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He's afraid to be who he thinks you are
Some things finally got cleared up in tonight’s season finale of House, including the main character’s furrowed brow. He looked positively serene at the end, drinking and smoking cigars with a man who earlier in the episode had asked him, “How do you fix something if you don’t look at it?” The man was talking about his desperately ill wife, but he could have been asking House to examine his own life.

I think House does search his own soul deeply, but I believe he blocks himself, consciously or not, from revealing what he finds. By the end of the show, he had divested himself in various ways of his entire team, and it seemed, on the surface at least, just as easy to do that as it was difficult for him to give up on his patient, even though her heart had stopped and showed no signs of starting again. He wouldn’t let that go, and he ended up saving her, but he couldn’t save his own colleagues from abandoning him, one by one.

As much as I wanted Foreman to stay, I would have been very disappointed if House had betrayed his inner demons and begged him not to go. It was appropriate that he tell him he didn’t want him to leave, but his inability to go any further was totally in keeping with the personality (or the personality disorder) that caused Foreman to want to get out of that situation in the first place. Whatever happens when the series returns in the fall, I expect that the dynamics of House’s team will have changed forever.

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