House: Series Finale. "Everybody Dies." Discussion/Spoilers

[Guy Gardener]

So house killed the guy?

Or, House was just supposed to follow him around until he died of a really good time at some point probably in the next few days "Leaving Las Vegas Style"?

I mean he was on Ally McBeal when the season 3 ended and then he wasn't mentioned again ever when season four started...

The lad has a habit for being whacked.

 

[Joe Washington]

"Didn't like how they explained the relationship between House and Cuddy. It seemed to be slip shod (not the word I was looking for, but it'll do), and they seemed to avoid it in a way. Saying that if House would have stayed in a relationship with Cuddy, that it would have been boring.

is all I can say there. There were better ways for them to have handled that relationship than the way that they did there. It was bad writing period. No excuse for it."-The Might Monkey of Mim

I agree. Honestly, if I had my way, instead of the breakup in Bombshells, it would have been the heartbreaking revelation that the procedure she went through didn't work and she had months to live. House would be fighting for a way to keep her alive longer, refusing to let go of the one thing he cares about the most. This will increasingly mess with his focus on medical cases. Meanwhile, Cuddy would be busy putting more of her affairs in order and trying to make House accept her impending demise and make good of the time they have left together. It won't be until the season finale that House reaches a place of acceptance and spends his last days with Cuddy outside of the hospital. The last scene of Season 7 would be Wilson consoling a heartbroken House. Season 8 would be focused on House going back to taking on medical cases with his team while dealing with his loss of Cuddy, being a single parent to Cuddy's daughter Rachel, and having Foreman as his new boss. It would have been an interesting emotional journey for House.

 

[Saul]

Cuddy was still a huge part of House's life and not seeing her did indeed stand out. I hope we get more on what happened with Edelstein.

They should have planned out the arc sooner, they knew Hugh Laurie didn't want to come back for a 9th season, why wait so long until it's near the end of the season to clarify that the show was ending whether the producers wanted it to or not.

At first, this season wasn't being written as the last and I believe Laurie did say that he wouldn't mind coming back for a 9th. Once they got word that this would indeed be the end, they were able to put their closing arc into motion.

Seemed that since the season had begun Laurie had reconfirmed his position that he wasn't interested to play the character longer after his contract ended.

Anyone else disappointed they didn't get Stephen Fry on as the man with two limps?

It was a nice surprise to see Stacy back (though as someone said above, I suspect she was filling the Cuddy role in his hallucinations/inner dialogue.)

But part of what made House's (over)-reaction to losing Cuddy was that he lost Stacy and he didn't go on a bender and end up in prison due to his actions he just became slightly more of a miserable ass. House's reactions to losing Cuddy was just way, way, over the top and never jived with me on being true to the character.

We didn't see how House reacted to his first break up with Stacy. According to Wilson it sounded like House was a real mess telling Stacy she had no idea what he was like after they broke up the first time.

 

[DimesDan]

Wasn't a fan of the special before the ep either... didn't mind most of the behind the scenes stuff, but one of the executive producers (don't know his name) and Hugh Laurie kind of rubbed me the wrong way attitude wise for some reason. They seemed to be pretty arrogant -_-, and it just kind of made the whole thing not the most fun to watch.

Probably the British accent. They tend to do that.

That, our tone sometimes and our sense of humour, which can be self deprecating, something that Mr Laurie does anyway and well.

Personally I thought the documentary was pretty damn cool, but being British and understanding the narrators sense of humour, I didn't find him or others to be arrogant, more a case of, hay, this is what we did and we're all bloody proud to have done it.

As for the episode, I thought it was excellent and seeing Alison again made me a wee bit giddy and I think my girlfriend was a wee bit jealous by that reaction! I loved the fact House and Wilson rode off into the sunset and Chase got the department.

After watching both Sherlock and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and knowing that House was loosely based on Holmes, I wasn't surprised by House "killing" himself although, for a moment, I thought he had offed himself.

 

[Trekker4747]

We didn't see how House reacted to his first break up with Stacy. According to Wilson it sounded like House was a real mess telling Stacy she had no idea what he was like after they broke up the first time.

