House MD

Well, that was just cruel.

Oh COME ON! You're telling me that a sheet of tickets, made of paper manage to remain intact inside plumbing and clog the plumbing enough to cause the pipes to burst right above the million dollar MRI (of DOOOOOOOOOOOOM!)? And they managed to get House's FINGERPRINTS off of them? All this just so House gets sent back to jail just in time to miss the final months of his only friend's life? Couldn't he be sent back to jail for, I dunno, ASSAULTING A PATIENT like he did in this episode?

Good performances in these last few eps but the plot is just asinine. This show can't end soon enough.

edited 16th May '12 6:18:56 AM by Psyclone

...Yeah. The show has gotten really weird in that certain aspects of it are still really good, but others are completely bizarre.

I still look forward to the finale - in the sense that I expect to enjoy it - but the time to put this horse to rest is definitely here.

The problem with house is that its too much drama and not as funny and light hearted as the first seasons (i know they also had drama, but they felt more comedic overall for me, also the lighting was much more bright and colorful back then, now it's only shades of blue). I blame ambers death for that. Not that I didn't like it, that story was brilliant, but ever since the writers seem to try to top that. If they had Amber be a one time thing and then left the tone of the series as it were, I might have enjoyed it more (I still don't hate it now, I'm not that kind of a "fan").

The article here raises a point about the ambiguity of House's meanness.

In the beginning it wasn't so ambiguous. He was an imperious, short-tempered genius who stepped on a few throats to cure his patients. The paradigm switched in the third season — House was a neurotic. He can't stand being thought of as a good person so he lays waste to everything in his life that seems right. This changed yet again after season five. Now there is a genuine question of him being a sociopath a la Sherlock. I'm not sure that a psycho would be in medicine without clearing a few psych reviews, but...

If the show were really a Columbo-style puzzle with regard to House's personality, I wouldn't mind. But there isn't much ambiguity about his insanity (he's attempted murder a few times) so it's difficult to pull for him. He's not exactly Light Yagami.

edited 17th May '12 5:51:46 PM by johnnyfog

Honestly, whenever I watch this show, I wonder how any of the main characters have kept their medical licenses given how much law-breaking, lying to patients, and other shenanigans occur.

I think part of the problem this show has is that the writers kept wanting to make the finales more and more dramatic, and unfortunately that drama didn't take place in a vacuum.

...and once again the Celebrity Paradox rears its ugly head:

(Robert Sean Leonard, aka Wilson starred in Dead Poets Society)

Hey, Amber's back. Amber makes me happy.

Well, in keeping with the spirit of the series and its numerous dream finales, this episode is an elaborate prank on the audience.

It's not much in the way of completion, but at least it's open-ended with regard to what House is going to do now that he's lost his medical license. Become a consulting private detective?

On the demerit side, the final moments were a retread of old episodes. We've seen this life-affirming message with motorcycles before.

I like that they brought the patient to the forefront. The episode affirms that House saves lives. The irony is that the patients had become an afterthought to us as well. They were set dressing at best; assholes at worst; nefarious criminals more often than not. You could argue that it mirrored House's lack of conviction in his work, but I doubt that was intended.

I can't stop feeling sad.

What a shitty way to end the series. We get no sense that the past eight seasons have all built up to this, nor does it truly resolve any of the issues House faced. Okay, so he decides to be a good friend to Wilson, but he loses his entire reason for existing in the first place: solving puzzles. It was a total soap opera ending, and it makes me ill to think of it.

Not only that, but the episode takes a page out of its protagonist's book and completely avoids the big questions. How does House deal after his only friend dies? We don't know. What does House do now that he legally no longer exists? Does he reinvent himself and find more meaning in life, or does he continue to thrive on puzzles and cheap thrills? We don't know. The only thing we get is the same moral they've thrown at us since day one: House is a bad person, but he can change. The only new development is that our character is no longer a doctor, and we are therefore forced to accept this as the end. It's so artificial.

Alright, I'm done for real now.

edited 21st May '12 9:13:16 PM by BrainSewage

I thought the thesis of the whole show was "people can't change"...

Anyway I'm so happy House pull a Reichenbach Fall, now the cycle is complete.

I won't say I was hoping for it, but some part of me knew he'd find another way out of the building. I'm just glad they didn't make us watch Wilson die.

I didn't think for a second that House was ever going to fix himself, so it was either something like this or death. All in all, I liked what we got better.

I'm just happy they got to be together, though I was hoping for the writers to take a chance and have them kiss at the end.

I knew that no matter how they ended it, it would be unsatisfying. Arguably the central messages of the series include "People can't change" and "Everybody Lies (most notably to themselves)". Once those themes were firmly established (by the third season or so) and you realize that House could never really get "better" or become a better person, I don't know how narratively you could have a happy ending for the character with a real resolution.

Now Hugh Laurie will never win an Emmy for House.

He almost won in 2004. I was shocked that Spader won. I mean, I was watching both shows at the time, and Spader had already won for playing Alan Shore (as a guest-spot on another show, no less), and in any other year I would've given it to Spader, too. But he was so obviously outclassed by Hugh that year.

I hope they didn't give it to him based solely on his political rants in courtrooms.

Knowing the Emmys, they probably did.

Alright so Lily Simpson made a video on two House episodes

All I wanna say is, she makes some great points.

Holy thread necro, Batman

But yeah I've seen a lot of people in the modern day looking back on the show and noting that its handling of LGBTQ+ people and other minorities is fairly problematic in hindsight. It's a shame since the show was a big part of my childhood (my mother used to be a radiology nurse and watched this and Scrubs to decompress after work) but what can you do :P