Is House a soulless Jerkass misanthrope who's only in the medical profession for the puzzle/challenge, or a Jerk with a Heart of Gold doctor profoundly committed to saving his patients regardless of the law, traditional medical ethics, or common sense? He argues that the non-compassionate approach is more successful as shown by this quote: "What would you prefer - a doctor who holds your hand while you die or one who ignores you while you get better?"
On a similar note, is House simply arrogant and a "jerk" in the sense that he says and does what makes him happy without regard for others, or is he an abusive prick who constantly belittles his staff and accuses them of ulterior motives to make them feel stupid and dependent on him (i.e., Gaslighting)? While his staff never does become totally subservient to him (and he admits he needs them to disagree with him), the impact he has on their personalities is obvious. He also flat-out admits in one episode that he bases how he treats his staff on his father's training of soldiers and of him, which is literally abuse and brainwashing. Also, almost whenever a duckling, Wilson, or Cuddy finds happiness elsewhere, he reacts with anger and tries to sabotage it (see Moral Event Horizon below).
Adding to this, in "Three Stories", was House's leg infarction actually caused by the golfing incident, or was it because House violently stuck a needle into his thigh? After all, during his lecture, House never disputes that "Patient C" was a drug addict, and we know that House's addiction has a lot more to do with his personality than his leg. It is possible that House was simply in a bad mood, and wanted to numb his emotional pain with drugs. House also points out that getting drugs from a hospital is fairly easy, which may explain why he went there in the first place. Therefore, it may be that House lied about the leg pain at first, but then ended up causing an infarction with the self-injection, which makes the four days of his doctors delaying serious action a result of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
There is also the argument of whether or not his time in prison and his subsequent parole violation were undue punishment, or simply karma catching up to him. We're supposed to feel sorry when his parole violation might deny him spending time with Wilson in his last few months, yet he violated it through his own willful arrogance with a dumb prank that destroyed a significant portion of the hospital and an MRI machine. Then he chooses to fake his own death to avoid the consequences. Some may argue that House should know better than to do much of what he does, considering he doesn't feel as if he should be punished for any of it.
Does Tritter really believe that House is a bully that needs to be stopped? Or is he just projecting, since he is without a doubt a worse bully? Or is this all just an excuse to harass someone who wouldn’t submit to his own bullying?
When House questions his ability to be an exceptional diagnostician without being in pain, or on medication, or being happy. It happens constantly, but the show always reverts the status quo to ensure House retains both his genius and being a jerk.note Although, those who knew him before he was crippled say he was pretty much the same then.
The Vogler arc in Season 1, which was pushed onto the show by Executive Meddling. A megalomaniacal hospital administrator harassing House because he refused to help market an unethically developed, un-necessarily expensive drug did not impress fans who wanted to watch a medical drama.
Also from Season 1, Cameron's crush on House. It at least avoids turning into a Romantic Plot Tumor thanks to House never returning her affections, and ends with an episode consciously designed to sink any expectations that the two are going to end up as a couple purely because they're (at the time) the most prominent male and female characters on the show, but it takes until the third-to-last episode of the season to get to that point.
The Tritter arc in Season 3. Seven episodes of a grumpy cop harassing and arresting House and his interns because the cop and House are both stubborn jerks. At the climax of the arc, it suddenly stops and goes nowhere when Cuddy transparently covers for House while on the witness stand. The presiding Judge, tired of wasting time on Tritter's idiotic vendetta that will ruin the life of a highly regarded doctor, takes the opportunity to immediately dismiss the case, despite Cuddy's obvious perjury and House's clear guilt.
House having to recruit a new team in Season 4. The new team was obviously going to be Thirteen, Taub and Kutner, but getting there took up half of the season that ended up getting cut short by a writer's strike — if not for the strike, then it would only have taken up the first third of the season, which would at least have been more proportionate.