True, but I think we can be certain he didn't drive a car into her house and spend a year in prison.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Anyone else disappointed they didn't get Stephen Fry on as the man with two limps?

Oh, yeah. I wanted Fry on the series for years. My dream episode would have had Fry and Emma Thompson (who expressed an interest in appearing on the show) both appearing. House has to go to a medical conference in London.

 

[Saul]

We didn't see how House reacted to his first break up with Stacy. According to Wilson it sounded like House was a real mess telling Stacy she had no idea what he was like after they broke up the first time.

True, but I think we can be certain he didn't drive a car into her house and spend a year in prison.

I felt he had been through a lot more by that time, with his addiction problems etc Cuddy was more than just a relationship. She was his salvation and he did mention he had liked her ever since University which means there was always some feelings there for her for a long time.

 

[propita]

I need some clarification, since I wasn't paying 100% attention, and didn't watch the entire series anyway.

I read here that it's a bit debatable just how much of this was actually planned. House had to have switched the dental records long before gong into the burning building--so that is planning. Who burned the building? House committed arson? Was the dead guy the heroin addict from earlier? If so, how did House get him there? And get the guy's dental records?

I thought that House got to the point where he did "see the light." he seemed to finally understand the, "if you could love then you can love" or whatever that message was. Did he?

 

[barnaclelapse]

Overall? One of the best shows I've ever seen in my life. It would take at least a couple of essays to properly explain that.

This past season suffered from my not being able to see every single episode, but I've seen enough, I think, to believe the overall season was good.

And the last episode?

I need to watch it again. My initial impression is that it was a good conclusion to a phenomenal series, but I really ought to watch it again.

 

[Random_Spock]

Wasn't a fan of the special before the ep either... didn't mind most of the behind the scenes stuff, but one of the executive producers (don't know his name) and Hugh Laurie kind of rubbed me the wrong way attitude wise for some reason. They seemed to be pretty arrogant -_-, and it just kind of made the whole thing not the most fun to watch.

Probably the British accent. They tend to do that.

Nah . That wasn't it. It was his attitude. His accent didn't bother me .

Wasn't a fan of the special before the ep either... didn't mind most of the behind the scenes stuff, but one of the executive producers (don't know his name) and Hugh Laurie kind of rubbed me the wrong way attitude wise for some reason. They seemed to be pretty arrogant -_-, and it just kind of made the whole thing not the most fun to watch.

Probably the British accent. They tend to do that.

That, our tone sometimes and our sense of humour, which can be self deprecating, something that Mr Laurie does anyway and well.

Personally I thought the documentary was pretty damn cool, but being British and understanding the narrators sense of humour, I didn't find him or others to be arrogant, more a case of, hay, this is what we did and we're all bloody proud to have done it.

As for the episode, I thought it was excellent and seeing Alison again made me a wee bit giddy and I think my girlfriend was a wee bit jealous by that reaction! I loved the fact House and Wilson rode off into the sunset and Chase got the department.

After watching both Sherlock and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and knowing that House was loosely based on Holmes, I wasn't surprised by House "killing" himself although, for a moment, I thought he had offed himself.

Don't mind that kind of humor myself, heck I laugh at it most of the time. It was just the overall tone/attitude that got on my nerves.

I understood that they were proud of the show, and there's nothing wrong in that, it was just that parts of it came off rather arrogant (just from Hugh Laurie and one of the executive producers). The rest of the cast (like I mentioned before) didn't bug me one bit. The rest of the documentary as a whole was ok enough.

"Didn't like how they explained the relationship between House and Cuddy. It seemed to be slip shod (not the word I was looking for, but it'll do), and they seemed to avoid it in a way. Saying that if House would have stayed in a relationship with Cuddy, that it would have been boring.

is all I can say there. There were better ways for them to have handled that relationship than the way that they did there. It was bad writing period. No excuse for it."-The Might Monkey of Mim

I agree. Honestly, if I had my way, instead of the breakup in Bombshells, it would have been the heartbreaking revelation that the procedure she went through didn't work and she had months to live. House would be fighting for a way to keep her alive longer, refusing to let go of the one thing he cares about the most.

