homer Simpson might say, "The Scrubs are going to the Bahamas!"

For eight years, Scrubs hasn't ventured all that much away from Sacred Heart and it's surrounding environs. There was an RV-based road trip to Washington so J.D. can see Kim, and J.D. somehow ended up in Las Vegas during an extended fantasy/reality sequence. But other than that, the gang's lives have been confined to the claustrophobic world of the hospital.

But Bill Lawrence must have figured, what the heck, it's the last season, so he shipped everyone down to the Bahamas for a well-deserved location shoot in paradise. And, I've got to tell you, part one is the funniest episode of the season (I've seen part two, and it ain't bad either). I'll tell you why after the jump.

(S08E12) It's always fun when Scrubs takes its annual trip outside of J.D.'s head and lets us know what some of the other people around Sacred Heart are thinking. Considering we've heard from just about everyone else, it was nice to give the interns a chance in the spotlight. And, after last week's heartfelt but mostly laugh-free episode, it was good to see the show come back to the funny standard it had set for itself this year.

I'm starting to realize that if Bill Lawrence had actually taken the plunge and given us a spin-off featuring the interns, the character whose head we'd be in would be Denise / Jo. Yes, Jo's caustic. Yes, she's got about as much sympathy as a rock. But she seems to be the most well-developed character of all the interns, the one whose history we already know a little about and the one we know is ripe to go through a transformation over time. It doesn't hurt that Eliza Coupe a) does such a great job and b) is so darn nice to look at...

(S08E11) Ah, the wonders of corporate synergy. ABC has produced Scrubs since day one, but since it aired for seven years on NBC, an episode like tonight's would have probably never gotten made. Actually, it would have gotten made, but SportsCenter would only be referenced, not shown in extended sequences airing on the break room TV. And we wouldn't have gotten an opportunity to see extended shots of Hannah Storm wearing her sexy outfits (she's in her late 40s, a mom, and a respected journalist, but she still rocks those tiny dresses, doesn't she?).

This was an odd episode. Very light in tone, without a lot of guffawable moments. But the dramatic moments were spot on, and the nice easy-going vibe of the episode really reminded me of ones I used to see very early in the show's run. I mean first-season early.

(S08E09) Looks like the final season cost-cutting didn't spare anyone, did it? This is the first episode in quite awhile -- if ever -- where we don't see Zach Braff on screen for even one second. We do hear him via Elliot's cell phone, but the writers wisely decided that, if J.D. wasn't going to be there in body, he wasn't going to be there in mind, either. In other words, this episode was fairly narration-free, and it was quite refreshing.

This has been a season of in-jokes and external observations about how each character deals with things around the hospital. Yes, we got the usual jokes about J.D. and how he goes off on his fantasies. But Carla and Elliot also got some of the business, and in Carla's case, it made for a well-done story.

(S08E08) If anyone is paying attention to the intern-centric webisodes, you probably saw some of this episode coming. In fact, part of a particular webisode made it onto this episode, in a very adorable way.

This week was very Ted-centric, which is always welcome, as Sam Lloyd is one of the more underrated actors on the show. Not only can he play pathetic well, but he's brought a nice musical element to the show. And every so often, when Ted grows a momentary sack and acts like a man, he does a great job of showing long-roiling emotions coming to the surface.

(S08E07) Readers got all over my case because I didn't like either of last week's episodes, which is fair. Fans of the show are just happy that it's getting back to a rhythm that hasn't been seen since its earliest seasons. And I appreciated that dramatic parts of both episodes; I just didn't think the funny parts were funny enough.

This week was different.The mix of drama and comedy was much better in both episodes. This one was the slightly better of the two, mainly because it focused on the great John C. McGinley.

One of the more interesting turns of character in this final season is how Cox and Kelso are becoming friends. It makes sense, though, because the only person who can understand the pain of being Chief of Medicine is Kelso, and Cox is going to need him in order to do the job without going crazy. But what was just as interesting was who else Kelso decided to coach.

(S08E06) This episode was a little better than "My ABC's," but not by much. I don't know what it is, but I just didn't laugh all that much during either of these episodes. At least this one dug into some good character-based stories, from Cox getting in his own way on the way to becoming chief of medicine, to J.D. and Elliot continuing down the path of a drama-less relationship, to Denise/Jo revealing a little about why she got into medicine even though she's as sympathetic as a rock.

About the "Jelliot" thing, as Bill Lawrence has taken to calling it on his ABC.com blog; he writes on the blog that the decision to get them back together, but take them down this mature path, was a compromise between Lawrence, who didn't want them back together, and the members of the cast, who did. And because one of those castmembers was his wife Christa Miller, he made the compromise because, "Ultimately it came down to this - I wanted, at some point, to sleep with my wife again..." That's always the best motivation, isn't it? (By the way, thanks for the commenter last week who pointed this fact out... I was wondering where he got it from).

(S08E05) After four episodes that have ranged from the pretty-decent to the almost-classic, we start this week's double-shot of Scrubs with the season's first real clunker. Which is odd, because you'd think the presence of everyone's Sesame Street favorites in J.D.'s fantasies would have made for a funnier show. But I'm starting to wonder if it's becoming less funny because it's nothing we haven't seen from this show many times before.