Award Snub: Hugh Laurie never won an Emmy Award for Lead Actor in a Drama, despite earning 6 nominations. The show itself never won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama series for any of the four nominations it earned. This can largely be attributed to House being essentially a well-executed traditional, mostly episodic network drama during the era of the rise of the character-driven, arc-heavy "prestige dramas" on cable: when you're up against The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, it's really just an honor to be considered.
Thirteen. She's either loved or hated, with a very vocal portion of the fanbase thinking she gets way too much focus, despite being boring, and another portion thinking she deserves the Character Focus that she gets.
Park was either hilarious and the best thing about Season 8 or a waste of screen time that pushed Adams into the background. Other splits included those who thought her character drama failed to reach the standard set by the rest of the show's main characters.
Reactions are split down the middle for a lot of fans when it comes to Kutner killing himself. It was either a great episode or a terrible episode.
The House/Cuddy relationship in Seasons 6 and 7. For some fans, the dynamics between them were realistic and the separation in unfriendly terms was inevitable. For other fans, it was a disaster and an offense for those who cheered for the couple during the previous five seasons.
The Series Finale. Was it amazing, good but not great, or awful? There is no consensus among fans.
Although it's a popular theory, it is never outright confirmed that House is autistic. He is very anti-social but this could also be explained by other disorders besides autism, or even just his general misanthropy or drug addiction. It's not entirely uncommon for people talking about the show to claim House being autistic is completely canon however.
Many appear, but Wilson tends to stands out. He has trouble with relationships and is drawn to help anyone with a problem, yet is highly manipulative and seems to impose himself on his patients' lives even though they don't seem to want it; said patients usually don't object because they don't want to be rude to their doctor. Many fans speculate that he has some kind of attachment disorder.
House. It's never stated what exactly his issue is, but it's made very clear he has some sort of mental disorder. He has narcissistic tendencies, acts impulsively, has to constantly keep his mind active, has an addictive personality, and appears to be perpetually depressed. Then there's his social difficulties. The strongest theories point to some kind of depressive disorder, most likely PDD (Persistent-Depressive Disorder), combined with adult ADHD.
Draco in Leather Pants: House himself is treated as fans to be always a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and excuse his horrid behavior. While he does indeed have Hidden Heart of Gold, it's still a little disturbing the number of fans who defend some of the character's most objectionable actions.
Bobbin Bergstrom was originally one of the show's on-set medical advisers and has appeared more than any character other than the main six as a nurse. This includes the new team - she's been in 69 episodes to Taub and Thirteen's 39.
Dr. Darryl Nolan, played by Andre Braugher in the sixth season premiere.
Amber "Cutthroat Bitch" Volakis, a delightfully antagonistic doctor who was one of the candidates for House's new diagnostics team. Fans were bummed when she didn't make the final cut, then rejoiced when she returned as Wilson's girlfriend, then cried when she died, then rejoiced once more when she returned as one of House's hallucinations.
Fandom-Specific Plot: A lot of fanfictions focus on House and Wilson's road trip after the series finale and how they spend Wilson's final five months of life. To get even more specific, many of these fics specifically focus on the day Wilson actually dies, what his last moments are like and what his last words and thoughts are, and how House takes his passing. (Most authors go with "notwell.") A good portion of these are shipping fics, with House and Wilson officially getting together during the road trip.
House's team is often referred to as 'the ducklings'. House is sometimes called 'papa duck', though this is rare.
BOUO (Or, Ball of Unknown Origins), the nickname of that red and gray ball House tosses around.
Poor Dead Husband - Cameron's, well, poor dead husband.
Evil Nurse Brenda - Brenda the nurse.
Cottages: His team; little houses, geddit?
MRI of DOOOM: Nobody ever makes it out of that thing okay.
The various (un)official couples all got these.
House/Wilson: Hilson
House/Cuddy: Huddy
Lucas/Cuddy: Luddy
House/Stacy: Housy/Hacy
Sam/Wilson: Samson
Chase/Cameron: Chameron
Boreteen - A play on the portmanteau Fourteen/Foreteen, though sometimes used for just Thirteen.