This will increasingly mess with his focus on medical cases. Meanwhile, Cuddy would be busy putting more of her affairs in order and trying to make House accept her impending demise and make good of the time they have left together. It won't be until the season finale that House reaches a place of acceptance and spends his last days with Cuddy outside of the hospital. The last scene of Season 7 would be Wilson consoling a heartbroken House.

Season 8 would be focused on House going back to taking on medical cases with his team while dealing with his loss of Cuddy, being a single parent to Cuddy's daughter Rachel, and having Foreman as his new boss. It would have been an interesting emotional journey for House.

Interesting idea you have there. That would have certainly made things a lot more complicated for House and it would have helped him to grow more. He would have still been himself at heart, but it would have made for a better story overall.

Navel-gazing? Do you mean, weak on plot and such? I thought it was some what better than the shit fest we got during seasons 7 and 8.

Definitely .

By navel-gazing I was referring to suffering through an hour of current and former cast members popping up to remind us that House had a lousy bedside manner, was a self-centered jerk, ... blah blah blah. They were in a burning building, and they couldn't even make that interesting.

I see. Didn't find it all that bad, but still I can see where you're going with that. It could certainly be that kind of episode.

 

[Christopher]

I'm surprised at the negativity toward the retrospective. It wasn't arrogant or smug -- on the contrary, Laurie spent an hour celebrating and commemorating all the behind-the-scenes people who made the production happen, shining the spotlight on them instead of on the actors. I thought that was a very classy thing to do and a great way to bring a series to an end.

The one thing I never understood: Knowing that House was supposed to be an homage to Sherlock Holmes, and in ALL of the seasons...we've never seen House's Moriarty. Someone of equal cunning and intellect who becomes the bain of his existence. Now, granted, Holmes solved crimes and House...well...didn't. And yeah, we did have Tritter and before that was Vogler, but neither of those guys could really measure up. I think they missed a big opportunity to send this final season out with a bang.

House's Moriarty was lupus.

this whole Wilson-cancer thing that set everything in motion felt really rushed and not particularly organic

This I agree with. That they had the cancer doctor get cancer seems a little "cute".

I'm reminded of Chase's line from a couple weeks back, when he found out that the hospital's pathologist was sick because of the soap he'd been using: "House taught us to look for irony." Irony is central to this show, so it was kind of inevitable that Wilson would eventually fall prey to the very disease he'd devoted his life to fighting. Plus it allowed a look at how someone who's worked with hundreds of cancer patients, many of them terminal, would deal with being a terminal patient himself, and how that experience would be different for him than it would be for others.

No he didn't plan for the roof to fall through, which is why after it does and he's lying there in pain with the flames licking his feet, he seriously considers just giving up and dying for real. The inner dialogue is him remembering where he is and what's going on through the heroin and reflects his subconscious mind at work: his desires to give up, to die, to fail, to be loved, to be saved, to change, etc.

House knows better than anyone that people don't change unless they are forced to. So he sets up for himself circumstances that will force him to change or die. He kills himself without actually killing himself. He didn't go there to die and then decide to fake his death instead, it was the other way around. He went there to fake his death and almost decided to die.

I'm not convinced of that. I figured that he went to that building just to give in and get high. He didn't know that the former patient he turned to for a fix was going to die. Remember, the very first scene of the episode was House waking up from a drug-induced stupor, seeing the ex-patient lying next to him, checking his pulse and realizing he was dead. And of course, as callous as he could be, he's no murderer. He might help someone commit suicide, but this guy didn't want to commit suicide; he just wanted to disappear into the painless haze of heroin use. House decided to follow him there. He's always turned to drugs as an escape from pain, and now that he was facing the worst pain of his life -- losing Wilson -- he tried to bury himself completely in drugs far stronger than Vicodin. And it almost got him killed.

So I don't think he planned to fake his death. There's no way he could have. He woke up in a burning building, ready to surrender to death, and finally convinced himself to get up and leave. He saw Wilson and Foreman watching as the beam collapsed in front of him; then he managed to get out the back way in the nick of time. And then he realized that fate had given him an opportunity to get out from under his problems by "dying," and he managed to switch the dental records sometime between then and the autopsy.

