For a show whose protagonist vehemently claims to be an atheist, House certainly deals with a lot of religious themes and striking coincidences. One of the strong commonalities of the best and most interesting House cases is that the underlying causes are always weird, inconceivable ailments that can only be caused (and discerned) by putting together the most bizarre circumstances.
In Season 2, “Clueless,” a woman is poisoning her husband with gold that she is hiding in a… very intimate place. If House hadn’t spent time living in Egypt and known about a chemical that turns purple when mixed with gold, he wouldn’t have been able to solve the case. In “Insensitive,” in Season 3, he figures out from a Vitamin B deficiency that a patient who can’t feel pain has a tapeworm. So, the case of Lee having a paper cut that got infected with rat urine should have been right up there among the most elegant of diagnoses. So, why do I feel disappointed?
I was expecting there to be some kind of kinship between Lee and House. Or for House to have some kind of epiphany. Instead, Kutner diagnoses the patient. It was brilliant, but it lacked the infamous House face moment of discovery; I don’t like it when the underlings solve the cases. Even if they are supposed to grow and contribute to the back story. And, frankly, I still don’t really care about the new underlings. I miss the combo of Chase, Cameron, and Foreman.
Another reason I was disappointed is that I think a strong element of fear was missing from this episode– fear on the part of the patient, fear from his wife and children. About five years ago, one of my friends had a double brainstem stroke and was diagnosed as being Locked In. It was horrifying. Harrowing. The doctor who gave the diagnosis cried and had to walk around the parking lot for an hour. The nurses in the ICU were crying. It was whispered to us that residents in elevators secretly agree that the Locked In diagnosis is worse than death, worse than a vegetative state: You are locked into your body and you cannot move.
Instead of fear, we just got House popping up and saying, “Well, maybe we can fix this.” Of course, Molly and Lee both believed in God, and it was stated (rather than shown) that their faith was keeping them from despair. But there really was never any suspense or real doubt created that this patient would be cured. So, when he was cured, I didn’t really feel anything. And that was disappointing. For a show that has consistently (for three seasons and part of the fourth) had some of the best episodes on television, it seems to be really hit or miss lately.
Is it just me?
Clacked by Jen Creer
on Mar 31, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
I thought it was a great episode. I liked the POV camera shots of the patient being locked in. The episode seemed to only deviate a little from the usual House face of “a-ha!”. I assumed some else would come up the proper diagnosis because House was preoccupied with other things. He said he was seeing a therapist and therapy still doesn’t work. Plus, maybe he was testing his team – he was recording their time with the patient. I don’t know, I just liked the episode, it was a break from the norm.
House was still House though, he was fascinated by the case, wanted to find out what was wrong. In the end, when the patient said God brought them together, House was done with the patient.
It was easily the best episode of this horrible season.
I was sooo bored by this episode. The ailment of the week was more horrifying to me than it was to the guy and his family. I found the presentation and camerawork irritating.
I was also very disgusted with the Taub situation. House is being far more assholeish than usual, and if this is the big play to SPOILER
the suicide at then end of the season, then I am not into it at all.
I loved it. It really felt like the patient pov, and not just locked in-the doctors aren’t actually going to talk about how you’ll never get better in front of you-they’ll be peppy-and a challenge for House-he’d react as such.
I AM sick of Taub…don’t like him
This post by Ken Levine made the episode interesting for me, and because Mos Def plugged the guest starring role on “Real Time” last friday.
Other than that – it was your run of the mill House episode.
It’s time for the Cameron/Chase storyline.
I only saw about the first half of this before passing out on the couch. I had already read your post before watching, so I went into it with that in mind. I guess the thing that struck me, for the parts that I saw anyway, was that they probably had a better chance at a successful episode doing it the way they did, with Mos Def being kind of funny in his reactions to what the doctors were saying. I think if they’d tried to actually tap into that horror you described, it would have failed miserably and would have been like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone. House can do serious drama pretty well for the most part but with the POV scenario, it could have very easily been as big a disaster as that live episode of ER they did all those years ago.
One of the things my friend’s husband told me (the friend who was Locked In briefly) that the episode got right was the patient saying, “Hey, stop treating me like I’m a piece of furniture!”
And he also pointed out that there are a LOT of garrishly funny things that happen. I had forgotten how much we laughed that week.
I believe it. :)
I agree with brining back the old trio! Every Sat at midnight, one of local channels carry it. I stay up to watch the oldies, but goodies.