Hameron: House/Cameron.
"Hate Crimes, MD" has caught on as a nickname for the show overall, especially on Tumblr, due to the absurd amount of felonies, medical malpractice, and general jackassery House and his team commit every episode.
Fan-Preferred Couple: While the canon Will They or Won't They?, House/Cuddy, is quite popular, an even larger group of fans ship House with his best friend Wilson. This is mainly due to the chemistry and Ho Yay between them, along with the fact that they were designed to mimic the dynamic of Holmes/Watson (a popular ship in its own right) from Sherlock Holmes. Even the final scene reveals that House faked his death in order to spend as much time as possible with Wilson, who has cancer, before Wilson dies. On AO3, for example, House/Wilson easily outranks every other pairing.
The penultimate episode of Season 1, "Three Stories" is seen as the exact point where the show took off. It gave the full backstory to House's injury and fleshed him out as a character. It is considered one of the best episodes of the entire show.
Season 2 is where the show really hit its stride, with no Arc Villainnote (Unless you count Mark Warner, but he appears far more infrequently than Vogler or Tritter did during their respective arcs, and being worried that House is going to steal his wife is admittedly a much more legitimate motive than they had) and many highly rated episodes.
"Alvie was grateful I had gotten him out of trouble. It enabled him to go stay in Phoenix without worrying about immigration looking for him there." Just before airing Arizona passed an extremely strict anti-immigration law and the United States as a country has implemented a succession of harsh immigration laws in the decade since.
In "Mirror Mirror", Kutner and Amber are debating which of the two the patient is mimicking. Suddenly a new symptom sets in, and Kutner says, "It looks like he's mimicking whichever one of us is dying." Both doctors end up dying within the next year or so.
When he's trying to figure out why Wilson is dating Amber, House asks "she's not dying, is she?" Then came the season 4 finale. She dies.
In Season 5, when House is having hallucinations of Amber, he tries to deflect when confessing his hallucinations to Wilson that he is seeing Kutner. At the end of the season, when he hits his nadir, he actually does hallucinate Kutner along with Amber.
"Emancipation" gives us this gem from House to Wilson: "Holding things in can give you cancer".
House learns in Season 5 that Wilson sent a password-protected file to Gonzalez at New York-Mercy, leading House to infer that Wilson was sending his medical records. Gonzalez's specialty is oncology, with a recent article on managing suicidal thoughts in terminal cancer patients. 3 seasons later, Wilson gives up on chemo for his terminal cancer.
The Season Six episode "Teamwork" has House snark about Cuddy and Lucas hiding their relationship from him, asking if they saw him as "an unhinged loony who was about to go off the rails over a badly timed bit of news", referring to him being institutionalized at the end of the previous season. At the end of Season Seven, House goes berserk when he mistakenly believes that Cuddy has already moved on from their breakup, and plows Wilson's car into her building in response, which ends up being the last time Cuddy sees him before leaving the show permanently.
The Tritter arc gains some irony after House gets arrested for an actual crime between seasons Seven and Eight and his parole is a major plot point for the remainder of the series.
"Oh no, the death cat is attacking you, you're gonna die," said sarcastically to Kutner two episodes before his suicide. Six episodes previously, he described himself as exactly the sort of person who would not commit suicide.
In a Season 3 episode, Wilson is asked by Cuddy why he's late, and he loudly snaps, "The buses suck!" after his car is impounded by Detective Tritter. His girlfriend Amber is killed in a later episode because of a bus crash.
In Season 4, a patient is seeing dead people everywhere, Amber makes a comment about seeing ghosts. For the rest of the series, after she dies, she becomes one to House.
If the ghost of a man you killed doesn't screw with your head, there's something wrong with your head.
Doubles as foreshadowing, but "Lines In The Sand" had House make a speech about what a disappointment the autistic son must to be his parents. Cameron thinks he's talking Close to Home but he tells her his parents loved him unconditionally. Everybody lies.
