Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this “Fighting Time Lords” shirt for you.

@sizemore twatted a tweet so good I had to ask for permission to make it into a comic. Luckily he obliged, and thus you have the only ending to House that I will ever accept.

Before the pedanti-squad gets their pedanties all knotted up, I do know that once during season four of House “it” was, in fact, Lupus. I’m actually quite glad House is ending. It’s really the only formula driven, procedural show I’ve ever appreciated. I think the blame for that appreciation falls squarely on Hugh Laurie. He has remained consistently captivating for eight years. Even when the plot was faltering, the sidekicks were boring or the case was too fantastic to get emotionally invested in HE was the grizzled glue that held it all together. Despite my stubbley crush on the pill popping, leg limping wonder doc, I firmly believe the writers and producers of House have taken that character absolutely everywhere he could possible go. He has gone through various stages of addiction, recovery, self-destruction, and re-recovery more than a few times. He’s taken the same physical and emotional journey through the peaks and valleys of self loathing and self discovery over and over and to have him continue to circle around the depths of the human condition for 1 or 2 more years would be abusive to the character and the audience.

In all honesty, the show could have ended after season 4 and I probably would have been fine. They might have even checked out with a little more integrity at that point. The subsequent seasons have veered into territory so implausible that the ideas might as well have been borrowed from rejected Nip/Tuck scripts. Still, they somehow managed to real in the crazy and keep things interesting without resorting to too much sensationalism.

The problem with House is that it has always asked the audience to suspend disbelief in order to allow for a character that in any sane world would have long since died by his own actions or those of someone who has spent any length of time in his company, or at the very least been completely abandoned by anyone and everyone he had ever worked with or known personally. The show has explored each of these ideas multiple times, but the consequences never seem to stick. No matter how smart he is, no matter how many lives he’s saved, House would have been fired from PPTH in the first season and had his medical license permanently revoked. It gets harder and harder to ignore this fact as the show goes on since he starts committing felony after felony and goes essentially unpunished. Even after he basically attempts to murder his girlfriend/boss and her entire family he gets a truncated prison sentence, a slap on the wrist AND his old job back. I think the writers found it harder and harder to reset the show back to its basic premise after each consecutive escalation of insanity. If it were to continue any longer, house would have to assassinate the president with a tank, then somehow be elected president himself.

OK, I would totally watch that show.

COMMENTERS: What show that you enjoyed just went on at least a season too long? When should it have ended? I bet more than a few of you are going to say Supernatural season 5. For me it was Heroes, after season 1 and Nip/Tuck after season 2. I would also have accepted a straight up cancellation of LOST after season 3, since none of the unanswered questions up until that point were EVER answered in the remaining 3 seasons.

ALSO: Check out what I made for Josh’s 30th birthday.

You can now purchase a super high quality 11×17″ print of any HE comic by clicking the “Buy A Print” button between the “Previous” and “Next” buttons in the navigation menu. If you don’t see it, try refreshing your browser cache.