Monsters of Television

“I’m sorry for needing you.”

Don’t cry, Hugh Laurie. Not every finale can be a homerun.

Seriously. If you liked this episode of House, I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

Season finales on this show are events, the showrunners’ opportunity to fully utilize the talent they were blessed with in actors/characters, all the budget they can muster, and forward-thinking writers/producers. For instance, the big hullabaloo about this episode, from months ago, is that it was shot on a consumer-expensive DSLR, not a big honking HD camera. Interestingly, that was all anyone wanted to talk about when discussing the episode. Not the inevitable monkey wrench the finale would toss into the well-oiled machine that is the House formula, not what would happen to some of the characters. No, no. It was only about the Canon 5D. And I can imagine the reason was because no one wanted to talk about the actual content at all.

Because it stinks.

We’ve come to expect cliffhangers (a serious rarity on this show that we’ve come to expect) and heavy distortion of House’s vision of reality. Recall the episode where House was shot and he slipped in and out of subconsciousness or the one where he’s trying to figure out how he got on a bus with Amber (you know, the one with Fred Durst) or the one where drugs were making him hallucinate going through withdrawls with Cuddy by his side. I suppose now that he’s clean, we’re supposed to accept that these forays into the surreal would be obliterated by sober reality.

But who knew House’s actual life was so juvenile and miserably melodramatic?

I don’t even really care to discuss what actually happens in the episode because, let’s face it, neither did the writers (although Scott at Polite Dissent didn’t seem to have too many issues with the medicine) . Just know that, structurally, it starts the way we would expect for a season finale: a cataclysmic event, lots of injured folks, desperate situation, no “Teardrop” opening sequence. I’m not sure what statement they were trying to make with the scene of a fallen crane but it looked like someone in the writers’ room asked, “Is it too soon to draw comparisons to 9/11?” The destruction area that House meets the patient he’ll stick with for the rest of the episode has a suspicious Ground Zero vibe to it but maybe that’s just my touchstone to large-scale urban tragedy.

House finds the crane operator interesting and sends him back to PPTH for his team to inspect. Again, I’m not sure what they were thinking here. There really was no reason for the team to have a case other than to include them all in the finale. Without this patient, you would only see Foreman briefly in the beginning and at the end and no one else. It seems like they would have done just as well to have everyone treating people in the ER. The only important drama here is that 13 shows up late to the differential and asks for a leave of absence because she’s not “doing well.” I think you might see Chase for a total of 15 seconds. Taub’s stupid face, however, you see a lot more because, oddly, he’s the only one that picks up on something being wrong. You’d think Dr Hadley’s ex-boyfriend might see something’s up but, you know, whatever. When 13 uses her therapy as an excuse for her being late to the differential, Taub probably knows she lying because he hides in the bushes outside the entrance waiting for her. I’m saying he’s a creepy perv. A creepy hobbity perv.

But this episode isn’t ruined by the trollish. Nay, this episode was done in by the treacly, the overdramatic, the juvenile. Several times during this episode I noted that Cuddy and House were playing “baby games” more than usual, arguing and trying to out-analyze each other. House has always been sort of an overgrown teenager with a firm grasp on the tenets of Nietzsche but these two kids are fighting it out on a collapsed building like there’s a swingset and some monkeybars nearby. Her “I’m moving on — Wilson is moving on” line is particularly odd and somewhat unprompted I felt. Not that that wasn’t where their conversation was going but that Cuddy would treat him like that.

When 13 uses her therapy as an excuse for her being late to the differential, Taub probably knows she lying because he hides in the bushes outside the entrance waiting for her. I’m saying he’s a creepy perv. A creepy hobbity perv.

And that was the most troubling part of the episode: the disparate progression of characters. Wilson not being terribly supportive of House chasing Cuddy was weird. House using the story of his leg to help a patient feel better about having her amputated, a story he has not directly shared with anyone the entire series (that example you’re thinking of, where he talks about it to a class, does not involve him discussing it as if it happened to him), felt like some bizarro House, as if his weeks of downward-spiral self-destructive tendencies evaporated in the face of tragedy. And, let’s not forget the worst of all, the reason why I hated this episode SO. MUCH.

After losing a patient, House goes back to his old apartment (I think?) and yanks the mirror out of the wall to reveal a stash of painkillers. As he’s about to take some, Cuddy shows up (in her pink scrubs), and is suddenly consoling, friendly, warm. Just a few hours before, she was shouting at him about moving on. Now, she’s telling him that she can’t stop thinking about him and that she’s called it off with Lucas. House wants to know if he’s hallucinating (obviously, not the first time Cuddy has been in House’s head). “Did you take the Vicodin?” “Nope.” “Then I think we’re okay.”

Gag me.

House’s assertion that he is “the most screwed up person in the world” and wondering if he can “fix himself” are so trite it’s ridiculous. God, I hope this is all make-believe. I want this to be some sort of long dream sequence House is having from getting high for the first time in a while. I want that distorted reality. It’s the only way to explain away all the treacly nonsense. Maybe that’s just my hope for writers to explain away questionable narrative by turning it into part of a mental breakdown but this House and Cuddy thing is a dead end. I cheered when House might be going back on the drugs because it might instill some life into this series again. But House trying to be the guy Cuddy always wanted is going to be a let-down. Let’s face it: House and Cuddy are best being sparring partners fueled by sexual tension. The realization of House’s dream to “hit that” on a regular basis can only end in a “well, now what” moment for everyone. Sure, the ‘shippers will be happy but anyone that’s an actual fan of the show and not just the “will they or won’t they” aspect will only find disappointment.

It’s entirely possibly that I’m talking out of my anus because they’ve been writing this show for a long, long time (in network years anyway). This season, however, does not exactly fill me with trust for the direction of the show anymore. This finale felt like the writers just called it in. The season (mostly) feels that way, too. It’s sad when you hope the next season premiere will bring a reset button.

So, I’m going to end this review with an “oh” feeling, anticlimactic of sorts. Because the episode itself didn’t really feel climactic either. This seems like it should have been an episode near the beginning of this season, when House was still fresh from rehab. A trip through newly-minted sobriety would make more sense. Otherwise, if we’re taking into account all the things that happened in this season to these characters, the only explanation is all this is happening inside the head of a drug-addled, social-inept doctor.