Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A few words about the "House MD" series finale...

Did you know that "House MD" ended after eight seasons last Monday? If not, you may want steer clear from this short piece, because I won't be avoiding spoilers.


House ended his eight-year-journey into his own psyche by breaking the ties to his handicaps.


I don't want to go into much detail, but a few things are on my mind. "House MD" is one of those shows that can honestly claim they changed television. It was one of the standard "go-to" shows for the ripe and mature age of scripted television that blossomed last decade. More than that, it was a show that redefined the term "character study" in a medium that doesn't lend itself to it, with inherently fragmented storytelling, pacing and consistency issues.

For me, it was a show I loved dearly; saying that "this show changed me" is far too common and criminally overused, usually in the case of teenage dramas that kids watch while struggling slowly into adolescence ("I grew up along with the Dawson's Creek characters!") not realizing that they were never actually taught anything and if they were, it wasn't a good lesson.

But "House MD" decriminalized the "jerk", by tossing away conventions such as political correctness or the black/white morality found in most other American TV (where even the grey area was more about showing off than actual substance). Everybody lies, a miserable life is better than no life, there is no dignity in death, the Universe isn't just and you are just another nobody.

Sadly, the show did overstay its welcome and for all its creative success early on, it fell into bad habits born out of the medium's own nature and restrictions. The formula grew stale by the third season, but in the -otherwise- remarkable effort to shake things up a bit, the character study became second to far too many secondary characters, playing the same roles and the same drama over and over. The show "House" was created to be only about "House". In eight years, when no plot can do the subtext justice, every effort at a coherent long-running plot fell flat and even for a character as deep and complex as House, every aspect of his personality was examined and nothing was left to explore.

It's there that the series finale failed as well. The entire 8th season was a shell of the show that "House" used to be; transparently tired, often-times tranquil, with no thrills, character or, for that matter, soul. If the Seasons 5-7 (when the show had seriously started sucking, save for a few golden moments and episodes) was "House" speeding straight toward a wall with no chance of avoiding it, Season 8 was the aftermath of the crash, with the show on its deathbed.

The series finale tries, for one last time, to get inside House's head and give him a resolution. His self-destructive nature has once again put him into a difficult situation, where he wakes up after heavy drug use in a burning building. He sits next to the dead body of his last patient, who lies there as a stark reminder of where his long-time pretense of living the life he wants (the one without rules and aspirations) will lead him. He hallucinates important people he lost from his life; Kutner, Amber, Stacey and Cameron (apparently the father he hated and who screwed him up didn't make the cut). His subconscious is psychoanalyzing him.

The problem with the above is that it's nothing new. The resolution he eventually finds isn't anything we didn't know years back, at least as far back as the Season 4 finale, during the remarkable hallucination in the bus with Amber. The entire episode is just a fourty-minute wait to see the direction of the conclusion and nothing further.

This isn't surprising, considering the trick the writers pulled a few episodes earlier; Wilson has cancer. As far as shark-jumping goes, this is a pretty big one. The irony of the cancer-doctor getting cancer makes it worse. The issue with Wilson's disease (and the reveal that he is terminal and denies treatment, leaving him five months to live) is that it's just a very cheap plot device to add the drama lacking from the final season, so they can move forward with the events of the finale.

You don't kill off the one character that acts as a trait of the protagonist's personality (Wilson was a surrogate figure for companionship, consience, care and love, among others), just to get things moving. I doubt if the show had ended those five years ago when it should (circa season 3), they'd have to pull a stunt like this.

But things change and the show had changed-- not for the better, but it had changed.

To say that the finale of "House" was good would be an insult to the show itself. But the remarkable thing (and I am not sure if this is good or bad) is that I really couldn't care either way. I certainly didn't like the episode, but I didn't care that I didn't like it.

And this was inevitable, because the show had struggled for so long. I don't particularly care for the direction the ending took (with House faking his death and spending the following few months by Wilson's side) and I question the character's absolution without throwing him off a cliff (if he had died, the explosion claiming him would at least fill the "poetic justice" requirement), but it really doesn't matter anymore.

This is what fascinates me. It doesn't matter how it ended and how boring the thirty minutes leading to it were; "House" was a character study and it didn't become really stale until it ran out of chracter to explore and develop. The things that kept it going, the network mandates and the countless fans and viewers missing the point and essentially forcing increasingly larger rosters (started with 6, blew up into 10) and running storylines and romances (Cuddy remains one of the worst characters I have ever seen; I'm surprised weaponised feminism isn't ripping her a new one) are the things that ultimately couldn't matter in the end.

So, it is done. We met House, we loved him, hated him, learned from him, then watched him fade into the background and now he rides off into the sunset, leaving us with memories of more than just Three Stories.

It's not what I wanted.

But I couldn't be happier.



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