Post-finale breakdown

[flywoman]

A man who would deliberately drive his car into a houseful of people to express his rage at the sight of his ex-girlfriend moving on with her life is not the character that I know and love. House not only didn't attack Mark Warner, he did his best to diagnose and save him. He did not attempt to take any kind of revenge on Lucas for wooing Cuddy right under his nose. House lashes out at people verbally, but when it comes to physical violence, we've seen him turn the other cheek over and over again. Even when he punched Chase in "Finding Judas," it was in reaction to Chase grabbing him and trying to keep him from leaving the hospital when he was upset and in withdrawal. So unless there turns out to be a very convincing medical explanation for what we saw (and possibly even then), I will feel like the character of House has been assassinated by its creators.

I do think that no matter what the writers of "Moving On" have said in interviews etc., they have left this ending open to interpretation in the following season. We know that House has been taking high doses of Vicodin, which resulted in very realistic-appearing hallucinations in the past. We also know that the story of the POTW generally serves as a parallel for House, and while there are already many obvious examples here - a (false?) choice between work and love, a loved one trying to prevent self-destructive behavior, the theatricality of House emerging unscathed from the wreckage to hand Cuddy the hairbrush - it seems to me that the faked symptoms are significant as well, and tell us that we can't believe that everything we see in this episode is real.

What do I think is least likely to be real? That final scene on the beach, certainly. It seems too bright and colorful and fake, and the exchange between House and the bartender suggested to me that House is not "home" (in reality) but rather temporarily escaping it. I think that this could be a hallucination... or possibly even a dream while in a coma.

Why might House be in a coma? Witnesses of the shooting on location have reported that a woman (Julia?) was loaded into the ambulance and that the driver of the car (House) went through the windshield during the crash. I don't know whether either of these things are "true," but if actually filmed, they could appear next season. Alternatively, I think it's possible that House never got in his car after coming home from the hospital - that Wilson came to check on him but ended up having him hospitalized for an overdose or something. In any case, I really hope that, ultimately, what we saw is not what we get.

I think that what upset me most was that "After Hours" had left me so hopeful. House had (reluctantly) called on Cuddy to rescue him from his latest exercise in self-destruction, and it seemed by the end as if they might be on their way, not to any kind of romantic reconciliation, but at least to something resembling friendship. And House finally seemed to admit that he was out of control and needed Wilson's help and support to make the changes that he wanted - a theme which was echoed during early scenes of "Moving On" when he said he was trying to get healthy and returned Cuddy's things (after how long??), telling her that he wanted to get back to the way things were before the relationship.

As I understand it, "After Hours" (or some version of it) was originally going to be the season finale before it was decided that a 23rd episode should be written. In light of what went down, or appeared to go down, in the finale, as well as the last-minute outcomes of the negotiations with the network and the actors, I wonder exactly what decisions were made when, and why. Was this meant to serve as the series' finale if one turned out to be needed? Was it meant to set up a situation in which House or Cuddy would leave PPTH? I agree with alternatealto  in her recent post that it would make no sense from a financial (or frankly storytelling) point of view to have House wandering around as a wanted man for the first part of Season 8, which is another argument for all or part of this episode being some kind of dream or hallucination. Or just justification for Cuddy's despair and departure... although in that case, I wonder if what actually happened in the crash was worse than what we thought we saw.

I'm no longer surprised that LE decided to walk away from this show, knowing that this would the final episode of the season. Frankly, it's difficult for me to believe that RSL chose to associate himself with it for another year.