I think it was from the previews from last week for this week - we were left with the impression that Cuddy or 13 died.
Those who scoff at rubble and rescues don’t realize how quickly they can become victims themselves. That’s what happened to so many here in Nashville’s recent flash flood. They were still finding bodies at the end of last week. According to NOAA, Nashville would have a flood like this only once in a thousand years.
I suspect that most of you have watched people rescued live on television or seen bodies removed from some of the rubble in NYC in 2001 or in Haiti.
So the plot is not unbelievable.
I think the ending will liven things up for next season. We are liable to see fist fights between them. I loved the ending. Sometimes these things work out…once in a thousand years.
The young woman who played Hanna was exceptional.
what bothered me was why HOUSE was necessary to stay at the crash site while healthy, able bodied doctors like foreman, chase, and talb were back at the hospital. watching house scramble around almost took me completely out of the episode.
i don’t think they handled the 13 storyline very well, and the bit with the crane operator being a secondary PotW was forced and convenient (in the sense that it was convenient in giving the team something to do, even if it wasn’t relevant to the story). IMO it would have been better if the entire team was at the site caring after various bystanders each with a mini-story like how they used the free clinic PotW’s in earlier House episodes. 13’s hand shaking in putting on a bandage, or unable to sew a wound shut would have been a better reveal and leaving the audience wondering if it’s huntington’s or nerves. maybe cameron makes a cameo…
it’s also pretty unbelievable that cuddy drops lucas like that. it’s out of character and definitely enough to make us question hallucinations. the last time cuddy did something THIS out of character she was stripping, which wasn’t real. to add to the unbelievability is that cuddy was pretty nonchalant about catching house with pills and makes out with him. hypothetically speaking if my GF was a mean drunk, and swore to be sober, and i come home to find her staring at a bottle of Jack, I would be concerned - not turned on.
As I commented on last week’s episode, we’ve really never seen how Cuddy and Lucas are together. At most we’ve seen them sort of lazing about watching TV a few times. We really have no idea what their relationship is like.
As pancakes observes, it is not the fact that a person might be trapped beneath rubble that I found unbelievable, but instead just about every aspect of House’s activity at the scene, starting from the first moment when he drove his bike right up to the barricade and parked, and strolled into the site.
Did they ever really explain the accident? Not the illness, but what the crane was carrying and what it got dropped on? Was it one of those tall construction cranes and the crane itself toppled? And did it fall onto a parking garage? It was just never really clear to me.
I don’t know if I’d agree with that. I just finished training for CERT (Community Emergency Response Team. It’s sponsered by FEMA, but actually run by local Emgergency Managment and Fire departments), and both the Search and Rescue and Triage units are taught by experienced Fire personnel.
When we were taught the Triage unit, he made it clear that there was no shame in telling your Incident Commander that you can’t handle doing Triage and you’d like to be tasked to something else. Triage is hard. Doing triage means you decide not only who’s worth working on, but who’s worth dealing with. It means you have to look at someone with a broken leg, and tell them that they just have to sit and wait because they’re a delayed. You have to tune out the moans and “Oh, God, it hurts!” because the people who are making those noises probably go in the delayed pile. Your choices will not only decide who lives and dies, but who is whole and who is scared or disfigured. Some doctors - some people - are going to be much better at that than others, and you need to have been trained specifically in Triage (it’s different than other first aid training). I suspect House is psychologically quite good at triage, and for story purposes, I’m willing to accept that he took a triage training class at some point.
I had spent the entire first half of the episode trying to suspend disbelief that House and Cuddy were out there in the first place. Considering their positions in the hospital, why would they be the two doctors sent to the scene? I could understand if they were called upon to help out down in the ER, but to actually go to the scene? I would think they’d be getting in the way, rather than actually helping.
But oh damn, when Hannah died . . . it’s so rare for House to actually bond with a patient, and then have it turn out that way, especially since she died as a result of his postponing the amputation.
She didn’t die as a result of the postponement. House originally blamed himself that she was dying from crush syndrome, but it turned out to be a fat embolism. They specifically mentioned that even if they’d performed the amputation in a surgery room, the patient would have died from the embolism.
I don’t think it is. I honestly don’t think Cuddy ever really loved Lucas. I think he was convenient–he was nice, he was good with the kid, and he was somebody who could make her feel a little less alone. Also, he was House’s friend, so there might have been a little “let’s make House jealous” going on at the beginning (even subconsciously on her part). But they had lousy chemistry. I’m not a “shipper” (in fact, honestly, the whole “shipping” thing kind of annoys me) but to me, the chemistry between House and Cuddy has been almost tangible since practically the first episode. You could tell the two were crazy about each other and neither of them wanted to admit it.
Lucas, while an interesting character when he was acting as House’s paid PI, became a bit of a limp dishrag IMO as soon as he hooked up with Cuddy. I won’t be sorry to see him go.
This answers that – Olivia Wilde has decided she’s a movie star and is taking a leave of absence. Goody: more screen time for those who can act.
My problem with the Huddy idea at this point is that once again Hollywood has just stuck two people together with little regard for the realities of like/love. The reason I can like Pride and Prejudice or While You Were Sleeping is that the couple isn’t inexplicably instantly in love, and I think there’s some reason for them to like each other.
Imagine House and Cuddy at the counseling session: “Now write ten reasons you love your partner.” What would be on Cuddy’s paper? There’s very little to recommend House, unless you’re into the whole female fantasy of the tortured soul who can only be fixed by the power of her love. I would have thought Cuddy would be beyond that. These forced-by-the-script romances ring hollow.
