Fox's long running medical drama, House, suffered a common ailment of popular shows in their final run. It ran just a bit too long. The eighth and final season limped to its finale as the signature wit and charm fizzled out. The primary problem was the depleted material. House's cases had become less interesting, the original team had dispersed, and the recurring conflicts of the previous seasons had either been resolved or dropped. There was very little left of the character discourse and Sherlock-ian methodology that had carried the series to success.
The eighth season started strong with the "House only" episode about his time in prison, Twenty Vicodin. Much like Broken from season 6, House was combating unfamiliar surroundings in addition to a case-of-the-week. It was more like a prologue than an actual beginning. The following episode, Transplant, had him released into the custody of the hospital, and the story went on from there. There was a palpable emptiness to the next few episodes. None of the team members from previous seasons were present and the hospital had gone through several changes (House's diagnostic room was gone, and his former subordinate, Foreman, ran the hospital). The viewer, much like House, had to wait and wonder if things would go back to the way they were. They didn't, at least not quite. House managed to recover his office space and two of his team, but the "got the band back together" feeling just wasn't there. The new team members, Park and Adams, grudgingly came aboard from their own lack of options and the returning team members, Chase and Taub, had grown comfortable in the despondence of working for House. There was no excitement that the great Diagnostic Department was back in action. At best, it was a despairing shrug.
The diagnostic team and their various discussions had been staple of the series since day 1. There was usually something specific about the patient that had them chatting in various arguments. For the early seasons, the team dynamic followed a predicable pattern. House would usually make fun of the patient. Chase would usually back him up, though for pragmatic reasons. Foreman would disagree just to stand up to House. Cameron would always take the moral high ground. The diverse, but clear cut, opinions of the team helped the show succeed by appealing to different demographics. As the show progressed, the cast went through several changes and the varied opinions of the team members became a bit muddled. Even more so in the final season when the team seemed to be talking just to fill space. Like I said, Chase and Taub had grown comfortable in House's working environment, and were less likely to get riled up in the moral discussions. Adams was often the voice of professionalism, so she made an effort to keep her nose clean and focus on the medicine. That left it to House as the instigator, and Park as the naive rookie, to push things. Coupled with the less interesting patients they were discussing, the whole discussion aspect of the show quickly staled.
After several years of quirky medicine, House's patients became more and more average, which affected the team's talks about them. Over the previous eight years, the team had treated an excessively fat man, a heavily deformed teen, an emancipated minor, a third-world dictator and nearly every other possible patient quirk that would be worth watching. Patients in the final season included a chronic philanthropist, a teenage runaway, and a nun having a crisis of faith. They were very derivative of their previous patients and didn't really challenge the team or their diagnostic operations. House summed the medical creativity of the show in the final episode. "The medicine doesn't matter."
The idea well had ran low with the patients, but there was one story that might have kept the show moving: Lisa Cuddy. House and Cuddy had been professional antagonists for the entire series. Most of the arguments had been I'm a Crazy Genius vs. I'm the Boss, comparable to Lestrade and Holmes. Their romantic relationship in the seventh season further developed things as they tried to reconcile their professional conflicts with their personal ones. The climax of the seventh season, where House drove his car through Cuddy's house after their breakup, left the opportunity to follow up on their emotional fallout. Alas, Lisa Edelstein left the show, never to return. Cuddy's absence contributed to the empty feeling at the season's start that remained until the end. The House/Cuddy conflict was a show centerpiece that was not easily replaced. Foreman's promotion to Cuddy's position was briefly interesting while House was on an ankle monitor, but when that was removed to give House the freedom of his old shenanigans, there was nothing to drive the conflict. Foreman's presence diminished and there was one less opponent for House. So if the writers couldn't challenge House at work, they had to challenge him emotionally through Wilson.
The countdown to finale around Wilson's cancer illustrated the direction the show had been going for sometime. It wasn't about the cases anymore. In fact, the cases were just there to occupy the team and fill air time. Some of the team, like Chase and Taub, lamented as to why they were still working there (Chase eventually packed up and left). Do any of you remember the Sherlock Holmes story where he stopped solving crimes and just dealt with his own emotional stuff? Neither do I, but that's exactly what happened in the final few episodes. This again affected the team's dynamic as House wasn't around to stir the pot, so the scenes with the team were just a meaningless back-and-forth of medical jargon and even more feeble attempts at discussion. In the end, House was only one character that mattered.
Rather than being a climax to any of the story arcs, the finale was more a simple sign-off, with some nice allusions thrown in. House's final confrontation with his hallucinations echoed A Christmas Carol, but set in Dante's Inferno. Almost every single former character of significance (minus Cuddy) trotted themselves out before House to measure him and his life. The location of a burning building provided a nice metaphorical precipice for death or final days. ("Could you hold my metaphor?") Beyond that, it was a typical back-and-forth reflection leading to a resolution for change. The last few minutes of the episode were the most interesting as the writing finally returned to its Sherlock Holmes inspirations with a resolution through a fake death. The title Everybody Dies had suggested House would be facing death, but House's struggles were never against death. I know this sounds odd considering he was a doctor but let me finish. Death sometimes provided a ticking clock for him to race against, but it was never his nemesis. He was fighting against the unsolved puzzles and, more subtly, himself. His own vices and antics were his personal Moriarty that would come back to thwart his own plans to solve a puzzle. The finale ended this struggle with House faking his death and walking away from it all. He tricked the establishment into letting him go, and by doing so, he was able to let go of his selfish ways. Without the hospital, he had no puzzles to obsess over and fewer rules to rebel against. The final act of the finale captured everything it needed to about House. It left the other characters with some small tie-offs, but like I said, they only there to fill time. They didn't have enough of a story built up to warrant more attention. It was about House, which was all it needed to be.
Had the series not dragged itself out into an eighth season, I'm sure the finale would have looked very different. There was much more going on with the supporting characters during the seventh season and a series finale then would have had to conclude all that. Fox and the show runners made the decision early that the eighth season would be the last. While many writers take the foreknowledge of a final season to push the envelope and take the risks they were unable to do before, the writers of House were just tapped out. There was an exhaustion of the material in the creativity of the cases and the loss of several popular cast members (that ungrateful Olivia Wilde got a few movies roles and was off the races). Time just caught up to the show and the rigors of that age were all too apparent when all was said and done. In the end, being a "middle-aged" American show, there was only one thing left to do. Ride motorcycles.
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