House Season 3: A Review

It sucked. Sure, there were some neat moments, like House on a plane, or death by bra!!, but overall, wow, not good. I don’t think the show’s going to last another year.

The problem with House is, they’ve got this great formula and this awesome main character. But they rightly fear that the show will become formulaic. So they try to change it up a little, but they have no idea how to actually do that.

I don’t think the writers of House actually understand the concept of character development. That’s that thing where characters remember things that have happened to them, and gradually evolve into something different than what they were. By and large, the characters on House do neither. Instead, the writers seem to have gotten the idea that all change needs to be BIG!! and DRAMATIC!! But then every time they do something BIG!! and DRAMATIC!!, they realize that it’s just not credible enough or that it screws around with the fabric of the show too much and it lasts for about one episode, if that, before they reset everything back to the status quo.

House is a good character, and the premise for the show is a good premise. But for most of this past season, the BIG!! DRAMATIC!! changes have consisted of Wilson and Cuddy suddenly deciding that House sucks and needs to change. Even though they’ve tolerated him up to this point. Suddenly House is going OUT OF CONTROL!! with the Vicodin and needs a major annoying story arc to harass him, and us, about it before going right back to the magic happy pills. At the end of that arc, Cuddy lied for House in court and then told House that his ass belonged to her, and he was going to get extra clinic time and stuff… do you remember that? Yeah, neither do I.

And, of course, the season 2 finale/season 3 premiere had House being magically cured of his leg problem and able to walk and run, and then there was some crap for a few episodes where Cuddy and Wilson were convinced that House had lost his diagnostic mojo. And then the leg pain and the mojo came right back, with no real explanation, and the whole thing was never mentioned again.

Speaking of things never being mentioned again, hey, remember last season when House got shot by some random guy who just walked into his office? Never mentioned again except for one episode where Wilson suddenly decided that Asperger’s Syndrome was the reason that House didn’t want to have his bloody carpet replaced.

Foreman almost died in a two-parter, remember that? And then he went on this major “it’s great to be alive” kick for one episode until House snapped him out of it. And he was brain-damaged, too, until the beginning of the next episode when he just came in in the morning and said “oh, I’m all better now.”

And, of course, in the finale we got one more BIG!! DRAMATIC!! change: all of House’s fellows have quit or been fired. Why? Well, because Foreman suddenly decided that working with House meant he would become exactly like House, which is a bad thing, gave his two weeks’ notice, and then spent the next three weeks milking it for all it was worth. And then House decided that Chase had either learned everything he could learn, or he had learned nothing, and either way, it was time for him to leave. And then Cameron played copy-cat and said that she had either learned everything or blah blah blah and it was time for a change.

So now, I suppose, House is either going to get new fellows, or… perhaps… the writers will play “takesie backsies” again and all three of them will come right back in a couple of episodes and it will be like they never left. I’d really miss Chase if he left, and I really hope he comes back, but I really wonder whether the writers have any way to move forward from this point other than just to pretend it never happened just like everything else never happened. Maybe come season 4 we’ll find out that House was just hallucinating again? Or… maybe… he never stopped hallucinating. Oooh. Whatever you do, guys, please just make it interesting, okay?

Tags: House, TV