House (TV series)/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• House has House and Wilson. Compare to: Holmes and Watson. I can't believe I just thought of this. It should probably be obvious, but this is what I get for only half paying attention to the TV while this show is playing.
  • I had a similar reaction on a slightly larger scale. House and Wilson = Holmes and Watson. House is hooked on Vicodin; Holmes on cocaine. They both can't resist a good mystery, and always assumed that someone - or everyone! - was lying. But the best hint is in plain sight in some many episodes: House lives in apartment 221B. Holmes' abode? 221B Baker Street. Can't believe it took me well into the third season to get it. - Tropers/Ixtli_Awakening
  • And in the series finale, House fakes his own death, just like Holmes does in The Final Problem.
  • The episode "House Divided": I didn't realize until starting to watch the episode the second time that... Amber is House's anima! Way to use what I've been studying in class this semester, writers!
  • Take a look at what the name of the person who shoots House in the Season 2 finale - I'm pretty sure it was the season 2 finale... - is named. For that matter, several of the producers have referred to House as a "medical Sherlock Holmes."
    • "Moriarty"... and he's played by Casey Jones!
    • Although he only got that name in House's head. In the real world, he's not named at all. Which means either House thinks he is Holmes, or somehow thinks that's a reasonably name.
  • There's also been a couple of references to someone named "Adler" or "Irene Adler". The show has a whole other level of enjoyment if you're a Sherlock geek.
  • It's also a sort of a pun... Holmes sounds like Homes, the plural of Home or...House.
  • Even more brilliant when you remember Holmes was based on a medical teacher Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had.
  • Also, every single season finale has been building to season 5's finale. Season One had House's mental jumping-around, not in itself unusual, but it's hard for a stable mind to tell three stories is jigsaw order like that and be totally consistent. Season 2 is, I think, pretty obvious. House's gunshot-induced hallucination. Season 3 gives us the magical reviving woman, a case I don't believe ever happened, because no one has ever brought it up since and it doesn't seem to have effected squat. Season 4 really gave House some gas, with the brain problems and the hallucinations and the electroshock. It's all been foreshadowing.
  • What's more, I just now figured out why Amber's hallucination tried to kill Chase that time. Up to that point, House didn't treat the fact that he was seeing Wilson's dead girlfriend as something he should take seriously, and instead took advantage of having an "all access key to [his] brain". Amber causing House to attempt to kill Chase without him realizing it was House's brain trying to tell him that it is serious, and that he needs to get rid of Amber.
  • It took this troper a couple of viewings to realize just how clever the Season 2 season finale is. Consider the show's central conceit, Willing Suspension of Disbelief-challenging enough as it is - genius doctor has to solve an apparently unsolvable medical mystery every week, virtually all of which are inexplicably concentrated in one corner of New Jersey. What's the plot of the episode? House is faced with a medical mystery, but the fact that the mystery in this case is literally unsolvable is what tips House off that he's dreaming. It's at least a Lampshade Hanging, and arguably even a Deconstructed Trope, of the basic concept of the show - driving the consequences of a medical mystery which cannot be solved to their logical extreme. Additionally, it occurred to this troper that in the episode, all the other characters are just manifestations of House's personality - try imagining some of the team's medical-related lines as if House was saying them.
  • I had a rather minor moment of this. It always bugged me how each episode would spend time building up this drama to do with the patient, and then as soon as they were diagnosed, it would just be left unresolved. I found this a little unfulfilling, until I realised. Thats what it's like for the Doctors. They see small snippets of each patients life, never seeing the full story, and so the audience gets the same experience.
  • I couldn't help but notice for the first time while re-watching Season 5 on DVD that everyone consistently treats Kutner like crap. He comes up with dozens of intelligent conclusions and answers and never gets any recognition for them, he tries to reach out to people when they're troubled and gets treated like a nuisance, and the others routinely make fun of him like it's the hospital's running joke. There's your "simple explanation."
  • In the very first episode, House tells Cameron he hired her because she was pretty (therefore she could have likely had a comfortable life without becoming a doctor). Many a fan took this as a sign of Informed Attractiveness... except for the fact that Cameron is just as attractive as her actress, who is a successful actress.
  • Another example from the episode "Three Stories", where House is giving a lecture. In the lecture, he tells the stories of three past cases of different people with leg pain. At first he hides their identities by saying that they're two middle-aged men and Carmen Electra, which we see in the scenes of those people being treated. Eventually some of the interns attending the lecture ask questions that require House to reveal the actual ages and genders of the patients. One of the middle-aged men turns out to be a 16-year-old girl, and Carmen Electra turns out to be a man screaming in pain who is then revealed to have just been a drug seeker. When this is revealed, they change to who they actually are in the scenes. Eventually it is revealed that the pain seeker was actually House, though the man wasn't seen as House until later, and it was never revealed to the interns that it was House. Now, the Fridge Brilliance comes in when you realize that even though we don't see that the pain seeker is House, when we first see him as a man, and not Carmen Electra, he's dressed the same way House dresses.

Fridge Horror

• In the series finale, House fakes his death so that he can share Wilson's last five months of life. House has, many times, stated that Wilson is his only friend, the only person he considers something close to family in the entire world, and that if he dies, he will be completely alone. What do you think is going to happen when Wilson finally dies from his terminal cancer?
  • Start over. Make a new life, with new friends, and never forget his old ones. That's kinda the point.
• Also in the finale, House uses the body of the drug addicted patient to make it look like he died in the fire. A question arises, however... What happened to the drug addict in the first place? On somewhat popular interpretation is that House purposely caused him to overdose on heroin, thereby murdering him and getting access to his useful body.