HOUSE, M.D.: 25. "Humpty Dumpty"
Micky DuPree
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I guess it's official. First-season House is virtually gone. One
episode could be a blip. Two could be a coincidence. Three is a
pattern. What's David Shore *really* doing with his time these days?
Got a new project in the works? 'Cause I can barely feel his presence
this season.
"Humpty Dumpty" was weird, like well-intentioned fanfic that just can't
resist having House comfort someone in the end.
Strangely, even with deeply somber subject matter, like death row, dying
cancer kid, amputation, and crippling guilt, the series seems lighter
and breezier now, and one reason as to why is that the pace is
inadvertently dictating terms to the tone.
Almost everything is off now, and this seems to be a permanent change.
Despite Shore's reassurances to the media, House is cuddlier and more
approachable now, more of a people person (though that remark should be
understood as relative to what he was like before). They have softened
him and that really takes the edge off. They've given him a Hollywood
haircut and made him more like a crowd-working insult comic than the
isolated misanthrope of old. But that will probably be more popular, so
most people will be happy with the result.
More specific observations:
Maybe it was just me, but I thought Edelstein was favoring her knees
rather than her side when she was running.
I didn't spot any L.A. palm trees lining the street, but there was one
reflected in a car window.
I suspect that Cuddy choking on water at the beginning was supposed to
fool us into thinking that she was the patient this week, but even with
trying to avoid trailers and listings, I still knew it was somebody
else. I've been driven to the extreme of reading the closing credits
not only with the sound muted, but also with my view of most of the
screen blocked.
HOUSE: [To Cuddy] You haven't been a real doctor in ten years.
Which, taken with some later exposition, implies that Cuddy is about 42
in the present.
FOREMAN: You really want to screw Whitey? Be one of the few
black men to live long enough to collect Social
Security.
Probably my favorite line in the episode.
So maybe they are doling out more clinic cases to the fellows, but the
second-season handling of the clinic patients has been a lot more clunky
and a lot less entertaining.
The shot where Chase told Cuddy about the protein C side effects was so
oddly backlit that at first I thought Chase was standing in front of a
green screen.
HOUSE: It's not pneumonia. He might have missed a finger
turning dark. He's not going to miss breathing problems.
What else?
CUDDY: It's pneumonia. He wanted to go home. I thought he was
lying. I told him I had a dinner party. I made him go
up there.
HOUSE: Well, why didn't you just take out a gun and shoot him?
CUDDY: I thought it was just asthma.
HOUSE: You might have mentioned this earlier, Doctor. Maybe we
could have sent some blood cultures to the lab instead of
wasting a day indulging your self-loathing.
Not one of these doctors took a history? No one knew Alfredo had asthma
except Cuddy, who mysteriously didn't mention it or write it in his
chart? Alfredo's inhaler (which we saw him use just before he went back
up the ladder) never got mentioned in the history of medications he was
taking? No one thought to ask if his asthma had seemed exceptionally
bad lately, therefore hinting at something more? Wouldn't Alfredo have
kept his inhaler on the table by his bedside just in case, where the
doctors could have seen it? Wouldn't he have been likely to overuse his
inhaler while he had pneumonia, mistakenly thinking that his breathing
problems were just asthma? I had a lot of trouble buying this plot
turn, because while it might have been designed to make Cuddy look like
a crappy doctor (part of House's point at the end), it also made them
all look like they had dropped the ball.
HOUSE: So give him garden-variety Levaquin and a garden-variety
echocardiogram.
The Levaquin wouldn't have had an effect on the psittacosis?
Interesting that Wilson admonished Stacy for what he saw as
inappropriate interest in House from someone who was married, which is
usually the kind of admonishment House gives Wilson. However, I'm not
convinced that Stacy wasn't just being somewhat protective of Cuddy
rather than sniffing around House, given that Wilson had just confessed
that House was about to break into Cuddy's home.
