I watched the show House, M.D., as it's officially called, since the beginning, amazed like everyone else to find that Hugh Laurie was (is) British. The show just ended its 8 year run and though the run-up to the ending was fun, I think you need to look at the events in reverse to get an idea of how much suspension of disbelief was required to follow along.
As the series ends, House and his friend Wilson, ride off on motorcycles to the strains of "It's Later Than You Think," which is appropriate because Wilson has terminal cancer and will be dead in 5 months, which fortunately enough is 5 months after the series ends. Not likely to be a spinoff named "Wilson" though. How does House get away from his busy doctor job to spend 5 months with his dying friend?
Well, House is officially dead. He texts Wilson during his supposed funeral and has him come to meet him. House is fake dead on purpose, sort of, maybe. When we last saw him he was in a burning building that did the dramatic collapse/fireball thing that TV shows and movies love. We saw him silhouetted in the front window moments before said fireball and they cart out a body that is ultimately identified as House's through some clever swapping (especially for a dead guy) of dental records. How did he get to that door?
He fell though the floor from the upper floor of the building. He had spent most of the episode lying on the floor having deep conversations with hallucinations of people from his past, who I can only assume were assembled for the purposes of final show-type stuff. The conversations were about whether or not he was going to try to get out of the burning building or allow himself to perish.
Okay, two questions at once now. Why was he in a burning building lying on the floor (he has a dead guy lying next to him, or at least the hallucinations say it's dead)? And why would he want to kill himself?
The second question is easier to answer. House has always been miserable, and now his best friend is dying from cancer and on top of that he will not be able to spend the last 5 months with his friend because he is supposed to go to jail. I know, that's a new question, but let me dispose of the burning building one first.
Actually even that is two questions. Why is he in that building and why is it burning? We presume he was in the building to shoot heroin with the dead guy (who presumably wasn't dead yet when they did the heroin) because he was miserable about the whole friend dying/jail thing. Why he didn't shoot the heroin in his apartment, where he has consumed many illegal drugs before, is a question neither asked nor answered. And why is it burning? Why, it's a mystery. Did House set the fire so he could shoot up and die? If so, that was very poor timing because the fire was just getting going when he came out of it. I don't know anything about heroin, but I'm presuming the buzz lasts for a little while, and I doubt he set the fire while he was lying on the floor because he was upstairs and the fire was downstairs to start with.
Everybody following? So as best we know he and his heroin buddy pick a random building that just happens to catch fire, even though it's an old building and therefore is unlikely to have burned down at any other point. So, back to the jail question.
House was supposed to go back to jail because he broke the MRI, by crashing thousands of gallons of water down on it. This is referred to as felony vandalism, which I guess would be true because if you commit vandalism after having already been in jail, it often treated as a felony. What, you may say? Yes, House has already been in jail and this vandalism violates his parole. Again, two questions. What was the act of vandalism that caused the water to crash down on the MRI and its contents and why had he been in jail?
The simple answer to the second is that he had, in a very well controlled act of rage, crashed his car through his former girlfriend's living room window. It should be noted that said former girlfriend was totally absent from the final season, including the funeral. Fair enough.
The act of vandalism? Flushing tickets down the toilet. On one hand, it's kind of hard to see water crashing through the ceiling of the MRI room as a result of flushing tickets (or anything, for that matter) down the toilet. I know I'm certainly going to be more careful from now on. On the other, House seemed fully aware that the flushed tickets would wreak havoc with the hospital's plumbing and he even seemed to know where the havoc would occur. Certainly, anyone who has watched the show knows that the support staff at this hospital is hapless, so House must have known this too, but several days seemed to transpire between the flushing and the collapse (hard to tell, though, because it was all flashbacks, because House is, well, supposedly dead)
This makes no sense to me, but again, we're suspending disbelief. What were these tickets? A colleague had given him hockey tickets to cheer him up about his best and only friend dying, even though hockey season is ending right around now and his friend wasn't dead yet. House did not take this gesture well, apparently, and somehow knew these tickets were just the thing to flush to make selected toilets back up at strategic moments. What's surprising is that the water backup would occur upstairs so it could collapse a ceiling, even though the hospital lawyer said it was a main outflow pipe that was clogged. My experience with water is that it wants to go down rather than up (note the preponderance of waterfalls versus waterrises). Oh well.
To sum up, House had to fake his own death, maybe on purpose and maybe by accident, because he flushed hockey tickets down the toilet.
Okay, and because his friend is dying. Props to the guy who gave him the tickets, though, otherwise they might have had to come up with a less preposterous ending. Somehow it wasn't until it was over that the the Rube Goldberg aspect of the plotting hit me. And I leave the show wondering how in the world did anyone come up with that idea.
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