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Final Curtains for Dr. House

I lost interest early on this season, but am still invested enough to check out the occasional "event" episode on Hulu. I think Trekker has it right that the show hasn't reached the wonderful heights it's capable of since the S4 finale, but individual moments still stand out. But those moments are too far and in between these days, and maybe a "Final Season®" could be enough to spur the producers and writers into making something great again.
 
For me, it's not so much that the season four finale was amazing; it's that the season five premiere was a bit clumsy and strange leading to the show aimlessly wandering after that point.
 
What happened in the season 4 finale that everyone thinks is the last great spot.

At the end of Season 3 all of House's fellows left his practice, either quit or were fired by him. Most of Season 4 featured House recruiting new fellows via a impromptu 'reality show' like set up whittling down a couple dozen candidates to four (Chris Taub, Remmy "Thirteen" Hadley, Laurence Kutner, and Amber "Cut Throat Bitch" Volakis.) He ended up firing CTB and hiring the other three, CTB was fired because she wouldn't easily admit to being wrong.

CTB eventually got romantically involved with Wilson much to House's chagrin. In the penultimate episode of the season House is in a bus crash and is suffering memory loss but is aware that someone he saw is near death, it's eventually discovered this person is Amber.

In the final episode of the season we learn that she answered a call for Wilson, from House, to pick him up at a bar. Wilson was on call at the hospital so Amber went to pick-up House to take him home; House refused and boarded a bus followed by Amber and both were in the crash.

Amber sent to another hospital as a Jane Doe, House takes charge of her "case" (she suffering from kidney failure) and we find out that Amber was overdosing on anti-virals for the flu. Her kidney failure meant that they weren't properly filtering out the drug and the drug bonds with certain proteins in the body, without the kidneys it wasn't being filtered out and the drug was causing damage to all of her internal organs. When her hear stopped on an ambulance en-route to the hospital House works at (from the hospital she was originally in) nothing could be done to save her. (In the ambulance her heart stopped but Wilson and House decided not to restart it rather to put her into "protective hypothermia" to prevent whatever was killing her to be pumped through her body to cause more damage, at the hospital she was kept in hypothermia and put on bypass.)

In short, Amber was dead. She was awoken briefly from a medically induced coma to say goodbye to Wilson and friends (House himself now in a coma due to a risky memory-recalling procedure he went through to solve the case.)

Her death tore Wilson up and strained the friendship with House as House was, partly, "responsible" for her death (had House not been so dependent on others to bail him out of trouble Amber would've never gone to pick up House or followed him onto the bus.)

You'd have to watch the whole season to really "get" it namely the relationship Amber had with House and the one Amber and Wilson had that formed a bit of a "love triangle" with Amber coming between House and Wilson's friendship. Her death was very well handled, shocking, and we even get a bit of a humanity insight into House. Also? Cuddy does a strip-tease showing us all how good looking a middle-aged woman really can look.

If there's one season I'd recommend seeing of House's it's Season 4, the shortest season due to a writer's strike. It's just very compact, tight, and I don't think there's a bad episode in the bunch, it also introduced me to the perfect beauty of Olivia Wilde. The show really hasn't topped those two hours.
 
Oh yeah that was a great season. Just a hint, after 2-3 years don't really need spoiler warnings. :lol:
 
Season 4 was the best. It had most of the characters in a more positive or interesting light which the show has been lacking lately. For example, back in Season 4, Chase was a mature person with a functioning romantic relationship and working in the hospital in a capacity free of being House's lackey. But in Season 7, he's back to being House's lackey, his once-functioning relationship has been ruined by his own ill-thought actions, and his maturity has been turned into cynism and a level of narcissism.

Has anyone noticed that House's Ducklings have become mimicking parts of House's behavior from the misery to the pscynoanalyzing the way dogs mimick the behavior or mood of their owners?
 
Oh yeah that was a great season. Just a hint, after 2-3 years don't really need spoiler warnings. :lol:

You never know, someone may pick up the series and start watching/be watching and Season 4 is so amazing that I think spoiling it should be avoided at all costs. Sort of like the ending of The Sixth Sense.

;)
 
Oh yeah that was a great season. Just a hint, after 2-3 years don't really need spoiler warnings. :lol:

You never know, someone may pick up the series and start watching/be watching and Season 4 is so amazing that I think spoiling it should be avoided at all costs. Sort of like the ending of The Sixth Sense.

;)

Then they shouldn't enter a topic about House ending. :lol:

King Kong dies. ;)

Then King Kong Lives. :lol:
 
I hear contracts have been signed by some of the cast or are close to being done and a 8th season is expected to be announced by FOX this week. The only real question is how many episodes will it be?
 
I'm sure working on House isn't easy for Laurie, American TV schedules are a lot tougher, tighter, and stricter (not to mention feature more episodes) than British ones. I'd like to see them work something out with him to still do the series but maybe do fewer episodes or stretch the season out more but, as I said above, I think this series is passing it's prime.
 
I stopped reading the article when it said the current 8th season. It's the seventh, and will end after the 8th next season.

I thought most were smart and realized Hugh Luarie wanted to leave.
 
When Hugh signed the contract that ran to 8 seasons a while back, he stated he would not go past an 8th year and who can blame him really.
 
An eighth season was pretty much a given at this point, it was just a battle between Universal (owned by NBC) and Fox. Good to see RSL will be back in some capacity as he seemed to be the one hold-out. I think Edelstein enjoys working on the show, so I suspect she'll be back too. Awesome the Wilde is in.

It'll very likely be the last season which is good, it's a shame how much the show has slipped but hopefully next season they can pull out all of the stops and do some great stuff again, I hope they stop messing with the character, soap opera, melodrama bullshit and get back to medical mysteries. This season started off good in that regard but really slipped when it got too envolved in the Huddy stuff.

No mention of it being the last season, but I would expect it to be the final year

Right in the second paragraph, dude.
 
I find it difficult to imagine it will get 22 episodes due to the fact FOX is paying quite a bit to air the show and with a packed lineup a shorter run means they could squeeze in a new show come early Spring for a limited run. Personally I'd be happy with 15-18 episodes and you could always start and end with 2 hour episodes to make House finish earlier making room for a pilot pickup.
 
To be a contrary voice, i actually LIKE the inter-personal interactions. The medical stuff, while somewhat interesting, has been done for so long that it gets routine and boring, even with the 'exciting' cases. The cast interacting is about the only thing keeping me watching...
 
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