the more i think about it, the more i think s5 kind of is the best finale for house-the-show. not in terms of "the show sucked after this" or "i wish it had ended here," but from a bluntly narrative perspective. everyone has reached the apex of their character development, and i think you really see the show struggling in s6 and beyond as a result.
house has decided he wants to change and get better. his thesis was always that he's fine as he is and happy and doesn't need to change and that people do not, but the show was constantly proving him wrong and showing that to be denial. he has decided he wants to change and get better; he has overcome his largest burden.
wilson, admittedly, is a fairly static character: his development tends to come in relation to house, and not independently. but s5 also ends with them and their relationship at its strongest, i think: wilson has suffered a great loss (amber) and their friendship has been challenged, but they came out of it repaired and more honest.
cuddy, after several years of it being a plot point, has her daughter; this has been her main "lack" and drive since s2. while house/cuddy hasn't happened yet, a surprising lot of s5 is pretty focused on their relationship and makes it very, very clear that beyond just flirtation, she and house have Feelings for one another.
foreman has been struggling for a few years with being in house's shadow/being too much like him. by s4, foreman has begun to embrace this rather than fight it; in s5, we really see him reach the end of this arc as he gains confidence and starts trusting his own judgement over house's (something he struggled with, and the show highlighted he struggled with, in earlier seasons). this has been his arc since s1; he's reached the peak.
cameron's largest struggle/character arc has always been romance and fear focused: she is afraid of taking risks, and has always been defined by her grief and heartbreak. she's gotten the big romcom ending, a wedding. in s4 she's given a plot of struggling to move on from diagnostics and missing the rush, but in s5 she's given a new arc: she's shown working more closely with cuddy and even being groomed as assistant dean: she's on the hospital's budget committee, she runs community outreach programs, etc. cameron was never really shown as fantastic at diagnostics as the boys were (she's very smart! but she's never solved a case); s4-5 shows her finding a niche where she does thrive and being fantastic at it. she's happy and bubbly now, no longer defined by grief.
chase, unlike the other two kids, was never really given any strong arcs, but we've seen him thriving since leaving diagnostics. he's confident and stands up for himself, he is great at his job. the only thing we're really told he wants/lacks is cameron (he's never given an arc like foreman's about leadership, or like cameron's about fear/grief), but hey! he's got the girl! at a stretch, you could say what he wanted was validation/belonging — but again, he got it! he got the girl, he has a new job and is the best at it. yippee
thirteen is stable and happy after her huntington's crashout; her drug trial might have failed but foreman is giving her some much-needed support and stability, and she's getting treatment for huntington's instead of partaking in risky behaviors as she was.
even taub has confessed to his infidelities and (for now) has worked things out with rachel.
everyone is happy! everyone has gotten the Thing They Want and the Thing They Need! characters have nowhere left to go after the s5 finale, and on the one hand, i do think it's a really interesting story choice to continue past the "happy ending" and watch reality ensue and things fall apart, but… even though s6 is generally quite good, i think this is actually a big factor in how and why the show goes downhill. everyone has peaked. everyone's arcs have been wrapped up. and that means in s6 and beyond, the show has to find new arcs. new goals and desires and plots. for everyone.
house stays sober for a while, but his flandarization, i think, continues: the show struggles to strike a balance with house the star and performer and Silly Guy and house who has always been defined by his own misery. cuddy and that arc keeps him going for a while, but i think you can see the show flailing slightly. the wilson/sam arc seems fairly transparently designed to make house suffer, which a) literally romcom playbook okay and b) is telling, that the show so quickly tries to find reasons for house to backslide.
cuddy's "arc" becomes just a will they/won't they with house. this isn't bad (although the execution, you know), but it does sap her of a lot of her independence: her character now revolves entirely around house (or exists for house to react to), she doesn't have too much else going on.
foreman's leadership arc is quietly abandoned. he spends s6-7 largely spinning his wheels; he is made into a joke and incompetent. he no longer is running his own side cases or drug trials, he doesn't really do much. he also starts getting undermined left and right in s7. s8 throws him in the dean's office, which is nice on the one hand as it finally lets foreman be taken seriously again -- but is also very blatantly a "shit, we lost lisa" fix, so it's hard to really enjoy it as a Natural Conclusion To His Character as much as yet another example of creating new arcs out of thin air.
chase is completely rewritten. on the one hand, he gets away with it: chase was never given an arc in the way the other two were, he was reactionary and not given his own agency. but he still isn't really given an arc in s6-7: there's his depression over his divorce, sure, but … what does he want? what does he need? apparently, the answer is casual sex. s8 does a good job fixing this, calling out chase's sleeping around as loneliness and unhappiness to the effect that chase seems pretty self-aware of how he's been rewritten. but even if it's a nice arc, you can't deny there were no hints of it before s7, that it is completely new.
cameron is summarily removed from the show. never going to be okay with this.
thirteen is also more or less removed from the show, less intentionally. she isn't given much to do while she is around, for obvious reasons.
taub gets a divorce! and then has kids! i love the guy, but clearly they were just throwing plots at the wall and seeing what stuck.
everyone's character was done! everyone's arcs were finished! s8 does a lot to try and fix the damage of s7, but i really think this is the problem with the second half of the show. it isn't that they ran out of ideas -- it's that they finished them, and had to create new arcs for everyone from scratch.
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