By Buzz Byrne
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.
This episode revolves around a Cuban couple, rescued while trying to reach the shores of the U.S. to find Dr. House (Hugh Laurie). The wife is dying, the Cuban doctors don’t know why, and neither does House’s team -- which seems to be coming apart since the recent resignation of Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps). As the team initially misdiagnoses -- as they do every week -- the central question has to be addressed: Will House ask Foreman to stay, and even if he does, will Foreman oblige? Foreman has declared he doesn’t want to become like House -- an uncaring diagnostic machine. This has been hanging in the air for weeks, and one assumes because of the whole “finale” aspect of the episode, that it will be resolved. We get the first clue which way things will go when Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer), blond suck-up extraordinaire, breaks out and tells House to stop being so pigheaded and then promptly gets fired. “Either you’ve learned all you can, or you’ve learned nothing,” House tells him.
Meanwhile, Foreman is looking for a blood clot in the Cuban wife when her heartbeat stops, but she’s still alive. When she is put on a heart bypass machine, a cardiologist tries to defibrillate her to no avail. House pushes for more, but the doctor tells him flatly, “Her heart can’t start. She’s dead.” A lesser actor than Laurie would have reveled in the close-up after hearing that line, which clearly is working on more than one level. Writers do actors no big favors by serving up juicy mugging opportunities like that. But Laurie remains flat-footed, unmoved as he should be. This is a moment of fine acting boiled down to its essence; Laurie reverses the audience’s conditioned emotional expectations by staying perfectly true to the nature of the character. It is not what we are expecting, but it seems absolutely natural.
When all hope is lost and she is removed from life support, miraculously her heart beats again. God gets the credit and House gets pissed. And, he gets even. He single-handedly deals with the initial causes and is in such a good mood he even makes a half-hearted attempt at getting Foreman to stay. Here is where the writers get their due for taking a risk. The conclusion is a bit of a surprise, but if you have followed the series, it actually seems true to the characters. Really, what else was supposed to happen?
The strength of the series has always been the acting,and for the lead role, it's the singular commitment of the writers to staying faithful to the central conflict that makes House compelling; he is a doctor who functions best by not caring -- for his patients, for his co-workers or for himself. He is driven to solve the problem, so emotion -- and sentimentality --be damned. When this works, as it does for this season finale, it is a look at what makes true genius. It is a slicked-up vehicle to seriously consider moments of human art expressed through medicine, and in that context, it is nothing but a question of when people can transcend frailty and achieve the sacral. It has always been House against God, and on this show, House has more writers on his side, so he wins almost every single time.