In "Role Model", House tells a Black senator running in the 2008 presidential election that he's not going to be president because "they don't call it the White House because of the paint job". The senator even agrees, though he says it's important to make the try anyway. Good thing someone thought the same way.
In "A Pox on Our House", Dylan Baker guest stars as a CDC official who is forced to quarantine House when House willingly exposes himself to a virus. Half a decade later, the roles would be reversed on The Americans, with Dylan Baker willingly exposing himself to a pathogen and Peter Jacobson being forced to quarantine him.
House is constantly referring to how "huge" or "rotund" Cuddy's ass is.
In "Heavy", a 10-year-old girl is admitted and repeatedly referred to as "morbidly obese". The actress playing her is overweight, but not obese by any stretch.
In "Wilson", they move in together. And an episode later ("The Down Low"), they're being Mistaken for Gay and Wilson actually proposes to House in a restaurant. Of course, he's only doing it to get back at House.
I Knew It!: Most fans worked out pretty early on in Season 4 that Thirteen, Taub and Kutner would be the new team, as aside from them the only candidates to get even the remotest shred of character development were Amber (who was too much of a Jerkass to realistically be a long-term main cast member), Dobson (who didn't have any medical qualifications) and Cole (who was a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Foreman, and thus left redundant as soon as Cuddy re-hired Foreman).
Did you really think they would kill Foreman near the end of the season?
Did you really think they would kill Houseat the end?
Season 3:
Did you really think they'd fix House's leg for real at the beginning of the season?
Did you really think they'd actually get rid of Chase, Cameron, and Foreman when House fired them in the last episode?
Though Chase and Cameron did "stay fired" in the sense of being off of House's team for over a season— they just remained at other jobs in the hospital and were in many episodes at least briefly— and except for a brief period Cameron was never a member of House's team again. That was probably more of an aversion of Status Quo Is God than most fans expected.
Series finale: Did you really think House was going to die?
"It's not lupus." (See Once per Episode.) Ended up subverted when "It was finally lupus" in Season 4's "You Don't Want To Know." Good night, sweet meme. Parodied in its own sponsorship messages, on the channels it broadcasts on in the UK - one sting features a girl playing with two dolls, one in a lab coat, the other a suit jacket. She makes one say to the other "It must be Lupus!"
Sarcoidosis is approaching lupus status, too, and so is Amyloidosis.
And Wilson's disease (although it once WAS Wilson's Disease, but the team couldn't even name it for a minute)
Wegener's.
We're gonna have to intubate!
In-show example: "Be not afraid. The forest nymphs have taught me how to please a woman." Of course, the fandom has fun with this too.
House's expression in "Spin" has become the default image macro◊ for saying "DO WANT". Photoshopping it into horrific contortions like this one◊ is also popular.
"What the hell even happens in House?!" and variants have popped up as people who never watched the show hear fans discuss some of the more bonkers storylines and some of the most extreme stunts House and occasionally other characters have pulled. Often coupled with the non-fan wondering if the fans are just making things up to troll people outside the fandom, followed by fans swooping in to gleefully explain that, no, whatever insane thing was described actually did happen in the show.
Misaimed Fandom: There are a lot of people admiring and/or saying how awesome House's jackass behavior is, ignoring the fact that about 80% of the show's running time is spent on explaining how said behavior ruined his entire life and made him an extremely bitter and miserable broken man with no hopes in life. Even he points it out in season 8, telling Adams that she shouldn't glamorize his screwed-upness, and he ends the show making an effort to change.
A potential one for Stacy and Cuddy is when they removed House's muscle from his leg. They schemed, in advance, what they would do once he was in an induced coma, knowing full well it wasn't what he wanted. Stacy was House's medical proxy, but the idea behind that is a comatose patient can't make decisions, and he'd already made the decision.note although, per the House Wiki's article on the episode, the proper procedure for Cuddy would have been to refer the situation to Princeton-Plainsboro's Bio-Ethics Committee; the page even opines that Stacy might have gotten her way due to how much risk House's preferred course of treatment carried She actually told him she was sorry as he lost consciousness.