I can't believe that Foreman and Chase were stupid enough to take a bet
against House at this late stage. And I assume the whole point of House
going directly to the hidden key (instead of looking under the mat
first) was to tease the House/Cuddy 'shippers into thinking that House
simply remembered where Cuddy kept the spare key from when he was last
over at her place.
CAMERON: He's a great doctor, but any other hospital
administrator would have fired him years ago.
CUDDY: Four of them did. The question is, why did I hire him?
It's not hard to believe that House's last four bosses fired him. But
it does make me wonder what was going through the mind of boss #4 when
he or she decided to hire someone with three previous sackings on his
record and probably no glowing letters of recommendation to show for it.
It also struck me as somewhat uncool for a boss to discuss her
subordinate's hiring history with his subordinate.
HOUSE: Someone as obsessive and insecure as Cuddy probably has
three extra keys hidden away within ten feet of the door.
"Obsessive" and "insecure" were never words I would have used to
describe Cuddy before, with the lone exception of swabbing down the
hospital in "Maternity," and there it was out a sense of protectiveness.
In the first season, Cuddy always came off as extremely self-assured and
I never saw her as one to sweat the small stuff (unlike House going
through every pill bottle in the pharmacy at the end of "Occam's
Razor").
CAMERON: You both went to Michigan. Did you know him while you
were there?
CUDDY: Uh, I was still an undergrad, but yeah, I knew him. He
was already a legend.
CAMERON: So you just knew him as a legend.
Yadda, yadda. We already know that House is all that and then some.
This would have had more of an impact if she had actually mentioned some
kind of detail or anecdote that would have gotten the point across.
If this is supposed to mean that House was at the University of Michigan
medical school while Cuddy was an undergraduate, then that puts the
likely difference between their ages at somewhere between one to seven
years, which indirectly implies House's age at somewhere between 43 and
49, give or take a year.
HOUSE: She uses super tampons. What does that mean?
Any guy who is both as curious as House is and has lived with a woman
for five years knows what different sized tampons mean.
All that sniffing around Cuddy's home and none of them checked up on the
roof, the area that Alfredo had actually had recent physical contact
with? Geez, that might even have been funny, House directing his
long-suffering boys from the safety of terra firma (and maybe even
asking about the presence of bird droppings).
I did like the bit where Stacy asked House if she had caught him during
a commercial. It was an offhand line, but it smacked of five years of
experience living with him.
Hard enough to believe that not one of those doctors would have spot-
checked the urine output from a patient who had been given the ooh-scary
antifungal, but not even the nurses noticed the lack of output either?
Since when does House go to a patient's room to take the patient's
temperature? (Since the writers needed a lame excuse to get him in the
room to overhear some Spanish and prove he's the only person in the
hospital who can smell gangrene.)
House was cool with giving the nun in "Damned If You Do" hyperbaric
oxygen treatment with no protocol at all, but not someone with a
gangrenous hand?
I haven't taken a Spanish class in 32 years, but I'm pretty sure I
caught "esta noche," presumably meaning Manny could start working
Alfredo's job that night, and "una noche," presumably meaning Alfredo
gave Manny permission to take over his night job just for one night.
I'd have to guess at the rest, which would only lead to heartache.
If I could ignore Cuddy's position as hospital administrator of long
standing, then I'd be amused by Stacy scolding House and Cuddy for their
presentation of a hospital divided against itself. However, I would
expect Cuddy to be a veteran of overseeing numerous hospital lawsuits,
so logically, she would have known better before they even went to
Stacy's office. (At this stage of the game, I'd expect House to be no
stranger to medical malpractice suits either.)
CUDDY: He's not like us.
HOUSE: Can't work as a cripple?
Major left-field comment from House, 'cause he's not too stupid to
realize that Cuddy was right about a handyman being unable to work
without a hand (unless his stock in trade was mowing lawns on a riding
mower), nor too irrational or overinvolved to confuse Alfredo's case
with his own. And yet once he said it, I seriously expected Cuddy to
matter-of-factly say, "Yeah," without shrinking. She's never cut House
the least bit of slack for being a cripple before. I can't buy either
character in that scene.
