House last night. *spoilers*

[Deep13]

Goddammit! They killed Amber!! What a total mind-fuck!! Jesus Christ, don't do that to me!

[bicentennial_baby]

1. That ending was SO sad...

:(

[TrogL]

2. This totally threw me

I can't go into the details but I had CraftyGal (and hell, me too) really worried there for a while.

House has always been a relatively "safe" show for me because the plot is predictable. Somebody comes in (or House goes out and discovers somebody) with a wierd illness and they all play guessing games until somebody gets it right and everybody gets all better and happy.

Wilson got to say goodbye.

I didn't.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

3. that was an awesome show. i just dont understand why anyone would think its house's fault

that amber died

[Reverend_Smitty]

5. So far it looks like House is blaming himself the most

because if she refused to come to the bar or follow him onto the bus, she'd still be alive

[La Lioness Priyanka]

6. from the last scene it seemed that wilson was blaming him too

didnt get that

[Deep13]

8. Either that or Wilson felt guilty for risking House.

Instead of losing one friend, he almost lost two.

[Orrex]

20. Here's how I read it

Wilson wasn't ready to speak about it, but he wanted House to know that he was worried about him. That's why he stuck around long enough for House to make eye contact with him, then nod and exit without a word.

If Wilson blamed him, then Wilson wouldn't have been there at all. He's above petty gestures such as hanging out just to give House the first F-U upon regaining consciousness.

So I infer that he wanted to be there as much as he was able to be, because he really is House's best friend. However, Wilson didn't have it in him to say anything, because his grief and pain were still so acute.


That's my reading, anyway. For my money, the House/Wilson friendship is about the best-written male friendship currently on television, though YMMV.

[Deep13]

7. She would not have been on the bus if House had not...

...gotten blitzed and needed a ride home. It may also be that she rode the bus with him instead of driving them both because of the Cosmo House harrangued Amber into having.

He didn't cause the accident, it's true, but the only reason they were in it is because of his bad behavior. And as they explained, the accident was the cause of kidney failure which caused her cold pills to be fatal. (If they could not filter her blood, why couldn't they simply replace it with donor blood?) So House did CAUSE her death. Whether or not it is his FAULT is another question. In personal injury law, we would ask if his drunkeness was the "proximate cause" of the death or whether the crash was an unforeseen intervening cause. One might argue that a crash is always foreseeable and that what House did was subject Amber to the rather ordinary risk of it which she otherwise would not have done. On the other hand, someone else's bad driving or accident is not generally thought to be the kind of damage that getting drunk causes.

He pretty clearly has survivor guilt as he explained at the end. I just hope Amber is not going to become his Obi-Wan who talks to him in his dreams.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

9. i think amber chose to ride the bus because she loved wilson

so by that stretch of argument its just as much wilsons fault

[Deep13]

16. So, she knew that Wilson would bail him out yet again...

...so Amber took the bus so Wilson would not need to do it?

But, Wilson was on-call. Maybe he could not have picked up House anyway? If so, Amber would not need to do anything. Of course, if House was passed-out in a gutter somewhere, Wilson would go nuts trying to find him. So maybe A. was just letting Wilson avoid that. Or maybe, Wilson would go get him despite being on-call and get in trouble with Cuddy. (Did you enjoy the Cuddy pole-dance routine last week? I sure did. :-) )

Ultimately, though, Wilson didn't do anything to set things in motion. House did that. Amber was not at fault because she was being helpful. One has to do something wrong to be at fault. Obviously loving someone can not be the basis of any kind of fault. (I'm looking at you, Fundies! :mad: )

[Beaverhausen]

11. but the crash isn't what killed her

it was the drugs she was taking and the interaction that killed her. At least that's what I thought. :shrug:

[Deep13]

14. Only because her kidneys got fucked up by the crash.

That was my understanding, anyway.

[Reverend_Smitty]

4. I *did not* see that one coming!

What a great episode though

[Fox Mulder]

10. It was a sad episode.

:(

[applegrove]

12. I've just started watching the show and even I was upset they killed her and I'd never seen her

before.

