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Now what indeed. When you end a will-they-won’t-they relationship that has been simmering for six years with ‘they will’, you run the risk of writing yourself into a corner. Keep the couple together and the romantic tension fizzles out; break them up and either one of them has to leave, or they both stay, avoid each other and you lose the most exciting relationship of the entire show (sorry House/Wilson fans, keep writing that slash fiction in the hope it'll come true). Remaining friends might have worked for Ross and Rachel in Friends, but a show in which characters with no money manage to afford an apartment that size in Manhattan isn’t too concerned with reality. So, back to the original question: now what?
It is a paradox that the most well-received episodes of a formulaic show such as House are the ones that stray from the formula. It worked in season five’s ‘Lockdown’, in which almost the entire episode was seen from the perspective of a patient with locked-in syndrome. It also worked way back in season one in the episode ‘Three Stories’, in which the writers played with time and narrative and won an Emmy for their efforts. Why is it, then, that the opening episode of season seven, one that was almost unrecognisable as an episode of House, was not as successful?
For a start, we were on edge as soon as Cuddy started to take off House’s trousers. Jacket, fine, but taking off his trousers to treat a wound on his neck? That’s not the kind of doctor you want running a teaching hospital. OK, so she was just doing it to move things along to the bedroom, but kissing the scar on his leg? That was just bizarre, and excruciating to watch. Sure it’s metaphorical – she accepts him for who he is, warts and all – but couldn’t they have chosen a different metaphor? Unlike the love scenes in the final two episodes of season five, which were impulsive and passionate, this one felt unsure, as if House and Cuddy were still trying to decide whether it was a good idea. And they then proceeded to spend the rest of the episode continuing to analyse whether ‘Huddy’ was indeed a good idea.
Half of the fun of House and Cuddy finally becoming a couple is to witness everyone else’s reactions to the news, but instead House and Cuddy were isolated for pretty much the entire episode leaving the Ducklings to get on with the medical stuff. The B-story at the hospital – the team having to treat Princeton-Plainsboro’s sick neurosurgeon so that half the hospital wouldn’t be shut down – provided some comic relief, but it felt like it had been shoe-horned in to give the other actors something to do. Not to say that any of the actors, Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein included, dropped the ball; the quality of their performances was as high as it has ever been. While it was unsettling to see House out of his comfort zone, it was also wonderful to see him testing out his long-dormant romantic side, wooing Cuddy with champagne and breakfast, House-style. He was being... normal.
But there’s the rub; as House has said, normal’s not normal. A formula show that is an expert at breaking free of its formula slipped up slightly. But only slightly. An average episode of House is still ten times better than most other television dramas, and there were some genuinely wonderful moments, such as Wilson trying to climb through House’s window, and George Wyner as the stoned neurosurgeon. Now that House and Cuddy have decided to give it a go, and they’re ready to leave House’s apartment, the season can really begin, albeit minus Thirteen who seems to have disappeared, presumably running off to film Tron: Legacy. Armed with fresh title credits (it’s about time) and a new central dynamic, it’s a mouth-watering prospect of what might happen when ‘Huddy’ finally becomes public. Rehab and therapy seem not to have changed House, maybe romance will. Let’s hope not too much.
House continues on Sky1 at 10pm on Sunday
The best part of the episode was when the audience was led to believe for a minute that he had hallucinated the whole thing. Now THAT would have been trippy.
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