Yeah, I got what they were aiming at with the black blood pressure
medicine. House's point was that he'll lie to anyone if it will be
better for them medically, so he's a jerk, not a racist. But Foreman's
point was -- or should have been -- that if you lie to people who have a
history of being lied to, it's going to have a different effect from
lying to people who don't. (We know that the people in nominal charge
of this show are familiar with the Tuskegee study, because it was
referenced in the pilot.) Before this season, I would have given House
credit for understanding the problem better and I would have given
Foreman credit for articulating the problem better. As it was, they
both came off as dumber than usual and missing the mark somewhat.
CUDDY: I graduated medical school at twenty-five, pissed off
that I was second in my class. Chief of medicine at
thirty-two. Second youngest ever. First woman.
Do they advance by assassination at Princeton-Plainsboro? Not that
Cuddy hasn't been a good administrator up until this episode, but when
did she have time to prove that she knew her way around medicine before
she was promoted? Foreman should be close to 32 by now, and he's still
completing fellowship training.
HOUSE: Endocarditis. His heart's infected. Little bacteria
cauliflowers clinging to his valves.
The Levaquin wouldn't have had an effect on the endocarditis?
I should be all gooey over the revelation that House speaks Spanish
(although every native-born American I've ever met who could read
Portuguese could also at least read Spanish, so it wasn't a huge
stretch), but once it becomes difficult to buy into the bad parts of the
writing, it also becomes difficult to buy into the good parts of the
writing. Laurie's delivery was convincing, though.
If I were running an illegal Mexican cockfight (muchos Chicanos in
southern New Jersey, are there?) and I saw a black guy and an Anglo
white woman coming in together, I'd immediately assume they were
undercover cops. Bad ones, but cops just the same. Maybe that's just
me.
I couldn't help but feel that by the end of the episode, the only
stereotypical note they hadn't hit in the story of Alfredo's struggling
Latino family was that it would turn out that they were illegal aliens
all along and would be deported before they could file their lawsuit.
If the writers thought they had made some kind of point with Foreman's
speech against the benevolent white father looking out for minorities
who can't take care of themselves, they certainly undercut it with the
Alfredo plot, since he got himself into that mess with the bird disease
via illegal activity, made it worse by not reporting bird contact or
lack of renal output to his doctors, and it took the Great White
Father's medical expertise and the Great White Mother's largesse with
the insurance company's money to bail Alfredo out of his own stubborn
mistakes.
And while I'm on the subject of the writers' left hands taking away what
their right hands giveth, I can understand having one female character
who tosses reason and professional discipline out the window to indulge
in groundless emotion, particularly when she's young and House seems
determined to beat it out of her. But doing the same thing to the
supposedly more mature female character, who's in a position of
responsibility that she achieved despite her unusual age and gender (a
fact that they expositionally shoved in our faces)? How could Cuddy
have possibly risen to where she is today if she's such a basket case
every time something goes wrong on her watch? Yet more mixed messages,
and a sad tearing down of the character to my eyes.
You know, I kind of miss Mark. (You remember Mark? Mr. Stacy?) But I
guess he's not necessary for the plot until there's the implication of
romantic sparks flying between House and Stacy. And speaking of a lack
of same ... except for a couple of comments here and there, I think they
could have had any hospital lawyer take Stacy's place in the story and
not lose anything. That's an extremely strange use of that particular
guest character.
HOUSE: Cuddy. Your guilt. It's perverse and it makes you a
crappy doctor. It also makes you O.K. at what you do.
CUDDY: You figure a perverted sense of guilt makes me a good
boss.
HOUSE: Now, would the world be a better place if people never
felt guilty? Makes sex better. [Points at Stacy.]
Should have seen her in the last months of our
relationship. Lot of guilt, lot of screaming. I know
this wasn't just because it was your roof. Cuddy, you
see the world as it is and you see the world as it could
be, and what you don't see is what everybody else sees:
the giant gaping chasm in between.
