Ventilating the "House"
As many good things as "House" routinely manages, one thing it does seem to have problems with is its season finales.
(What follows includes spoilers for those who didn't see but did record the episode.)
Last year, "House" cooked up a contrived storyline involving his former lover being hired oh-so-conveniently by the hospital as in-house counsel while her husband was in the process of a long, slow mend. This flirtation played out over the first half of the past season, ending, as it inevitably had to, with House shooing her away to stay with her husband so he could remain the same old lovable Grumpy Gus he's always been. For while Hugh Laurie may be the thinking-woman's sex symbol, House as a romantic figure is an awfully gimpy notion.
Tonight, "House" opened with the proverbial and literal bang, as someone describing himself as a former patient shot the good doctor/bad human being twice. As the episode played out, it was boxes-within-boxes, a series of hallucinations and dreams and gross-out sequences that eventually had viewers asking themselves, how much of all this is a dream? The answer eventually revealed itself: All of it (c'mon -- putting him in the same hospital room with his assailant? The show did something similar earlier in the season when it trapped Forman in the same isolation area with someone he clearly disdained), putting those elaborate dream sequences in "The Sopranos" to shame.
In the end, as House was being wheeled to the OR, he requested a treatment he had been railing against the entire episode, one that would eliminate his limp and, it was implied, that might humanize him somewhat.
Just as it did last season, "House" has set up a cliffhanger the outcome of which should be obvious to any fan of the show. Those who love the irascible House won't sit for a kinder, gentler House, a less-brilliant House doesn't make for much of a medical-mystery series and his cane has become an iconographic part of the series.
This may be because the show doesn't play well with other TV conventions that the series' producers haven't created for themselves and, increasingly, the season-finale cliffhanger is one that numerous series have used to engage in a form of one-upsmanship. "House" may follow this edict somewhat half-heartedly.
This said, the dialogue crackled as always.
That was a weird episode. The ketamine he was asking for is an anesthetic with psychedelic properties. I fail to see how it could miraculously cure his leg, seeing as how it appears to be missing muscle tissue. Explains the hallucinations, though.
The eye pop was a surprise. Thank goodness we didn't get a close-up of the exploding testicle.
I didn't like it at first, but this morning, after I saw it, I liked it for some reason.
Spoiler space (I guess)
Sooo...most of that episode took place in House's mind in the seconds between when he got shot in the beginning of the episode and when they were taking him to surgery in the last 30 seconds of the episode. Is that it? Are we supposed to take from this that this is how fast House's mind works and how far ahead he can think in a short amount of time? I could be completely wrong.
It reminded me of Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge"...
...where the whole story is revealed to be the figment of a doomed man's imagination, and a whole day's escape from hanging and return home has actually transpired in the time it takes for the hanged man to fall from a bridge before the noose snaps his neck. Kind of a whole "life flashing before the eyes" sort of thing.