 

[propita]

Yet House had jimmied the dental records. This had to be prior, right? So planning. I mean, to do that, he'd have to have a copy of the dead guy's records and put them in his own file. Unless he got the ME to just outright lie, to say there was a match when there wasn't. But House said he switched them.

Of course, House lies.

 

[Trekker4747]

Of course, House lies.

Everybody lies.

 

[Christopher]

Yet House had jimmied the dental records. This had to be prior, right? So planning.

It had to be prior to the autopsy, not prior to the death. In fact, it could've even been during the autopsy. Checking the dental records is actually done toward the end of the process when all else fails:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1450/how-can-they-identify-people-from-their-dental-records

First, the remains are examined to get a rough idea of age, sex, race, etc. This information is then checked against missing persons files; open kidnapping, murder or accident cases; or, in the case of accidents such as plane crashes, passenger manifests. Once investigators have a general idea who the body might be, dental records are used to sort among a smaller number of possibilities. Even then the process isn't easy because there's no central registry of dental records. The dentists for all the names on the list must be identified and asked to furnish records from their office files. Tedious though this can be, it's often the best and sometimes the only way. Tooth arrangement and fillings and other dental work are unique to the individual, or nearly so, and the teeth are highly resistant to fire and decay, so dental records permit positive identification when all else fails.

So once the coroner had failed to verify the body's identity by other means, he would've contacted House's dentist and requested a copy of his dental records. So there would've been a window of at least several hours, maybe a day or more, between the fire and the delivery of the dental records, depending on how long the autopsy took, how many other autopsies were ahead of it in the queue, how long it took the dentist's staff to respond to the request, etc.

I mean, to do that, he'd have to have a copy of the dead guy's records and put them in his own file.

Remember, "the dead guy" was the same guy who'd just been his patient, the heroin addict who offered to take the fall for him. So House knew the guy's name, and it's possible that the name of his dentist was in his medical file. So he would've known where to go to obtain the records. And then he just had to go to his own dentist's office to switch them with his own, or maybe intercept them upon delivery to the coroner's office (though delivery may be done electronically these days -- how good a hacker is he?).

Everybody lies.

Oh yeah? And why should I believe you?

 

[Trekker4747]

Oh yeah? And why should I believe you?

Truth begins in lies.

 

[gh4chiefs]

Yet House had jimmied the dental records.

This is where this whole thing falls apart for me and why I'm doing a at the fake death/switched dental records thing. Christopher's explanation before this post seems to make the most sense to me as to the sequence of events in the warehouse.

But then you have the dental records thing. So, Ok, he did it before the autopsy. So we're supposed to believe that House was able to break in to HIS dentist, get his dental records, and then somehow he found the dead guy's dentist and was able to break in there and switch those records. All without getting caught. And that's just implausible to the point of being totally ridiculous to me and made me want to throw stuff at the TV. Before or after the trip to the warehouse, it doesn't matter, it's ridiculous either way.

Ok maybe someone can make the argument that he didn't break in, but he bribed somebody at both ends. Ok somewhat more plausible, but still strains credibility. Just how in the hell did he find the dead guy's dentist?

 

[Christopher]

Ok maybe someone can make the argument that he didn't break in, but he bribed somebody at both ends. Ok somewhat more plausible, but still strains credibility. Just how in the hell did he find the dead guy's dentist?

I already said. "The dead guy" had been his patient mere days before. I think some people are overlooking that -- the corpse wasn't just some random junkie who happened to be in the building, he was the Patient of the Week. So naturally House had full access to his medical records, had his team ransack the guy's place of residence, etc. Given how thorough and invasive he is in researching his patients' lives and medical histories (or in making his team do so), it's not remotely hard to believe that he would've known who this man's dentist was.

 

[Forbin]

What might be a little harder to believe is that the pain-wracked cripple managed to run all the way thru a big burning building from the front door and out the back door.

But I guess fire nipping at your ass is a good incentive.

 

[Trekker4747]

If he was still feeling the effects of the drugs he did he may not have been in much pain.

 

[Saul]

Wouldn't that explosion have killed him too? When I watched it at the time and the ceiling collapsed I thought he's ok and then boom! I thought he'd be a goner for sure.