CUDDY: House, I'm not naive. I realize --
HOUSE: If you did, you never would have hired me. You're not
happy unless things are just right. Which means two
things: you're a good boss and you'll never be happy. By
the way, why does everybody think you and I had sex?
Think there could be something to it?
Personally, I can't see where irrational guilt would be an advantageous
trait in a hospital administrator. (Nor in anyone else, for that
matter, but especially not in someone who holds a position of measured
responsibility.) I cannot extract a sensible through-thread from
House's speech. Either we're supposed to believe that House is
consciously spinning bullshit in order to give Cuddy a backhanded boost,
or else -- and this is where my money is -- once again, the writers have
encumbered the character with their intellectual deficiencies. They
should have stuck with the supremacy of patient care, the one issue on
which House and Cuddy have usually found their most committed common
ground: a simple, practical recognition that without Cuddy constantly
running interference for House, he'd be brilliant but hamstrung, because
no one would hire him unless he reined himself in and licensing boards
would be all over his ass if he pulled that shit in private practice.
That's not guilt. That's just the unsung but valuable work of the
offensive lineman.
Character discontinuity. Cuddy has previously been portrayed as the
realist, the pragmatist, the compromiser, and that's why the hospital
supposedly keeps running (though perilously close to running into the
ground when she closed her eyes to what Vogler represented). Far from
torturing herself over the world not being the way it should be, Cuddy
has previously been the one who could most easily accept that things
aren't always going to be perfect. She was satisfied with all manner of
compromises to keep Vogler's money, including getting rid of House for
nonmedical, power-struggling reasons, until Vogler started going after
other doctors as well. Even at the very end of the Vogler arc, she was
still insisting that it was really all House's fault for just not
getting along with the guy and she accepted no personal culpability for
any of it.
Double character discontinuity. Well, in the first place, House doesn't
give pep talks, not even ones riddled with insults. Trying to make him
lovable just makes him annoying. Second, if he were going to give a pep
talk, he wouldn't want an audience present. Third, the character who
came closest in the past to fitting House's analysis above was House
himself. "Just because you don't know what the right answer is -- maybe
there's even no way you could know what the right answer is -- doesn't
make your answer right or even O.K. It's much simpler than that. It's
just plain wrong." That would seem to assume blame even for things that
were beyond anyone's ability to diagnose. Fourth, if this was supposed
to make us believe that Cuddy hired House because of guilt after the
infarction, then the old House wouldn't have a shred of respect for her.
Fifth, it doesn't seem consistent for the guy who once complained about
people being ashamed of sex to now say that guilt improves sex. I also
preferred the contrast in last season's version of House, who would
sexually harass Cameron until she got serious and then he suddenly shut
up, got private, and refused to dish even to Wilson before or after The
Date despite the fact that nothing actually happened. As strange as
it seemed, when things got serious, he'd manifest some form of sexual
ethics. This new version of House, who cares nothing for either his
privacy or his ex-lover's and will crack wise about his actual sex life
with that woman in the presence of others, is just an overgrown frat
boy.
Triple character discontinuity. Up until now, Stacy has been
represented as completely unrepentant about overriding House's decision
to not surgically treat his leg. Now she's supposed to have been
riddled with guilt over it in the last months of their relationship?
Yeah, theoretically, that could have been just a wholly invented joke on
House's part, but as recently as "Honeymoon," House hasn't shown any
sense of humor on the subject whatsoever.
Perversely, taking the emphasis off the medical mystery plot and putting
it on the characters has been detrimental to the characterization.
I couldn't believe that not once in all of Cuddy's ham-fisted attempts
to treat someone she knew (major no-no), was it ever mentioned exactly
which medical specialty she trained in. Is she supposed to have been a
practicing diagnostician back in the day and that's why she was beating
herself up over her failure to diagnose Alfredo? (Dubious, since she
told House, "*You're* the diagnostician.") And if not, could anyone
have immediately leapt to the right conclusion about the psittacosis,
even infectious disease specialists (like House) that have been "real
doctors" for the past ten years? Are we supposed to believe that Cuddy
was such a basket case that she went into administration as an
alternative to slitting her wrists over the patients she couldn't save?
