House Finale

For the last five years, I've watched "House".  If you didn't know that about me, you know it now.  I am now out of the "House" closet.  Well, I really wasn't ever in the closet on this one, I really just never got much of a chance of to talk about it.  Anyway, for about half a decade, this has been just about the only primetime TV show I've bothered to watch.  Because look at those Hugh Laurie puppydog eyes!  Who can resist that?  Awww, whose a good Hugh Laurie!  You are!  Oh, yes you are!  Oh, yes you are!  Good, boy!

Lately, however, "House" has been in a fairly spectacular decline.  When did "House" jump the shark?  That's a question for historians to ponder over for years, I think.  But it is clear that fish was hopped, nobody can dispute that fact.  Its pretty clear to me that the producers ran out of interesting medical mysteries by roughly season 5, and then completely ran out of things for TV's most beloved misanthropic drug addict doctor to do about two episodes later.  First they blew up the entire old cast of the show, replacing them all with increasingly less interesting people every few seasons.  That didn't quite work.  This last season has actually been utterly unwatchable thanks to the newest staff, one of which is a twelve-year-old Asian girl who don't think actually knows how to act.   So they tried having House go crazy.  That worked for a shocking finale, but it didn't quite have legs.  Then they had House fall in love with his boss, Cuddy.  That led to an excruciating season where House and Cuddy argued back and forth over how to make their relationship work, often focusing on braindead things like "do we even have anything in common?*"  Cuddy dumped House, he drove a car through her window, he went to jail, etc.  He's back now, I haven't been watching this season all that much, but it really seems like the show was collapsing under its own weight.

So now "House" ends, not on a triumphal note, but on a sheepish acceptance by the producers that if they go any further, this trainwreck will start to kill people.  Pull the plug now before it gets any worse.  As for the final final episode?  It was... meh.  "House" often has been able to end on truly shocking sudden notes, most notably season 5 when House thought he had sex with Cuddy, but actually had gone completely insane.  This time, House has to decide whether to live or die.  So I guess this was kind of a symbolic representation of this show reaching rock bottom in quality by having its star reach rock bottom in his life?  Who knows?  Either way, its over, and we can somewhat be grateful for that.

I guess it was fitting that the final episode of "House" would focus on House himself.  Its his show, after all.  Supposedly "House" was a medical mystery show, but really, most of us came to watch Hugh Laurie play the House character, who really was just the best character on TV for the last eight years.  I never understood why everybody on the show always considered House to be an intolerable asshole, the guy was fun!  He was funny, but nobody ever seemed to giggle, I don't get it.  Yeah, House must be hard to work under, and never pulled punches, but if I had the chance to hang out with Hugh Laurie every week, I would do it.  Once Wilson dies, House is going to need a new sidekick/homoerotic tease.  I'm game.

Anyway, Monday's episode (I'm aware I'm really behind on writing this post, sorry) opened with House in a burning building with the corpse of this week's patient next to him.  This is where spoilers begin, by the way.  If you don't want spoilers, go stick your head in the sand and sing a nursery rhyme for awhile.  So House really has to decide whether he's going to get out of the building or let himself burn to death.  This seems like an easy decision, but unfortunately House isn't doing too well lately.  Wilson is dying of Soap Opera Syndrome, during the flashbacks in this episode its revealed House blew every chance to stay out of jail, and House is his usual sarcastic misanthropic self.  Since House is crazy, his subconscious creates him a series of ghosts to visit him.  These include the Ghost of Christmas Past - Stacy, the Ghost of Christmas Present - Cameron, the Ghost of "A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas" - Kutner, and the Ghost of Christmas Bizarro Universe - Cutthroat Bitch.  Personally the highlight for me wae the appearance of Cameron, since it reminded me of the good times, Seasons 1 to 3, the Golden Age.  Also, its only at the end that I realized I am a Cameron x House shipper, its weird the things we see when Hugh Laurie's life is flashing before his eyes.

Strangely Cuddy wasn't invited to this party inside House's mind.

So House sees all kinds of things, my favorite being the House Baby.  Its a baby with Hugh Laurie's eyes CGed onto it, shown by Stacy, who wanted House to see that he could have future.  But since this show seemed to be more preoccupied with House x Wilson than anything else, I have to wonder if House will even care.  Ultimately House decides to live, but then the building blows up.

At this point I immediately decide that the show is bullshitting me, that House is still alive, and this explosion was just a fake-out to get me worried.  It was all too dramatically timed, since Wilson shows up exactly at the second when the building goes, that's silly.  And there's the cocaine guy, so House's death can easily be faked.  Then I decided that was simply too stupid and too obvious and that this was a fake-out within a fake-out.  So we cut to House's funeral, where everybody in the show (sans Cuddy, again) give House a nice eulogy saying nice things about him.  Wilson gets up on stage, tries to say nice things, but then realizes that he never got to chance to have sex with Hugh Laurie, so he gets really mad and rants for awhile.

Until his cellphone goes off.  Yeah, they played the fake-out straight.  House is alive.  So in a weird convoluted way, this show fooled me.  House is now legally dead, that means no jail time.  So House and Wilson go off, grow moustaches, and decide to ride motorcycles and presumably have lots of gay sex before Wilson dies.  Remember that look Samwise gave Frodo at the end of "Lord of the Rings 3"?  That amazing loving look that pretty much proved that those movies were actually a romance the whole time?  Yeah, Wilson gives House that same look.

And that's the end.  The end of "House".  Wilson x House won in the end.

Now I just need to find something else to watch on Monday nights.

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* Here's a tip for all you aspiring television authors from me, somebody who has never written anything:  if your romantically entwined characters suddenly realize they have nothing in common, its probably a good sign you shouldn't have roped them together in the first place.