Masters seems to have had hers in her final episode, "The Last Temptation": A 16 year old girl doesn't want to let them amputate her cancerous arm (yet) so she can beat the youngest person to sail solo around the world record, but Masters wants her to do it immediately, so she drugs her, sending her into cardiac arrest, and then manipulates the parents into signing over their consent, so that the girl WAKES UP WITHOUT AN ARM and is understandably horrified. This is presented as being more or less the right decision, and House doesn't object, despite the fact that she got the idea to do it from Wilson's story about Stacy and House and his leg. She realized the crossing herself and couldn't accept it, looking like she wanted to throw up afterwards and decided to give up on the internship because of it.
Some viewers feel that Cuddy's dumping of House when he was in need and literally begging her not to was her MEH, especially since she was breaking up with him for not being there for her when she needed him.
Many have called MEH at House driving his car into Cuddy's dining room, saying that it makes him go from "eccentric, Jerkass but brilliant diagnostician" to "illogical, psychotic attempted murderer."
Both in-universe and out of it, Foreman's accidentally killing a patient by having her undergo radiation treatment (thus destroying her immune system and allowing a minor infection to become extremely lethal) and Kutner setting a patient on fire in his first episode are always the go-to examples whenever anyone needs an example of their screwing up. In Foreman's case House even brings up that mistake as late as Season 8, by which time Foreman is the Dean of Medicine and has long since stopped actively working as a doctor.
Not So Crazy Anymore: Season 1's "Role Model" has the patient of the week, an African-American United States senator, running for president. The episode both directly and indirectly pillories as unrealistic his odds of winning the White House. Fast forward four years and an African-American US senator being elected president suddenly doesn't seem so unrealistic anymore.
Older Than They Think: Many fans have accused the extremely similar anime Black Jack of ripping off the premise of House. In fact, the original Black Jack manga predates House by about thirty years. Oddly enough, there's a commercial break of sorts in Japan who is a Crossover between those two series, and with their respective voice actors reprising their roles.
One-Scene Wonder: This being a medical drama, there are plenty of patients who qualify as One Episode Wonders, but Eve from "One Day, One Room" is easily among the most memorable. Not only is her episode a complete departure from the usual formula, but she brings out a surprisingly humane side of House. It also helps that her episode is considered to be one of the best.
"The Dig" starts the rally to rescue Thirteen. Season Eight had her happier (even if still about to die), giving Olivia Wilde more to do than Dull Surprise.
Foreman starting in mid-Season 6, as his resentment of House was downplayed and his usurper tendencies increasingly became Played for Laughs.
Even people not fond of Season 8 appreciate that it did a decent job of bringing House back from obnoxious sociopath abusing his ex-girlfriend, as he finally gets some Character Development he doesn't backtrack on, far more Pet the Dog and being selfless for Wilson.
Thirteen and Foreman in Season 5, Chase and Cameron later on in the same season.
House and Cuddy in Season 6 and 7. People loved the 1-5 Ship Tease, but she wasn't wrong by season 6 when she said it wasn't fun anymore, both of them seemed to take many levels in dumbass when they were actually in a relationship, and House's annual self-destruction was seen as more tired and stupid than sympathy-inducing.
The Scrappy: Edward Vogler from Season 1 and Tritter in Season 3, both for the same reason: Being a pointless Arc Villain in a show that didn't need them.
Seasonal Rot: Although House has been praised by critics and fans and remembered at awards, everyone admits that the series has lost some quality over the years.
Season 3, due to Deus Angst Machina and Wangst during the Tritter arc, the original team splitting up, and the start of the Foreman is House arc.
Season 6, for uninteresting patients of the week, the way it dealt with Chase and Cameron, and especially for the Romantic Plot Tumor involving House and Cuddy. At least, everyone agrees that "Broken" is one of the best episodes of the series.
