The modern-day medical Sherlock Holmes, the namesake of HOUSE M.D., fights the last battle he can as his medical team crumbles around him. It’s God vs. House to see who is responsible for the mistake and who gets credit for the success.
How do most “season finales” of nighttime dramas work? Plane crash? Mystery gunman? True love revealed? HOUSE M.D. has dabbled in those tired mechanisms before, but not this time. The third season, which brought us real threats to House’s nest of security, ends not with a cliff-hanger so much as an unwritten page. A satisfyingly unwritten page.
Watching THE SHIELD is almost always like taking a bath in mud; you feel dirty right away, and you keep finding grit and dirt long after it’s over. Unlike mud baths, however, this show’s addictive; the stellar writing and acting keep turning over old tropes and clichés as fast as they churn them out. This week’s episode, “Recoil,” was a master class in betrayal, with so many backstabbings, I tossed my notepad away twenty minutes in.
Series creator Shawn Ryan and his crew have embraced the serial drama format with glee, reeling in plot threads and characters from several seasons past for more hijinks. Did you enjoy the heist of the Armenian money train? It’s back, along with the shadow of Antwon Mitchell (Anthony Anderson) and that pernicious cell phone picture of Aceveda (Benito Martinez) doubling some guy’s pleasure at gunpoint. The only way the show could get any more wrapped up in its past would be if all the guys Det. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his Strike Team have capped over the years rose from their graves and came back to Farmington looking for munchies. It’d make a hell of a movie, but I digress.