House, 2/14/2006 SPOILERS POSSIBLE
Laddy
part. It came nowhere close to "Three Stories" or "Autopsy" in writing,
direction, or acting. Given the direction the show is taking, I won't be
surprised if ratings decline. There is less and less screen presence for the
young docs and Cuddy. Instead it's just a vehicle to demonstrate the
immature, selfish, craven, self-destructive personality of House. I get it.
You don't need to continue to hit me over the head with a two-by-four every
10 minutes. I think it's safe to say that in most real worlds, House would
no longer be practicing medicine, given his antics. They are seriously
overplaying the personal side of House and if they continue, it's going to
end up biting them in the ass. Also, they are trying to get Ward (Stacy)
back for the last two episodes. Great. I thought we were through with the
shrew. /rant off
Jack Bauer's Spunky Sidekick, Ian J. Ball
"Laddy" <laddybo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> This episode was touted as a must see. I thought it sucked for the most
> part.
I agree. They really seem to be taking the House character places I'd
just as soon not go.
> ...There is less and less screen presence for the
> young docs and Cuddy. Instead it's just a vehicle to demonstrate the
> immature, selfish, craven, self-destructive personality of House. I get it.
No kidding. This episode, even The Three Dwarves came off looking a lot
better than House.
When that happens, you've got problems.
> ...I think it's safe to say that in most real worlds, House would
> no longer be practicing medicine, given his antics.
Totally. At the least, he should be suspended after this episode.
> They are seriously
> overplaying the personal side of House and if they continue, it's going to
> end up biting them in the ass.
Agreed.
(And Ian's perennial complaint: WHERE are the clinic stories?!?!!)
> Also, they are trying to get Ward (Stacy)
> back for the last two episodes. Great. I thought we were through with the
> shrew. /rant off
That's terrible news.
With "House", I just have to hope that it rebounds in season #3, after a
relatively atrocious season #2....
Ian (After all, even "The O.C." has managed to come back somewhat from
the trainwreck that was the second-half of season #2. (But, then again -
"One Tree Hill"? Not so much...))
--
"Relax. He's really good at this." - Chloe O'Brian, about Jack Bauer
"24", 01/15/06
MrBud...@aol.com
(Irony mode) Nice to see Dr. House taking Dr. Wilson's advice, in the
form of the young lady who shows up at House's door at the end of the
episode.
I take it it's significant that the young woman appeared to be of South
Asian (more specifically, Indian) descent?
Callen Molenda
<ijball***SPAM-No***@mac.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:ijball***SPAM-No***-4702D9.091...@news-lb-01.socal.rr.com...
> In article <peudnQmf3ag...@comcast.com>,
> "Laddy" <laddybo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This episode was touted as a must see. I thought it sucked for the most
> > part.
> > They are seriously
> > overplaying the personal side of House and if they continue, it's going
to
> > end up biting them in the ass.
>
> Agreed.
I like the character so much that I never thought I'd hear myself
complaining about too much House, but the way they're handling it just weird
and uncomfortable.
> (And Ian's perennial complaint: WHERE are the clinic stories?!?!!)
The writers seem to have totally lost interest in that aspect of the show in
their quest to bring us more soap opera storylines.
> > Also, they are trying to get Ward (Stacy)
> > back for the last two episodes. Great. I thought we were through with
the
> > shrew. /rant off
>
> That's terrible news.
Ditto, but again, I don't hate the character as much as I hate the story
line. It's a freaking mess.
> With "House", I just have to hope that it rebounds in season #3, after a
> relatively atrocious season #2....
Your lips to ....
Micky DuPree
In article <peudnQmf3ag...@comcast.com>, "Laddy"
<laddybo...@hotmail.com> writes:
: This episode was touted as a must see.
Well, none of them are ever touted as "You can skip this one if you have
a taping conflict." ;)
: I thought it sucked for the most part.
"Me too."
: Given the direction the show is taking, I won't be surprised if
: ratings decline.
The _American Idol_ lead-in won't last forever, but I do expect that the
series is picking up some new viewers in the meantime because of it, so
I expect the post-_Idol_ ratings for _House_ to be higher than the pre-
_Idol_ ratings. (Of course, the writers will probably assume the
ratings mean that they're doing their best work ever.)