Many fans will agree that Season 7 is the show's worst season, due to the Romantic Plot Tumor between House and Cuddy, a general lack of interesting or memorable episodes, Thirteen being missing for virtually the entire season and being replaced by the even more divisive Masters, and the infamous season-ending cliffhanger.
Season 8 is itself somewhat divisive, thanks to Cuddy and Thirteen both being Put on a Bus at the start of the season (off-screen in the former's case), Park being a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, and too much time being spent Putting the Band Back Together at the start of the season. At least, everyone agrees that it is better than Season 7.
Despite the orange man in the pilot episode being probably the show's most well-remembered clinic patient (if not its most well-remembered patient, full stop), the episode's extremely stylized cinematography, which desaturates all the non-skin tones, ends up making him look hardly any different to the other characters.
In "Fall from Grace", House flies toy helicopters around the hospital, they are obviously CGI'd. But they're not bad CGI... however, when he takes the crew to a monster truck rally later on, everyone jerks back as the car appears to speed up, but the background is moving at the exact same speed.
In season 2's "Humpty Dumpty", the bandage covering Antonio's hand amputation wound is quite obviously pasted on.
In "House Divided", House practices pouring flaming shots, eventually setting a cadaver on fire in the process. The fire is hilariously fake.
When House tries to revive the baby in "Forever" Hugh Laurie is holding a pretty obvious doll.
One episode featured a mother who never lied to her 10-year-old-ish daughter. To test this, House ask the daughter if she knows her mother's sexual preferences and how they have changed, obviously as a way to prove to her that her mother doesn't tell her everything. Then, she says: "She used to like being on top, but now she likes being face-down". It's treated fairly seriously, and even House looks disturbed and saddened that such a young girl actually had an answer to his rhetorical question.
An older brother Promoted to Parent telling Foreman it's fine for him to speak about analingus... in front of his two underage siblings. Huh.
Given the regular appearance of things that would gross out a police coroner, they're included for the obvious reason of presenting a gross-out factor to the audience; while the apparent pretense is "realism," this is contradicted by the fact that doctors are used to it. This is lampshaded in at least one instance, in which House is, as usual, trying to mooch off of Wilson's lunch; Wilson responds "if you're trying to gross me out," and relates what he deals with daily as the head of the Oncology department.
One episode had House add a sample of male human breast milk (from a male patient who has started lactating because of a hormone imbalance) to his coffee, while his team look on in horror and disbelief.
In "Histories", House tastes a patient's vomit for diagnostic purposes.
The season 2 episode "Autopsy," which contains a scene where a patient attempted a self-circumcision with a pair of box-cutters. Included a Gory Discretion Shot but the description and the fact that even House was horrified was enough to invoke this reaction in the audience.
Season 2's oral bowel movement.
The Season 3 episode "Insensitive" has House pull a 25-foot-long tapeworm from the guts of the Patient of the Week.
Strangled by the Red String: Foreman and Thirteen go from polite but distant colleagues to a committed relationship over the space of a couple episodes.
Strawman Has a Point: A rare case where the strawman is the lead character. In "Fetal Position", Cuddy takes a risky course of action, motivated by her desire to save a woman's fetus, when House wants to terminate the pregnancy. The show makes it clear that Cuddy is supposed to be considered right but House's course of action was probably much more advisable. As he himself points out at the end of the episode, 9 times out of 10, Cuddy's course of action would have killed both mother and child, whereas House's would save the mother 10 out of 10 times.
Suspiciously Similar Song: The instrumental theme that plays in the opening for the digital and international release is very much meant to be a stand-in for Massive Attack's "Teardrop".
Kutner was one of the more inventive doctors and had good dynamics with House but didn't get anywhere near as much character development as he could have done, thanks to a combination of Season 4 being cut short by a writers' strike, and then his actor quitting the show to take up a role in the White House halfway through the following season.
