10:58 a.m. | Updated The sixth season of House (major spoilers ahead) ended on Monday night with some pretty terrific wish fulfillment: Doctors House and Cuddy, who have been tugging at each others’ hearts since the series began, finally got on the road to something real.
Adam Taylor/Fox Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein in the season finale of “House.”The third side of the love triangle, Cuddy’s boyfriend, Lucas — whom House once hired as a private investigator though he now disparages him as the “manchild” — has thankfully been eliminated. What will happen now? At least one double date for House and Cuddy and their friend Wilson and his ex-wife.
In the aftermath of the finale, we asked writers for the show Garret Lerner, Peter Blake and Russel Friend to settle some final questions. Below are selections from the e-mail exchange. Mr. Blake will take questions from readers, as well; please leave them in the comments section.
You have finally satisfied the twisted dreams of legions of female television viewers by getting House and Cuddy together during the last few seconds of the season finale on Monday night. Was there any internal debate about torturing viewers even further and making them wait a whole other season for the relationship to begin?
GARRETT LERNER We have known for a long time we were eventually going to explore the relationship between House and Cuddy. And while we do relish torturing our viewers, we felt that House had really
spent season six working on making himself available for such a relationship and that Cuddy would recognize the change in him. Our exec producer, Katie Jacobs, pointed out that we have ended so many recent
seasons on a bleak note, that it would be a refreshing change to end this season on a hopeful one.
House and Cuddy spend most of the episode in a rescue effort at the site of a very bad accident. They argue about whether or not to amputate the leg of one of the victims. This obviously has a lot of symbolic resonance for House. Did you worry that this might seem a little too, you know, neatly hokey?
PETER BLAKE Well, our initial idea was a lot more hokey — that the victim was also a misanthropic diagnostician with a drug addiction named Doktor Haüs –- spelled the German way, but with an umlaut.
RUSSEL FRIEND It was actually inspired by real stories we’d read about. Unfortunately these things happen when people get trapped underneath buildings. Rescuers are forced to make life-and-death decisions that often involve amputations. We had a technical adviser from the L.A.F.D. helping us out throughout prep, and production (Capt. Larry Collins), and he told us some incredible stories about his time pulling victims from the rubble in Haiti. We also watched the documentary “Sergio” [about the United Nations special representative who died in an explosion at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad] — and with “Law & Order” going off the air, there were all these headlines just in need of being ripped from.
When House arrives home bereft at the loss of this patient and the general hideous unfairness of life, he hacks into his bathroom wall to get at a secret stash of Vicodin. When are we supposed to imagine that he built this drug safe deposit box?
MR. FRIEND: Ah, good question. Well, we’ve imagined for years now that House has various “secret stashes” of Vicodin hidden around his apartment, office, and I guess wherever else you can secretly stash something. However, as astute viewers will point out (and by that of course I mean our show runner, David Shore) at the end of last season House tells Cuddy where all the drugs are hidden and she cleans them out before he heads off for his stint at Mayfield. So, that leaves the question – did he hide this stash sometime during this past season? Or, was it a secret-secret stash that he kept secret from Cuddy? Or was it all hallucination, and he didn’t show Cuddy any secret stash? Now, I guess you’re expecting me to answer that question, but instead I’ll just trail off into silence…
At 8:38 p.m. Cuddy was yelling at House and telling him she didn’t love him and was “done.” It certainly did not seem as though she was going to toss her fiancé, Lucas, to the curb within the remaining 22 minutes of the episode. Walk me through Cuddy’s off-camera thought process and the unseen dialogue between her and Lucas.
MR. BLAKE Well, the 22 minutes that pass are only screen time. The last scene takes place around dawn, so in reality (or “reality” in quotes) many hours have passed. Not to mention that House and Cuddy getting together is actually six seasons in the making, so hopefully we’d earned it.
MR. LERNER Here’s what we think was going through Cuddy’s mind: she sees House admit something that he’s never admitted before — that the defining moment in his life (to save his leg) was actually the wrong choice. It was the most vulnerable she’d ever seen him, and for the first time, she believes he’s actually capable of change. Greg Yaitanes (who directed the episode) got a great shot of Cuddy’s reaction. So we imagine that after all of this, Cuddy goes home to Lucas and has a wrenching, long conversation with him. She tells him that she’s incredibly sorry to do this to him, but that she’s in love with House; that it’d be wrong to go forward with him.
The final moments of the episode are an obvious echo to last season’s finale. There’s House in his bathroom clutching at a bottle of Vicodin and there’s Cuddy. Only this time, he stays clean and Cuddy’s presence is real rather than hallucinatory. Tell me about the decision to come full circle and end this way.
MR. FRIEND Wait a minute, you’re wrong — last night’s episode was a just a hallucination.
MR. BLAKE To avoid death threats on the comments threads, let me note that Russ is kidding. The kiss was real. There was some debate about where to play this scene. At one point, we had it take place in House’s living room because we were concerned that the audience would think it was just another hallucination. But Greg felt strongly that the final scene of this season should echo the end of last season, and I think he was right.