She's never seemed that unstable before. The plotting and the
characterization here felt like fanfiction.
So the hospital is just going to throw tons of money at a bizarrely
misplaced case of liberal guilt on Cuddy's say-so without a peep from
the ace hospital lawyer, because the guy with the bird disease is just
lucky enough to know the hospital administrator. Since when are
insurance companies cool with paying out just to make their clients'
acquaintances' lives easier? No matter. An implausible six-figure
bandaid at a really stupid insurance company's expense allows us to just
breeze on by to the topic that everyone knows the episode was *really*
about: teasing the House/Cuddy 'shippers. Hinting at once and future
soap is more important than taking the subject matter seriously.
HOUSE: It's raining.
We're having another State the Obvious Contest? This character was a
lot better when he stared out his window and said, "Beautiful organ
donor weather." I don't get House's last scene. Was he supposed to be
moping because he had the same guilt over not diagnosing psittacosis
earlier too, but he was just better at hiding it? Because this episode
went from being subtle like a kick in the head to suddenly being
downright cryptic. Not so very long ago, the writers would strike a
happy medium all the way through an episode between writing on the nose
and being oblique.
The closing song lyrics were different in the closed captions:
Yesterday I got lost in the circus
Feeling like such a mess
Now I'm down just hanging on the corner
I can't help but reminisce
I know we all
All got our faults
We get
Locked in our vaults
And we stay
But when you're gone
All the colors fade
When you're gone
No New Year's Day parade
You're gone, colors seem to fade
The lyrics actually sung, as best I could make out:
In my ?
We are alone
Nobody's watching
I might take you home
So I just fill my sorrows
With the words you borrow
From the only place you've known
And why'd you say hallelujah
If it means nothing to you?
why'd you save(?) me(?) me(?) at(?) all(?)
If anyone has better ears, have at.
Are lollipops just more family-friendly for a broadcast network than
Vicodin? Because I can remember seeing the former, but not the latter
this time, which I'm pretty sure is a first for the series.
Damn. I know all good things come to an end, but I was hoping to get at
least another season at the same level of quality as the last. This
season is a mess. It feels more like a remake of _House_ using a
similar premise, but reinterpreted through the eyes of a different set
of writers. It's not a different set, though. There are some new
names, but most of the writer-producers from last season are still in
the opening credits. I don't know what's gotten into them.
-Micky
--
STAR: Once hit shows become hits, they -- and this is a
terrible thing to say, but it's actually true -- they don't
really have to be good anymore. But in the first and second
season, it's got to be really great, because you've got to,
like, grab that audience. And that audience, once they're
there --
INTERVIEWER: The bar comes down?
STAR: They're just sticking around. Yeah, they're just happy
to see those characters every week.
-- Darren Star, TV writer/producer, interviewed on _Face Time_
Alan Pollock
> Disjoint observations on the 9/27/05 episode. Spoilers abound.
Thank you for an excellent review. My conclusions are the same as yours. Nex
Jeremy Billones
In article <dhi1l5$j4b$1...@pcls4.std.com>,
Micky DuPree <MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply> wrote:
>I guess it's official. First-season House is virtually gone. One
>episode could be a blip. Two could be a coincidence. Three is a
>pattern. What's David Shore *really* doing with his time these days?
>Got a new project in the works? 'Cause I can barely feel his presence
>this season.
I think that the running subplot of House losing grip strength in his
hands might be Shore's baby. Otherwise, no idea.
--
Jeremy Billones
"It's a place used the world over where people can come together to bitch about
movies and share pornography together." This is a much more sophisticated idea
of the Net than we find in high-tech cyberthrillers, where the Net is a place
that makes your computer beep a lot. - Roger Ebert on "Jay & Silent Bob..."
khal...@netzero.com
> Disjoint observations on the 9/27/05 episode. Spoilers abound.
