‘House’ Season Finale Commits a Major Boo Boo
House Season 2 Finale—No Reason
If there’s one technique that I wish television shows, movies, and books would do away with and never bring back, it’s the copout know to rabid fans as “It was all just a dream.” Essentially, that’s exactly what the second season finale of House was, although the writers thought they’d get over on viewers by couching events in the more clinical-sounding term “hallucination.” Hallucination, schmallucination, dream, schream—it’s all the same, only using different combinations of letters.
The episode opened interestingly enough, with Doc House and his team of merry interns being confronted by an irate former patient wielding a big fat gun full of real live bullets. We already knew House was gonna take one or a few pieces of steel in the kisser (or some other anatomical part) because the prior promos made sure to indicate that fact.
What the adverts didn’t reveal, however, is that the central medical case of the night, the one besides House’s dilemma that provided the most intrigue and really had me scratching my head and salivating in anticipation of the eventual correct diagnosis, would go completely and vexingly unexplained. I literally almost didn’t care about Mr. Grumpy and his suddenly healed leg and irritating ICU roommate, who, in a nice acerbic twist befitting our star doc, was the guy that put House temporarily out of business.
No, my concern was reserved for the poor man whose tongue was swollen so bad it wouldn’t even fit into his mouth, not to mention his ballistic eyeball (ew!) and most unfortunate explosive encounter with the urinal (double ew!!). How could the people responsible for the show leave viewers in the dark about such a fascinating case? It became pretty obvious what was happening with House when he realized he had imagined meeting the tongue patient’s wife.
Then all the technical babble and emoting from House, Wilson, and Cuddy about House’s miraculously healed leg just sealed the deal, making alert viewers even more conscious that the plot seemed more like wishful or drugged thinking than reality. When the end finally arrived just where I expected it to, with a newly shot House being wheeled into the emergency area surrounded by his frantic posse, my eyes were already rolled halfway to the back of my head. House will certainly survive, of course, but I still hope the third season will offer some sort of closure to the Case of the Guy with the Titanic Tongue, even if he wasn’t really real either.
