On my Serializd account, I keep a tally of TV series episodes that drop Denzel Washington references and Spielberg references, so when “My Ex’s Ex” dropped both a Denzel reference (Turk’s brief recreation of Training Day) and a Spielberg reference (Turk’s “She totally got Indiana Jones’d by the yoga ball!” line), I cheered.
“My Ex’s Ex,” the third episode of the Scrubs revival’s second season, brings back to the Sacred Heart halls Scott Foley, who reprises his role as Sean, the marine biologist who dated Elliot in the first and third seasons. Foley and Rachel Bilson (who co-starred with Zach Braff in 2006’s The Last Kiss and starred in Hart of Dixie, a CW small-town medical dramedy that ran for four seasons) are alright as the love interests for, respectively, Elliot and J.D. this season. But J.D. and Elliot’s love lives were always the least interesting part of the show for me, and they continue to be that.
Written by Michael Hobert and directed by Gail Mancuso, “My Ex’s Ex” is another Scrubs episode that proves that the medical cases and how they test the main characters are more compelling than the romantic stuff. I just watched for the first time Widow’s Bay’s first-season finale, which was a great episode for K Callan, whose elderly secretary character dropped a major bombshell on Matthew Rhys’s mayor character. It was kind of crazy to go from that to K Callan guest-starring as a dying patient whose situation gives Blake, David Gridley’s full-of-arrogance-that-masks-massive-insecurities intern character, an opportunity to say the farewell he never got to deliver to his late mom while also realizing that he has a future in palliative care.
Palliative care happens to be what Shannon Fill—the retired actress who memorably played Ensign Sito on Star Trek: The Next Generation and briefly reprised her most famous role about 28 years later in Star Trek: Lower Decks’s best non-comedic arc—does now for a living. I learned a little bit about palliative care from listening to her discussion of it in interviews during Lower Decks’s penultimate season. I like those Scrubs twists where a character who was dead-set on becoming a surgeon or some other type of doctor finds a different path.
Now what do you—one of the only three people who showed up to the Scrubs discussion space last week—like or dislike about this episode?