7. Lawrence Kutner- House
Where the hell did this come from? Kutners departure from House was a necessity as the characters portrayer, Kal Penn, had joined the Obama administration and would be leaving the show. What was not a necessity however was the entirely random exit that the writers came up with. Having not showed up for work, and therefore annoying House, Thirteen and Foreman travel to Kutners home only to find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. This suicide happens entirely off screen and aside from hallucinations in later years we never see Kutner again, nor do we ever get an explanation for why he took his own life. There is an argument for this episode handling the topic of suicide extremely well, I understand and in part agree with this argument. The crux of it is that suicide is a shocking thing that none of us can truly understand and we can never really know what is going on in someone elses head. The teams utter shock and Houses desperate attempt to prove foul play when there was none, is meant to represent the feelings of bewilderment and frustration that people feel after a real-life suicide. There is certainly some merit to this idea and for the characters it works, especially House who has a pathological need to understand everything and this is something that he never will. Thats all well and good, but House is not real life, its a TV show. Whilst it may be a cool storytelling device for the characters to be blindsided by the suicide, we as an audience should be able to understand what in the hell is going on. We were never given any indication of Kutners mental instability and there was exactly zero build up to his death. The week before he was helping patients and now he was blowing his brains out off-screen. I suppose the episode had the desired effect - we were all frustrated by the fact that we will never get the answers that we want. Yet the fact that Kutner was leaving the show and that there was no build up whatsoever makes me think that this was nothing more than a shameless plot device.