Despite how glaringly weird the lack of Carla is, the new characters are decent. There's Lucy, the wide-eyed med student with low self-esteem, who is basically a little JD. There's "Number 1" (because they wanted to drill the similarities between Dr. Cox and Dr. House in further, Dr. Cox is assigning his students numbers instead of names now), the mild Tourette's sufferer who likes to stick up for the little guy, and Cole, the entitled, misogynistic jackass whose family money makes him untouchable at the hospital. They're all pretty entertaining, and though I found Lucy annoying at first, she quickly became endearing, which is really a credit to the actress. Because on the page, that girl is grating as hell. I wouldn't go so far as to say the new characters have revived the series, but they're definitely watchable if nothing else is on. And that's frankly a million times better than I expected any of this to be.

And of course JD is embracing his new teaching duties as an opportunity to become a new-age mentor to a class of bright young minds, and that's backfiring as expected. One of the reasons I stopped watching a couple seasons ago was because JD was just way too whiny and annoying, but he was back to silly, impish form last night, getting stuck in trees, participating in awesome fantasy sequences and flashbacks (the Lifetime movie trailer was particularly amazing), and making up funny songs with Turk. Speaking of Turk, he is still hilarious and adorable ("Ooh, she's like a Gremlin!"), but it'll be weird for him to be the focus of this show eventually without Carla. Is she really going to make zero appearances? And we're just supposed to ignore their marriage and child forever? Weird.

Oh well. At least we still have The Todd. Naïve five!