Life sucks and then you die

Last night's House was incredibly disappointing to me. I had read the spoilers, I knew Kutner's suicide was coming, I know Kal Penn left to go work for Obama (which is a fantastic opportunity that he couldn't pass up), but still I'm sad. Kutner was my favorite of the newbies, bringing a light-hearted spin to an otherwise dour set of characters. I don't know why I'm going to have a reason to keep watching the show--Thirteen and Foreman are bores, Chase is barely seen, Cameron still annoys me when she shows up, House is taking forever to work things out with Cuddy, and Taub is his best when he plays off Kutner. Now that he's gone, I don't know how they'll make Taub, a guy already suffering a lot of misery, an appealing character. There has got to be something fun happening, otherwise I'll walk away from the show every week feeling as depressed as the characters do.

I suppose the point the show was trying to make was that suicide can happen without warning. Indeed, we got virtually no signs that Kutner would kill himself. But I can't help but think that the fact that were no signs was because the writers intentionally left Kutner an underdeveloped character. Ever since the newbies were added to the show, we've heard all about Thirteen's life, her sexuality, her Huntington's disease, her relationship with Foreman. With Taub, we know about his infidilities, his money problems, his struggling relationship with his wife. All we were told about Kutner is that his parents were murdered when he was a child and that he was later adopted by a loving couple. We saw that he was a funny, sweet guy, but we didn't get the chance to get inside his head. And since he killed himself, he clearly had a lot going on in his head.

So while the point that suicide is unpredictable is valid, I still maintain that it would have been better to have gotten to know Kutner, understand his point of view, see why he would have ended his life. The writers took a character that they often used as comic relief and had him kill himself with no build up, leaving his death to seem like a cheap ratings stunt rather than realistic character development. The writers didn't know what to do with Kutner, Kal Penn was leaving, and so they decided to do something sensational. Last night's episode centered on everyone's reactions to this shocking death. House and the others will be haunted by what they missed, and what they could have done differently. Ultimately, Kutner's suicide stops being about him and becomes more about everyone else's feelings. Even in death, he plays second fiddle to the rest of the characters.