I thought it was lousy episode. The plot was horribly contrived in a “we’re tired and out of inspiration, it’s the fifth season” kind of way, and
** Spoiler **
when House gives the gun back to the crazy man who’s already shot a patient, he might was well have proceeded to climb into a refrigerator. What zany adventures will House and his team face next week?
I think I’m really getting close to the end of my fuse with this show. The House of the first season could actually make a comment that wasn’t sarcastic. He’d actually answer questions with a straight answer. He wasn’t just this cartoon character jerk. He was actually a moral entity: remember the House who turned down Cameron by telling her that she could only love what was broken, or the House who went to a patient and asked her to tell him that she actually wanted to live so that he could feel right about lying to the heart transplant review board? The guy who felt guilty because a part of him wanted his ex-girlfriend’s husband to die? What happened to that House? Now he’s just the asshole who gloats over the fact that one of his staff is dying of a horrifying neurological disorder and then ambles off to sexually molests his boss.
But the bigger problem is that the show’s just not going anywhere. The set-up of the case of the week is laughably predictable, as is its resolution (in structure, if not in detail). People try to claim that the show’s a mystery in the guise of a doctor’s show, but that’s patently false: any mystery story should be plausibly solvable by the audience based on the clues that are given, but House’s cases are usually unsolvable by real life doctors because the show’s depiction of the illnesses and symptoms are only tangentially linked to reality, and most of the time the only symptom or case detail that matters is held to the last minute of the show.
This Cuddy plot just shows everything that is wrong with the show. House and Cuddy can’t get together in any meaningful way because that would fix House, and the producers think a less mean and sarcastic House would kill the show. But House’s character has stagnated for seasons: there’s nowhere this show can go without fixing him. House should have never been allowed to get meaner than he was in the first season. The show’s not a mystery, it’s about doctors, and that means it needs to be human. Until House stops being a cartoon character, this show’s basically spinning its wheels.
I just watched the last two episodes in rapid succession. Week after week, the only justification I can come up with for watching the show is morbid curiosity. There are occasionally good moments, but they really need to wrap it up.
I don’t really see the problem. It’s possibly because I only started watching in Season IV, with the cast reboot, and then caught up on older seasons on DVD in a short amount of time this summer. But it seems to me that the show was most in danger of stagnating back in Season 3, but the cast reboot really made it pretty fresh again, and the end of Season IV was just as good as “3 stories” from Season 1, if not better.
From watching all the seasons recently, I agree that Season 1 was very different in that the medical mystery actually mattered a lot more and was more central to the show back then. They had a lot more emphasis on trying to figure out what the disease was. But from Season 2 onward, the emphasis shifted toward the show being about characters, and the diagnosis being the formula around which the show’s drama is focused.
On the one hand, I would welcome a change to the formula, and a change to character of House. But on the other hand, I enjoy the show a lot in its current form, maybe since I only started watching last season, and wouldn’t mind another season or two of the current formula before they decide to change things up again like they did last season with the cast reboot.
Yeah, I avoided the show for years because it was obvious to me that the basic premise could only ever be contrived and repetative but, once that I started watching I was hooked and I now love it in spite of its flaws. It’s formulaic but I like the formula. I don’t need grand sweeping changes to the characters to keep me interested because I still enjoy the show week to week.
With regard to mysteries, not all mysteries need to be solveable by the audience. House is Sherlock Holmes in a hospital. House is a misanthropic drug addict who uses his genius level deductive reasoning and observation to solve mysteries. “Fixing” House would ruin the show. His character is why people tune in. Further, go back and watch the first couple of seasons again and you will note that for everytime the writers showed us a glimpse of House’s human side, they would follow it up with an episode showing him to be a complete bastard almost devoid of feeling. (Refusing to hug the woman who just lost her daughter, playing mind games with a dying child trying to poke holes in her positive world view and make her admit that the world sucks, etc.)
The parents of the dying girl don’t want to care for their own granddaughter because “its just too painful”? That was painfully stupid, and I saw the Cuddy-gets-a-baby “twist” as soon as she set foot in that house. I was thinking “Christmas Miracle - the baby is magically alive somehow and Cuddy gets to keep it”. At least the baby’s survival had a reasonable explanation, but they did nothing to make the Cuddy-gets-a-baby part believable. If the dying girl’s parents had abandoned her when they learned she’d been pregnant, saying things like “you have shamed our family, now you are dead to us” I would have had no problem believing they’d put the baby up for adoption, but they were exactly the opposite of that.
House trying to be nice and failing was funny, as was House “confusing nice with evil”. I’m always happy to see him visit the clinic.
Agreed, the sappy “Cuddy gets her baby” angle was horribly contrived and ridiculous. There is no way that the parents of both those kids would agree to adoption, especially not the girl’s parents who are already losing a daughter, now they’re going to just toss aside a granddaughter as well. Stupid.
The whole lady who leaves the drug trial thing also seemed pretty contrived as simply a way to get Foreman and 13 together. I don’t get that story angle either, as they’ve never shown an ounce of interest in one another prior to this and now suddenly they’re all hot for each other despite her preferring girls and him being deathly averse to any emotional attachment. I suppose the writers will justify it as her seeing him as someone who can see past her condition and him seeing her as only a temporary attachment due to that same condition. I think it’s a stupid Grey’s Anatomy style move that brings nothing to the plot. Though if it means I get to see more of Oliva Wilde every week then I’m OK with it I suppose.
13 is bi, as they’ve mentioned many times (he called her 31 once, she said “but I’m 13!?” and he replies “Oh sorry, I thought you liked it both ways”). Still, the only relationships of hers that we’ve known about prior to this are with women.
The lady who left the drug trial was… Lori Petty (Tank Girl). Weird stunt casting.
House has become more of a caricature, and that would be fine if they simply decided they’d rather be a weekly hour-long sitcom. The Adventures of Superjerk, M.D., is where the show still works the best (at some point they should try not having a central medical mystery at all, and just have House doing all clinic duty, all the time); the problem is it keeps falling on its face in trying to be Medical Drama #338, with dubious-at-best heartstrings moments and beginning to work through permutations and combinations of the characters fucking each other.
My wife and I watched a couple of episode from Season Two when USA or some channel was running a marathon recently. It’s incredible how much more entertaining Dr. House is in those episodes. He’s sarcastic, caustic and snide in ways that make you laugh nearly every time he interacts with anyone. This season’s House is much more mean spirited, angry and just plain asshatish. It’s not nearly as funny when compared to the earlier stuff, and I wish they’d find a way to lighten him up again and make him go back to being the way he was. We saw a glimpse of it in this episode when he was doing clinic duty, but it wasn’t nearly enough.