Brief "House" season four finale spoilers coming up just as soon as I wipe my sleeve...Like Amber, I've had healthier days. Unlike Amber, it's not hard to diagnose what's wrong with me (hint: it involves the little germ factory I send my daughter to every day), but it still means my judgment's a bit impaired. (For that reason, and my need to sleep, the "HIMYM" review will likely have to wait until morning.)
I'm still not sure all the hallucinations/flashbacks/dreams in this two-parter were an necessary stylistic flourish, but Anne Dudek and Robert Sean Leonard acted the hell out of Wilson and Amber's goodbye. There's stage crying, and then there's raw, unfiltered emotion, and they gave us buckets full of the latter.
I'm also glad they didn't try to end the season on a House-in-jeopardy cliffhanger. Not only did they do that at the end of season two, but endangering the life of your main character is the most bogus kind of cliffhanger. I mean, we don't know for sure that House will be completely unimpaired, but the final scene seemed to be much less about the state of House's brain than it was about the shattered state of his friendship with Wilson.
Also, good on the writers for making House's sin relatively minor, but still the type that Wilson would have a hard time forgiving. Had House slept with Amber, it might have been more dramatically interesting at first, but it's the kind of development that they could never plausibly undo, and the House/Wilson friendship, whenever it's restored, is one of the strongest (and often funniest) parts of the series.
Speaking of things that can or can't be undone, we end the season with the status quo for the new team, which means the writers didn't try to backslide the way I think we all assumed when House lost his whole team last year. Yes, Foreman's back, but there's no sign that Thirteen, Kutner and Taub (whose hug of his sleeping wife was one of the episode's nicest little touches) are going anywhere, nor that Chase and Cameron want back in. That's not great news for fans of those characters -- or for people who could take or leave, say, Thirteen -- but at least the writers have made the ramifications of last year's finale last a lot longer than House's newfound ability to run from the start of season three.
Don't have a brain injury, but still need sleep. What did everybody else think?
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