Thirteen, to a lesser extent; despite nominally being on the show far longer than Kutner, she was sidelined for a good chunk of Season 6 in order to allow the "classic" team line-up of House, Foreman, Cameron and Chase some time to work together before Jennifer Morrison quit the show, then was missing for almost all of Season 7 due to Olivia Wilde taking time off to do TRON: Legacy, before being Put on a Bus after Wilde herself quit the show.
Adams, while an obvious Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Thirteen, toned down the traits that caused Thirteen (and before her, Cameron) to annoy some viewers, making her an overall more likeable character who also had an interesting backstory in meeting House while she was a prison doctor. Unfortunately, she spent most of the season shoved into the background in favor of giving Park most of the character development, making it seem like she was just filling the role that Thirteen would have had if not for Olivia Wilde deciding to quit the show.
Considering all the team changes that House's team goes through in the later seasons, it can end up feeling like a bit of a waste that none of the doctors who ended up being fired during the application game episodes got to make some sort of a comeback.
Dr. Cole (Big Love) in particular got a lot of development and screen time throughout the application episodes, yet he never got to reappear after his elimination.
In a lesser sense, Dr. Ashka and her Worthless Foreign Degree made a decent impression among House's applicants but she was eliminated after just one episode while other less developed characters got to stay a little longer.
The identity of House's biological father. They could have added a story arc about this at any point post-"Birthmarks" but instead did a single episode in Season 8 which raised more questions than it solved: the likeliest candidate also wasn't House's father, and House uncharacteristically finds closure in this.
Thirteen's Huntington's. The season 4 finale set up a potentially great One of Our Own plot, but Thirteen pulled off the impossible when her illness made herless likable, as the arc focused on girl-on-girl action rather than characterization or the illness itself. The gravity of the entire situation was undermined by the fact that she appeared healthy; illness as an Informed Attribute doesn't work, especially on a show that prides itself on bizarre or gross-out conditions. Season 7 episode "The Dig" was a genuinely moving plot centered around her Huntington's, but was basically a standalone plot.
At the beginning of Season 6, House's team briefly reverts to its original lineup of Foreman, Chase, and Cameron for the first time in three years. While this was meant to set up Jennifer Morrison's exit and give her a little more focus before departing, the dramatic potential goes largely unexplored. How does the team feel about working together again after so much time apart? How have they changed and grown during that time? How have their approaches to medicine and patient care changed? Are Chase and Cameron a little rusty, having been out of the diagnostic medicine game for a while? None of this is really explored, and instead it's just business as usual for a half-dozen episodes until Cameron finds out Chase murdered a patient and quits, and Thirteen and Taub return.
The sub-plot from "Humpty Dumpty" where Foreman calls out House for duping an African-American patient into taking blood pressure medication that he had previously rejected under the mistaken belief that it was an inferior product because it was targeted specifically at African-Americans. It actually comes across as quite prescient nowadays, thanks to there being greater awareness of forms of subconscious racism. However, some fans felt it was undermined by having House be the person who duped the patient, seeing how he lies all the damn time to get people to take medication or undergo procedures, and that it would have worked better had it been Cameron or Chase, which would have allowed for more discussion of how a well-intentioned but patronizing act can come across, instead of just showing House being House yet again.
Some fans felt the finale would've been better had Cuddy returned, given that she was the only regular character who didn't return Back for the Finale. Unfortunately, Real Life Writes the Plot was at work here, as Lisa Edelstein had apparently left the show on bad terms at the end of the previous season.
It's arguable whether a network would sign off on it even today, but given how often House and Wilson was played with, it can be seen as a shame the writers didn't actually make them a gay relationship. Arguably they may count as a sexless romantic relationship as of the series finale.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: House is a paragon of Dr. Jerk while one of the ongoing arcs of the series is that he is an incredibly toxic influence on anybody who has to deal with him for an extended period of time (which turns everybody else in the cast into a Dr. Jerk, and a seriously hostile and backstabbing one at that in various examples), and while many people are saved by them, there is the Inferred Holocaust of how much their lives will be destroyed (in the long or short term) by the secrets that House forces them to disclose... after some time it may be pretty hard to watch.
