"My Hard Labor"
Another pretty solid episode - still not
Scrubs at its comic best, and still at least as much about the serious subtexts of the series as about the blackouts and fantasy sequences.
Kim (Elizabeth Banks) is about to give birth, and J.D. (Zach Braff) is ready for everything... except for openly admitting to Kim that he doesn't love her. Meanwhile, Cox (John C. McGinley) looks for someone competent to give his infant daughter a shot, unwilling to give it to her himself for fear that she'll associate him with pain. Carla (Judy Reyes) can't do it,since she's enraged at Turk (Donald Faison) for his stubborn insistence on playing a console video game to its conclusion... or at least for his obliviousness to her need, as great as his, to be something other than a parent sometimes (and, to a much lesser extent, to his obliviousness to her ability to play the game better than either her husband or the Janitor (Neil Flynn). Even Kelso (Ken Jenkins) proves his worth as a parent, while drunkenly comforting his son over the phone, the son despondent over the latest exploitation by his various lowlife men-friends. So when J.D. does find himself telling Kim how he feels about her, in what is probably the funniest as well as the most painful sequence (quite literally for Kim, who finds that her argument with J.D. has caused her to miss her window for an epidural), he is banished from the delivery room in favor of Elliot (Sarah Chalke). But he gathers his lessons in the usual
Scrubs style, and goes back in. Kim, while quite sure that her romance with J.D. is over, apparently looks forward to coparenting with him, so J.D. seems suitably awed.
While I'm as much a casual Colin Hay fan as anyone, having him reemerge as he does in the teaser of this episode is an example of the kind of not-quite-airless self-reference too common last season (after his much more effective "haunting" of "My Overkill," the second-season premiere). In fact, let's estimate that perhaps a third of the jokes, maybe even a few more, were just a little too labored, cough, in this episode... which leaves all those others coming at the speed and interlocking screwball logic that we expect of this series.
With the summer's unplanned-pregnancy film comedies
Knocked Up and
Waitress having done suprisingly well, perhaps there's something in the air.
Scrubs is already (unsurprisingly) more realistic in its handling of the matter, so if the writers' strike doesn't bench the series, it'll be interesting to see how they sustain this... and how many cameos and guest spots from previous seasons we'll get. (The show has been notable for giving a number of guest stars, from Heather Graham to Tom Cavanagh to Tara Reid, some of their best roles-in one case, perhaps their only good role [whom could I be thinking of?].)
I'm very glad to see Aloma Wright back.
