Dr. Gregory House spent his last hour on television Monday doing what for eight years he has done best: messing with everyone in sight....
Dr. Gregory House spent his last hour on television Monday doing what for eight years he has done best: messing with everyone in sight.
Usually that has just meant annoyed bosses, frustrated underlings and dying patients.
As a special treat for his last hurrah, he also messed with the viewers.
You’re never too old to find new ways to have fun.
So Monday night was, in short, a perfectly appropriate final episode for one of TV’s most jagged primetime shows, full of psychological truths, brutal realities, honest confrontations and an unspoken, underlying theme that might best be summarized as “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
For starters, Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House spent half this episode in a burning warehouse, looking like an extra from “The Vampire Diaries” and talking with, alternately, the dead and the living about where he went wrong.
They spoke in shorthand, of course, since half an episode wasn’t anywhere near enough time to tackle that one.
But they touched on the main points, like how he didn’t care about patients, just about the challenging puzzles he saw in their broken bodies.
Then, not long after he spoke the title of the final episode — “Everybody Dies” — he did.
After a final conversation with Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), he rose to his feet just in time to have the warehouse collapse on him before the horrified eyes of his admitted friend Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and his closet friend Foreman (Omar Epps).
The body was carried out. The coroner confirmed it was House.
All his friends, with the apparent exception of his former boss and girlfriend Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), then attended a funeral service that was way, way, way too nice.
Everyone took the podium to speak what seemed to be one long sentence about how he helped them, encouraged them, brought out the best in them — and really, deep down inside, did know how to love.
You sensed from the start that somewhere House was muttering that this was exactly the kind of thing that would drive him to drugs even in the afterlife.
Once Wilson started to speak, which presumably was going to close the show, he got a text message on a phone that wasn’t his and had said he didn’t even know was in his pocket.
It read, “Shut Up You Idiot,” and was followed almost immediately by Wilson finding House on the steps of his apartment building, all ready to go have some adventures in the five months Wilson has left before he dies of cancer.
House first told Wilson he faked his death. Then he said he’s dead anyway. See earlier passage on “messing.”
No matter. While all House’s other colleagues were thinking fond thoughts to the tune of Warren Zevon singing “Keep Me In Your Heart,” House and Wilson were snapping up their motorcycle helmets and heading down a sunny country road.
Their song was “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” an old Guy Lombardo finger-snapper.
That meant the last words on the last episode of “House” were “Enjoy yourself,” which spreads irony thicker than the oblivion from a six-pack of Vicodin.
And we expected something else?
The final episode did bring almost everyone back, from Cameron to Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) and even, as previously mentioned, the dead.
House had some of his best chats with the late Kutner (Kal Penn) and Amber (Anne Dudek), who was Wilson’s girlfriend until she died after an accident on a bus in which House was also riding.
House had one last convenient patient who used to be a successful stockbroker, but then turned into a self-destructive junkie because successful stockbroking bored him.
“Losing everything wasn’t enough,” the patient philosophized, “because reality sucks.”
Now that’s House’s kind of patient. Heck, that’s House’s kind of scriptwriter.
The final episode didn’t bother a whole lot with precise, linear plot logic.
Instead, it leapt nimbly between fantasies and realities, truths and evasions — that is, what the show has done for the last eight years — until at the end it isolated House and Wilson in a bubble.
The rest of the cast vanished back to their own lives, leaving our doomed heroes suspended in space, apart from everything around them, less like Holmes and Watson than Romeo and Juliet, only without the kisses.
As for us viewers, in a way we got the same deal as Wilson: If “House” had only wanted to mess with us and didn’t actually care in some way, it wouldn’t have let us come along for the ride.
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