Tough Act to Follow: Even people who were positive about Season Seven's "Two Stories" said it couldn't match up to "Three Stories", one of the most popular episodes of the show.
Toy Ship: The episode "Two Stories" had House's Career Day antics land him in the principal's office alongside a young couple that was caught going a bit too PDA for elementary school at recess.note It was eventually established that the kids were in fifth grade, which isn't an unrealistic time to start seeing the opposite sex in a different light.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: The very divorced parents of the little girl in "Finding Judas" are dismissed as being worthless and annoying by all medical personnel they meet to the point where they temporarily lose custody of their child simply because they argued a lot while going through what can only be described as every parents' worst nightmare i.e. their child is slowly burning to death and not even the doctors know why. Even when they agree with advice from the doctors they are still treated as though they clearly don't care about their child and are unworthy of being parents!
Cameron in the Dibala arc. Yes, what Chase did was murder. On the other hand, Dibala was proudly announcing his intention to commit genocide upon returning home, and no one else could stop him. Her speech about Chase no longer respecting the sanctity of human life and him no longer being able to tell right from wrong rings very hollow and makes her breaking up with Chase and leaving the team seem incredibly naive and childish, as the alternative was letting a tyrant kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Cameron again in the Season 5 episode, "The Itch." The patient of that episode has severe agoraphobia and refuses to leave his apartment for treatment, so the team attempts to give him treatment in his apartment. Cameron repeatedly sticks up for him and tries to be as accommodating as possible so that he doesn't have to face his phobia. However, she becomes more and more unsympathetic as the episode goes on and the patient's condition worsens. No matter how bad he gets, Cameron keeps trying to accommodate him and allow him to stay in his house, up to the point where she starts undermining the rest of the team's attempts to get him into the hospital. After a while, it starts to look like she's just trying to make herself feel good for being so willing to help him in spite of how unreasonable his demands get.
Whenever House ardently fights to "save the life" of someone who wanted to die and was doomed to a life of pain or confinement to a wheelchair.
Cameron: This is cruel! House: And leaving him undiagnosed is what? Altruistic?
Cuddy towards the end of Season Seven, more specifically her reasons for breaking up with House. House, who had found the strength to overcome his Vicodin addiction after their Relationship Upgrade, falters when Cuddy has a cancer scare and takes Vicodin again in a moment of weakness. Cuddy takes this to mean that House is incapable of being in a serious relationship and claims that it meant that he was being selfish because numbing his pain meant he wasn't "there for [her]", dumping an uncharacteristically vulnerable House who was genuinely doing what he could to be supportive. House proceeds to spiral out of control as a result, and while it doesn't excuse what he ends up doing in the season finale to torpedo their relationship for good, it feels like a much more self-centered reason than it was intended to be.
Wangst: House during the Tritter arc. It gets really hard to stomach towards the end of the arc, when House keeps playing the victim after he's committed multiple felonies in the name of standing on principle, and refused Tritter's entirely reasonable offer for a plea bargain.
The Woobie: Wilson got divorced three times, temporarily homeless, his assets get frozen while attempting to keep House out of jail, he suffers from depression, his girlfriend, Amber, dies, and in Season 5 it's revealed that his long-lost, homeless brother that is mentioned in Season 1 is also schizophrenic and that he blames himself for him running away. Added to that his best friend is a socially inept, merciless asshole. Plus those eyes... Even worse now that he has terminal cancer. They never give him a break.
Woolseyism: The French dub used with great talent the French specificity of characters having to be more personal with each other between the pronouns "tu" (relaxed, friendly) and "vous" (professional, formal). House and Cuddy address each other with the formal "vous" for the whole show, except at the start of Season 7, where they are in a relationship and used the pronoun "tu" to address each other (as two persons in a couple and not as a doctor and its superior), making the whole situation much more tricky and complicated notably in the episode "Family Practice" where the whole conflict of interest takes on a whole new dimension just because of this.
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