[Deep13]

17. She was not a nice person.

At the beginning of the season, House auditioned something like thirty docs to fill three slots. Amber was one of them. She used psychological tactics on the others to eliminate competition. House called her "C.T.B." short for "Cut-Throat Bitch." Eventually she did something that even House found unethical and she was dropped from the running. House ended up with a team of four: Foreman, #13 (forgot her name), the short guy and Kumar. Eventually, House was shocked to find that Wilson was dating C.T.B. "I call her 'Amber.' " he said to House.

[applegrove]

19. Okay - I am no longer upset she died. I saw the show half way through last night. I missed

the part where she was a manipulator. Moving on..

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. I missed it last night!... (And now I know how it ends so I dunno if I could watch it anyway)

[Zuiderelle]

15. That was soooo depressing.

[hickman]

18. I was disappointed by the whole thing.

I knew they'd find a way to make House at fault. I just don't buy it. House didn't ask CTB to come to the bar. He tried to get away from her and she followed him. I guess I just never bought how she was the love of Wilson's life after 4 months together. And I never got the whole "House in a skirt" thing either.

[Orrex]

21. I was a little disappointed by the on-demand memory sequences

For a show that nominally prides itself on realism, it seemed off-key to jab a wire into House's brain and access the exact memory that they were looking for.

Thank goodness that they didn't turn it into a clip-show a la ST:TNG's awful Shades of Gray, but it was still a little too mystical for my tastes.


Especially the bit at the end, with the is-it-or-isn't-it NDE. House is on record stating that he has no belief in that phenomenon, and in fact he electrocuted himself earlier in the season just to test it out. For the season to end with him communing with the deceased seems out of character for him, even if we grant that he was in an altered state of consciousness at the time.

I'm glad that they got rid of Amber. I never liked her as a character, and I never bought the wink-wink sexual tension between her and House. Better to get rid of her one way or another.

[Deep13]

22. I figured he was dreaming.

He knew she was doomed, so he probably knew about how long she had. She was just his psychological expression of guilt.

The truth is, even though it has a venire of realism, a lot of stuff in that show is pretty far fetched. I saw one episode where an MRI ripped off a guy's tatoo because there was iron in the ink. Bullshit! There's iron in his blood too, yah know. Or what about the colonoscopy on demand? Doesn't a patient have to fast for a day and drink a gallon of liquid laxative to get a clear path?

[Orrex]

24. Yeah, there's a lot of stretching

I'm not thrilled about his see-what-sticks approach to diagnostics, either.

And I'd love if they talked about how much this shit costs. It can't be cheap to get a battery of MRIs, coupled with a string of open-heart procedures, followed by god-knows-what experimental drug treatment, followed by tox screens and a host of other tests.

Shit! We could barely get an MRI for my wife without two weeks' notice and triple confirmation from my insurance provider. But everybody in House-land seems to be able to afford everything.

:wtf:

You're also probably right about the dream/expression of guilt, but...

Given his adamant stance against NDE's, it would have been prudent either to shoot the scene in a different way (eg., sans divine light) or else have him mid-dream make some House-esque dismissive comment about it.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

25. MRIs and headphones

Maybe my experiences were exceptional, but I don't think so. Whenever I've had an MRI, I've had to wear headphones and listen to some very lousy music so as to protect my ears from the awful racket the machines make.

People get tucked into MRIs on the show as if it's just an X-ray. That bothers me, a sore note in an otherwise impeccably believable show.

[leftyclimber]

23. I was disappointed differently.

I was disappointed that they woke Amber back up. As was stated in the script, it was cruel. If I were in a situation where I were going to die, I wouldn't want a bunch of people bringing me back to tell me the inevitable. I thought that was a monumentally shitty thing to do to her.

On the bright side, I was glad to see Robert Sean Leonard come into his own. I hated him as an actor when he was younger. His performance in that episode was astounding.