They sort of did that already with Wilson’s girlfriend. The possibility that Lupus will figure large in the last episode seems likely though.
Here’s how I’d like the series to end. House becomes deathly ill and his team goes through a protracted series of diagnoses that lead to dead ends, red herrings, false cures that take a turn for the worse, etc. But this is an extra long litany of diagnoses and heck, we’ll throw Lupus in for good measure.
House suffers through a bunch of close calls with death and we’ll even have him clinically dead for a few minutes (he gets better). He undergoes radical surgeries, untested medicines and procedures… it’s like a whole season of House visited upon House.
At the end, it is discovered to be a problem caused by his leg (perhaps unrelated to the condition that causes his limp and leg pain). House adamantly refuses the treatment of amputation, but they go ahead against his consent. (As House may have done to his patients)
Cut to a year later, House has adjusted to his prosthetic leg and gets around reasonably well, has finished physical therapy and is off Vicodin. He’s as sharp as ever, but nice to co-workers and a joy to work with. His friendship with Wilson is as strong as ever. He is in a loving relationship and is thinking of starting a family. Could he finally be… happy?
At his birthday party at Princeton Plainsboro, he is cutting his birthday cake surrounded by singing co-workers. He cuts a jagged, lopsided piece, drops the knife and then punches the center of the cake with a balled fist. Everyone stops singing and gasps. House freezes, perfectly emotionless for a beat, then dramatically collapses. We hear the sound of his prosthetic leg clattering along the floor.
He wakes up in a hospital bed and learns he had an embolism leading to an infarction of the quadriceps of his good leg. He is faced with a choice: amputation or… [series end]
He wakes up on the Dallas set as the handyman and we discover the entire series was a dream.
He’ll wake up in bed in the middle of the night and say “You won’t believe the dream I just had!”
Someone lying next to him turns on a bedside lamp and it’s Stephen Fry.
Ben Howard’s “Promise,” which I thought was a poor pick. “Jesus Stole My Girlfriend” by Violent Soho would have been much more apt.
The great thing would be for House to be the last patient and have to go through everything his patients have gone through. One key point is missed because guess what, House lies about something.
Would it be to much that the Head of Diagnostics while House is incapacitated is Dr. Blackadder?
I’ve always had a semi-morbid vision of the final show. House is sitting alone in his darkened apartment, in a bad place. He has a gun. He looks at it. He raises it, turns the barrel toward his head. There is banging at the door - Wilson - yelling ‘House! House! Let me in!’ House freezes. Wilson still pounds on the door, yelling. Screen fades to black, Wilson still pounding and yelling…(That’s the semi-morbid vision. The whole-morbid vision is, of course, a gunshot rings out…the. end.)
Oh, and this episode is called “Happy Trails” because that’s the song I hear. Maybe House’s real father is admitted to the hospital and dies after much angsty talk with his long lost son. (The old man could have revealed he had been the owner of a big ranch or something. Yeah, I got this one all thought out.)
Should we start a new thread on “How I would end House M.D.”
My first though was Dr. Blackadder and Nurse Baldrick but with Foreman as Dean of Medicine, he’s kind of like Baldrick anyways.
Yeah, I think there is a future set-up with the gun that House has in his closet. The irony, of course, is that the gun belonged to his father: the Marine dad who wasn’t his biological parent.
We need the biological father to show up, with a story like: Marine Dad and Biological Dad were best friends. Marine Dad had the usual war wound that left him sterile, and the House family really wanted children. Marine Dad goes to his best friend with the request… Biological Dad tells House that after he saw Marine Dad with the baby Greg, he could see the overwhelming love that Marine Dad had for the child, so he made it a point to distance himself from the family.
House’s main quarrel with Marine Dad was the typical teenage angst.
So House would go home and eat his father’s gun.
An ending like that would PISS ME OFF!
~VOW
Marine Dad was, as I recall, an abusive s.o.b. I don’t think the overwhelming love between them lasted long.
I believe House series canon is that he was emotionally and physically abused by his father when he was a child: his father did not speak to him for a summer, he was locked out of the house to sleep outside at night, and he was forcibly immersed in long icewater baths.