Sorry but medical records do not equate dental records. I just had surgery not too long ago, they don't ask ANYTHING about your dental history or who your dentist is.
I bet they didn't break into your house and go through your stuff either. As I already said, House's team routinely goes far beyond mere medical records in learning about their patients.
Oh hell, BATMAN couldn't have gotten away from that fire/explosion and planned ahead enough to fake his death, much less a crippled 50-something in a drug-addled stupor. But what the hell, the show hasn't been very realistic for several years now. As long as it's fun.
Exactly. Not getting the patient's dental records for one of House's patients would be a good way to be called an idiot. Just goes to show. House is better than Batman. It's a final episode in a show where House has already gotten away with vastly more than he should have been able to over the course of just the last 8 years. That he was "somehow" able to survive the explosion and fake his own death is just another drop in the bucket (and another allusion to Holmes who also survived a similar impossible to survive "death".) It gets a "final episode" hand-wave.
um, why the hang up over House's ridiculous plot? If you wanted realism from "House," then the show's plot ended years ago with House in jail and his medical license revoked for one of a myriad of "stunts" that he pulled.
Fine, we'll have to agree to disgree. For me, it was just ridiculous and cringe-worthy and I expected better from the writers. But as others have said, the show has steadily gotten more ridiculous and more over-the-top as the seasons have gone by, so I suppose it's not unexpected that they would pull a totally implausible rabbit out of their hats. For me, it was an unfortunate manner in which to end this series. Your mileage may vary.
Well, let's consider that there are different types of explosion. When it comes to fires like this, there are two possibilities, deflagration and detonation. A deflagration is a rapid burn but one where the burn propagates subsonically, so there isn't much of a pressure wave generated. A detonation is a supersonic explosion which generates a far more potent shock wave and does much more destruction. Now, since this was a special-effects explosion, just a billow of flame that didn't involve a lot a force or blow out the whole side of the building, we can assume that it was merely a deflagration -- probably what firefighters call a flashover, a sudden eruption that occurs in a fire in a tightly enclosed space when flammable gases build up to the right density to trigger ignition (Mythbusters viewers should be familiar with the principle). A flashover generates huge amounts of heat, but not as powerful a shock wave as a detonation, so it is theoretically survivable. However, survival requires diving to the ground and insulating yourself very effectively from the extreme heat, and from what I can find online, even the best firefighting gear provides only about 14 seconds' grace period to get out of a flashover environment. So House surviving if he was in the building at the moment of the deflagration is highly unlikely but not impossible. Maybe the floor gave way beneath him and he ended up in the basement, and was thus protected from the flashover on the ground floor. But the most likely explanation is that he managed to get to the back door just before the flashover occurred. Since the danger came only from heat and not from shock waves, he could've been standing right next to the door and not been killed by overpressure shock or shrapnel. It didn't look like he had time to reach another exit before the deflagration, but that could've been a trick of editing, suggesting Wilson and Foreman's subjective perception of the event. Certainly the depiction of the deflagration was unrealistic; it probably wouldn't have had that loud a "kaboom" sound and would've entailed a lot more smoke. So there's some poetic license at play here (as there always is in cinematic explosions).
No, you missed my point. House had done a myriad number of illegal things long before the "drove a car into Cuddy's house" fiasco that would have resulted in him getting sued into oblivion/losing his license to practice medicine/landed him in jail. Realism was not this show's strong point. I watched it for the medical mysteries and the clever dialogue, not because of its gritty realism.
Subjective perception on the part of Foreman and Wilson is the only thing that makes sense. House was standing right near a window as he was engulfed by flames. He didn't duck, was nowhere near a back door and it didn't look like he had enough time to avoid catastrophe by falling through the floor.
I thought the series finale was pretty good. I love House as a series, and I think it was a good ending for the series. I liked House seeing various people he knew while in the burning building. If they could have gotten Cuddy's actress to do a cameo, it probably would have been a bit better. Thats one of the flaws with the last season of House, Cuddy (who was a major character for most of the series) leaves, and there really is no resolution to her and House. I get that (story wsie) she'd want to get away from the obessive guy who drove through her house. Still, a final cameo would have been nice. That said, getting Cutner, 13, and Cameron was cool, as was House's ex girlfriend.
Some interesting articles... Read more... 'House M.D.' Boss Explains the Mysteries in Series Finale Read more... House Comes to an End: Creator David Shore Answers Our Burning Finale Questions
Or rather, a burning rafter fell between him and the door. As the producer says in the interview linked above, it was meant to be ambiguous whether it had fallen in front of him or on top of him, but I definitely read it as the former. (Though that's probably because someone spoiled the ending for me before I watched it on DVR.) I think the resolution came when she wrote him off altogether after he smashed through her house. That's about as final as it gets.
That addict's body would have to be burned REAL thoroughly for them to not get any DNA from it, no? If they bother to test for that, anyway.
DNA tests are expensive and time-consuming. Why go through that process when dental records and can be check much more cheaply and quicker? Besides, the body was inside a heavily burning building for presumably several hours between when the explosion occurred and when the fire was extinguished. I'd think that'd be plenty of time to burn the body down enough to make a DNA test unreliable if not impossible.
I liked the final ep, but the fact that Shore had to explain what happened after the fact belies sloppy writing and/or editing for the final cut. He spoke of some more explanation in the "original cut". Perhaps they should have left that in...
I don't think it needed more explanation. The way he explained the events at the burning building were pretty much how I assumed they went. The only unexplained thing was how the building caught fire; that was explained in scripted and shot material, but cut for time, and it wasn't really essential to know it. A fire at an abandoned building where junkies shoot up isn't exactly a shocking or unprecedented event.
I really wish this was more of a full two-hour episode with the Retrospective maybe airing the week after or something.
Agreed. Nothing he said was a great revelation. I thought all of that, save how the fire started, was perfectly clear from the episode.