>
> .
> .
> .
> .
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>
<highly respectful snippage>
>
> Are lollipops just more family-friendly for a broadcast network than
> Vicodin? Because I can remember seeing the former, but not the latter
> this time, which I'm pretty sure is a first for the series.
>
That bugged me, too. I kept thinking about Kojak.
>
> Damn. I know all good things come to an end, but I was hoping to get at
> least another season at the same level of quality as the last. This
> season is a mess. It feels more like a remake of _House_ using a
> similar premise, but reinterpreted through the eyes of a different set
> of writers. It's not a different set, though. There are some new
> names, but most of the writer-producers from last season are still in
> the opening credits. I don't know what's gotten into them.
Actually, I was afraid of this. It's what happens when a well-written,
quirky show becomes a hit. The same thing happened to Joan of Arcadia
- went way downhill in the second season in an attempt to attract
*more* viewers, oddly enough. Or change the demographic, or something.
It's what happens when networks take notice of a show instead of just
letting it alone.
The best thing that can happen to a good show is actually mediocre
ratings - just enough to stay on the air, but not so good as to attract
network tinkering. "Life Goes On" is my favorite example of this.
It's still too early to give up on House, but this episode was so lame
it scares me.
Kate
John Gilmer
> Actually, I was afraid of this. It's what happens when a well-written,
> quirky show becomes a hit. The same thing happened to Joan of Arcadia
> - went way downhill in the second season in an attempt to attract
> *more* viewers, oddly enough. Or change the demographic, or something.
> It's what happens when networks take notice of a show instead of just
> letting it alone.
I think "they" are just putting too much into each episode. It's
interesting to have sub-plots and they make watching the same episode
several times interesting (like The Simpsons) but in the case of House, they
consumed enough plot lines to keep half a season going.
The revelations about Cuddy could have fueled two shows: one with her guilt
and her failure to keep up her skills as a "real doctor." Another with her
truly private life as revealed in the search of her home by House.
Likewise, the differences between "black" medicine and "Republican" medicine
could have fueled a complete episode.
If he actually see those sub-plots turned into episodes now, we will think:
"I've seen that before, haven't I?"
mary
khal...@netzero.com wrote:
> Micky DuPree wrote:
> > Disjoint observations on the 9/27/05 episode. Spoilers abound.
> >
> > .
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> > .
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>
> <highly respectful snippage>
>
> >
> > Are lollipops just more family-friendly for a broadcast network than
> > Vicodin? Because I can remember seeing the former, but not the latter
> > this time, which I'm pretty sure is a first for the series.
> >
>
> That bugged me, too. I kept thinking about Kojak.
>
Could those be morphine lollipops? I have never seen one, but my friend
(who legitimately needs them) has told me they exist.
Patty Winter
>> Disjoint observations on the 9/27/05 episode. Spoilers abound.
>>
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>>
>
><highly respectful snippage>
>
>>
>> Are lollipops just more family-friendly for a broadcast network than
>> Vicodin? Because I can remember seeing the former, but not the latter
>> this time, which I'm pretty sure is a first for the series.
>
>That bugged me, too. I kept thinking about Kojak.
FWIW, I just watched Ep. 2 of the series last night, and House was
sucking on a lollipop. So it wasn't just this season.
Patty
The Next SCOTUS Nominee, Ian J. Ball
pat...@wintertime.com (Patty Winter) wrote:
Also, wasn't it Micky who pointed out that many new episodes "expose" a
new "obsession" of House's. Maybe this epie's was just lollipops?...
--
CNN, FNC, MSNBC - I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP!!
"It is a decision of the Supreme Court... So this is almost
as if God has spoken." - Nancy Pelosi (on KELO), 06/30/05
http://homepage.mac.com/ijball/TV-Blog/