From just the show though, I think it’s quite clear that it’s Huntingtons. House noticed her hand shaking when they went to the lesbian bar in a recent episode.
i don’t think cuddy really ever loved lucas either. however, i also don’t think cuddy loves house, at least to the extent that believing the sequence of monday’s show would necessitate. cuddy as a 40 year old woman who is raising an adopted baby doesn’t have the same conditions for love as someone younger and childless. a nice, good-with-kids, and present male is good enough and certainly more preferable to a empathy-less, bipolar, crippled, (recovery) drug addict. well, that is unless cuddy is just totally batshit crazy about house which isn’t the case because an emotional struggle exists. you can’t be head-over-heels in love AND have an emotional struggle.
plus watching 2 grown, and lonely adults play middle school games just seems unbelievable. certainly at least cuddy would have spoken up about it, listing things house needs to change before they can date. otherwise cuddy would have just dismissed it as a weird sexual attraction to a coworker and stayed with lucas. at the very least, she would have married lucas and have an affair with house. cancelling the engagement after saying yes after watching house try to save a life, and then being ok with House with a handful of pills just isn’t plausible especially when you consider what cuddy gave up. all she could have been thinking was “this guy cannot be my baby’s surrogate daddy. i’m flushing those pills and getting the fuck out of here to reconcile with lucas”. instead she’s like “awww he’s super vulnerable after losing a patient. i’m going to give him sex for being such a bad boy.”
Or it could be a means to bring back Cameron. 
Well, doubtful, really. Even though Chase and Cameron seem more comfortable with each other now that they’ve shagged, post-separation. Wilde will just be gone while she’s shooting her movie. But they’re still going to need a female diagnostician on the team. For story purposes, Cuddy would probably insist on it, just as when she gave House a choice of Amber or Thirteen when he hired his second team.
I feel that it’s quite interesting to mention that this episode was filmed in its entirety on DSLR cameras. I found that fascinating.
Maybe that’s an opening for Sam, the first and perhaps future fourth Mrs. Dr. Wilson.
Is there a thread about scenes we most hate, somewhere? No? Well mine usually starts with a doctor saying something like, “Will you have your leg off, Captain Beauregard?” and then a shot to the whiskey, the belt in the mouth and finally the terrible screaming. Gah! I knew it was coming and had to leave the room until it was over. That said, I thought it was a terrific episode, though I won’t be watching it again.
I am curious, though, would they really amputate a leg with little anesthesia in this day and age? Would the possibility of shock be as worrisome as depressed respiration under general anesthesia? Just askin’.
See, now, I disagree with you here. House and Cuddy have known each other a long time. They’re both…for lack of a better word, “difficult.” House is an addictive personality, a bit (well, more than a bit) of a jerk, quite arguably bipolar (he was, after all, modeled after Sherlock Holmes, who clearly was), and a recovered drug addict. But he is most certainly not “empathy-less.” Just because he chooses not to use it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. He’s shown that he does (though it’s clearly very difficult for him), many times throughout the series–including with the patient in the last episode.
Cuddy is attractive, sure, but she’s also got a lot of qualities that make her unattractive to a lot of men–she’s highly successful (probably more so than most men); she’s very forthright and no-nonsense; she’s very intelligent. Plus she’s got a baby, which, let’s face it, is a turn-off for a lot of guys looking for some hot sex. House, for all his “protest too much” displays of misogyny, admires strong women and women with brains who can compete with his. I don’t know how he feels about being a ready-made father, but he’s been good with kids previously. So here he has Cuddy, who’s smart, gorgeous, can put up with his crap (a big feature, I think), and actually wants him. I don’t know how the relationship will proceed (House is inherently self-destructive), but it’s obvious to me that, if you want to put this in Holmesian terms again, Cuddy is his Irene Adler–the only woman he ever truly admired.
This interview with the writers about the finale addresses several questions: they say that it wasn’t a hallucination, that there were several hours between Cuddy seeing House with the amputee and Cuddy’s decision to reveal her change of heart, that the amputation wasn’t a mistake; House’s medical decision-making was proper.
As I said upthread, I recently did some coursework in triage. To help desensatize us, the trainers tell some horror stories, and the short answer to your question is yes, but probably not.
Most anesthesias require a significant amount of monitoring - there’s a very fine line between knocked out and dead. In a cramped space like that, there’s no way to get the proper monitoring equipment down there. Now, there’s other options, like morphine, but they’re going to want to put as little into her system as possible so that they don’t have to worry about sketchy field dosages when they get to the emergency room. Also, some types of painkillers also work as anti-coagulants, so you definatly don’t want to give that to someone who is going to be loosing a lot of blood. Plus, it’s hard to say how much they’ve used with other people - Emergency responce folks only carry so much of that kind of stuff, and they may have gone through their supplies, leaving them with less-than-ideal medicines. Plus, at that point, they were fighting against time, so they didn’t want to run to the nearest hospital to get anasthesia.
My problems with the episode were more with the Search and Rescue stuff. A gap as big as the one House went in to find Hannah would have been searched physically, and the miniute there was even kind of a sign of structural changes when they lifted that block off her leg, they would have stopped. They also had very, very little bracing in that area when they were doing the attempted rescue - a real S&R operation uses a stupid amount of bracing - if you ever do a fire house tour, some of the engines will have little stacks of 2x4s or simmilar in them. Those are for bracing when somethings fallen on them. Fire personnel are very consious of not injuring themselves when helping someone - they even docked us points if we got our hands under the thing we were bracing. Something like that, they would have had much, much more bracing.