How much couples therapy are you going to put House and Cuddy through next season to make it work?
MR. BLAKE Why would they pay for couples therapy when they have Wilson?
MR. BLAKE responds to more questions from readers:
Hello Infospherenauts! Nice to join you all here today. I will try to answer as many questions as possible, but let me just say that as much as
you’d like to know what’s happening next year, it’s one of those “careful what you wish for” situations. Trust me. It gets boring if you know what’s going to happen. So
the more that the questions don’t involve future events, the easier it will be for me to answer them.
Anyway:
Ponyo: Thanks for the nice words. Can’t say re Lucas, but I can say that next season we pick up very soon after we left off. The audience has been waiting six years to see what happens if House and Cuddy get together, so we felt like it would be a cheat skipping ahead.
Gwen: If House brought his daughter into preschool, they’d arrest him, because he doesn’t have a daughter. (Cuddy does, but that’s a very different thing.) Tina Fey would kill us if we brought Sarah Palin onto the show, but we do have a political themed episode that will be airing in the first eight or so, so I hope you’ll enjoy that one.
Carol: Good point about House’s cynical, sardonic edge. Whatever happens next season, we know that he can’t lose that element of his personality, so you don’t have to worry there.
Sven: I can’t say what Olivia Wilde is up to and I forbid you from using google to track her movements. But you should know that the writers also really care about Thirteen.
House Hugger (and Carol): First of all, if you ever meet a man like House again, do not date him, you’re clearly too nice a person for that. Second, nowhere in the episode do we say that Thirteen’s desire for time off stems from her Huntington’s. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but I’m not saying it does.
More Responses:
Pix: The line “only a psychopath can kill another person without having a breakdown” was the theme of one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, “On Killing”
by Dave Grossman, check it out. I didn’t write the episodes in which Chase dealt with the consequences of his act, but I think the other writers did a good job of showing how it affected him: it destroyed
his marriage, for one thing. We’ll explore more fallout from his breakup next season, as well.
Dan: The finale actually was the first time that House has admitted that keeping his leg was the wrong thing to do. Maybe he realized it at some point before this episode, but if so, he never told anyone.
And so
Cuddy would recognize what a big admission this was for him to make.
Thirteen fan boy: Yes, you did mention that you were a teenage boy.
(But as Peter Steiner has written/drawn: “On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.”)
Nellie: Definitely not some sort of hint. And we have great editors and makeup people, so any lack of scruffiness was probably a trick of the light. (Which is not to criticize our lighting department, they’re great too.)
Jehovah’s Hostile Witness, Hart Felt and CWallnau: We addressed shark jumping already, in one of the first scenes of “Here, Kitty.”
Iolanthe: Your point is well taken: use of pain meds does not necessarily imply drug addiction. However, House’s experience, and his reasons for taking the pills, are not necessarily the norm, and shouldn’t be construed as standing in for everyone else. His reasons are probably more complicated than pure pain management, whatever he admits to himself.
livinlifejb: who said season 7 is all about Huddy?
and finally:
Dear Ms B, rmmiel, roughestfrail, marie2712, Marcy Terlingua, dee and Mary M: You are clearly very perceptive viewers with keen eyes and discerning tastes. I think the message boards deserve to hear much more from you.
And still more from MR. BLAKE
Some more answers:
marie2712 & Kayla R: Regarding the secrecy of the ending… We went to great, LOST-style lengths to hide the final scene. (Which was definitely not a last minute decision, by the way — months before
we decided to end the season this way and had been building up to it the entire time.) The draft of the script that we distributed to the entire cast and crew left off the last scene and ended with House clutching
the vicodin pills, deciding whether to take them. We only gave the correct pages to Hugh and Lisa. And then we didn’t even slate the scene on the schedule, so that the crew was all surprised
when we had
one last scene to shoot. And it seems to have worked:
the ending didn’t leak.
tamijo: No plans as of yet to put Hugh behind a drum set but you never know.
John A: I don’t remember whether we’ve discussed a neurostimulator in particlar, but we’ve certainly had House consider many different methods for managing his pain. And it will continue to be something that’s always on House’s mind.
Libby: I don’t think we have any backstories hidden in reserve, but we all make an effort to pay off the backstories we’ve already described for the characters.
Charlotte: David Shore, who created HOUSE, addressed the similarities between House and Holmes in an interview on Kurt Andersen’s radio show here.
Best,
Peter
MR. BLAKE’S FINAL RESPONSE:
Diane: You’re right! We did not express ourselves clearly in the interview above. Cuddy never searched House’s apartment at all; that was a hallucination,
as you say. But to be nitpicky, it is possible that the hallucination was based on reality, i.e., that the secret stashes we showed were the only ones he had at that point. In any case, good catch.
Mary Al: You wrote: “I originally thought this was the most brilliant episode ever. But after reading the writers’ comments, […] I decided that it’s the most pathetic episode ever.” All I can say is, man, I guess we need some interviewing tips.
It was great talking to all of you, and I hope you’ll enjoy next season.
Best,
Peter Blake