I'd be surprised if the ratings for _House_ go into significant decline
before late third season at the earliest. Once an audience builds, it
usually takes at least a season for content-related attrition to be
felt. Stunt ratings may respond to advance hype, but overall long-term
baseline ratings tend to reflect the accumulated buzz, boredom, or
disillusionment of at least an entire season, if not two. How many
people continue to hang on in dogged hope that "Surely it will have to
get better soon now that X, Y, or X plot line is over"? I myself am
grieving for the House of old, dead and never to return, but letting go
is just so hard.
In the meantime, new viewers tune in to see what all the buzz is about,
and some of them, who may not have given the first season of _House_ the
time of day, will not only like the current fare, but prefer it to
first-season _House_ reruns. By the end of the third season, the fandom
will have split into "new episodes better" vs. "old episodes better"
factions, and the newer viewers may even be more numerous.
I don't mind ceding the future of _House_ to them at this point since I
haven't expected to build castles with it ever since I saw incompetent
Cuddy in "Humpty Dumpty" and jealous-of-attention House in "TB or Not
TB." But what finally saddens me is that there will undoubtedly be new
viewers who would like the first season if they saw it, but who will
take one or two looks at the second season and be permanently put off of
ever trying the older episodes in syndication or on DVD. And who can
blame them at this point? I wouldn't bother investigating further if
"Distractions" had been my first-ever _House_ episode either.
: Instead it's just a vehicle to demonstrate the immature, selfish,
: craven, self-destructive personality of House. I get it. You don't
: need to continue to hit me over the head with a two-by-four every 10
: minutes.
I don't like House, I don't admire him, I don't find him sympathetic,
and I can't even pity him. Revisionist House is just a loser. He used
to be a mixed bag of both good and irritating traits. Now about all he
has going for him is extensive medical knowledge, and even that is
something the writers fiat for him. Almost all the adults I grew up
with smoked cigarettes. Not a single one of them ever got a cigarette
burn like the Burn Kid had on his wrist. It looked deliberate to me. I
immediately thought it was self-induced, meaning there was going to be
some sort of self-mutilation angle, or that one of the parents had
abused him. The writers didn't even bother to have House exclude these
diagnoses. They're telling me, "House is just right, damnit. He's
defined as right. Look up 'right' in the dictionary and House's picture
will be snarling at you. To hell with facts and probabilities."
It'll likely be a popular episode in the fandom at large, though,
because of the multiple shock-value pieces. House stalked an old
grudge! House dropped acid! House in the shower! House in a towel!
House curled up on the floor! Aw, poor schnookums! House got a hooker!
Feh.
I can watch and even be riveted by much more morally repugnant
characters than House, such as Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey. However,
not only do they have definite and intriguing codes of conduct and a web
of interesting ties to other people, but I also hope they end up either
dead or in prison. The writers for House have completely undercut his
code of conduct without acknowledging that this is a change. Since his
ties to other people have been kept deliberately tenuous and the medical
plots have holes, that doesn't leave him with a whole lot else of
substance, just a growing bag of empty quirks.
: I think it's safe to say that in most real worlds, House would no
: longer be practicing medicine, given his antics.
No kidding. I used to could tell myself that Cuddy was the enabling
conceit for House to do what he does, because Cuddy would keep at least
a partial leash on him when she dealt with him, but then turn around and
shield him and defend him to the outside world and the other hospital
departments. But with Cuddy now permanently at risk for turning into a
fretting ninny who seems to have conceded most of her judgment to
House's brilliance, I can't buy her as an effective shield for him,
because in the real world, there's no effing way Cuddy would become a
Dean of Medicine/hospital administrator at any age, much less be the
youngest ever.
: They are seriously overplaying the personal side of House and if they
: continue, it's going to end up biting them in the ass.
I really don't think that's the problem per se. I think that better
writers could take the same story outline and make it compelling. House
was always a jerk. He described himself as a jerk in the pilot. But he
used to have a rationale behind what he did. Now the writers have just
picked up on the "jerk" angle and run with it. In fact, they seem to
think it's cool to make him a gratuitous jerk. When he told the kid in
"Need to Know," "I'm not sad. I'm complicated," I think we were being
given the clue that the kid was right and House was dead wrong. He's
not complicated. He's just sad. But he used to be pretty damn
complicated, at least compared to the norm.
I even have some difficulty buying into the idea that House is
miserable. No, he hasn't seemed happy this season except for his
post-adultery scenes last episode, but he has seemed satisfied with his
work and engaged with life, which is more than a lot of people manage.
I don't see where arch-nudzh Wilson has all that much more going for him
in his life. This miserable-by-fiat business is running counter to the
way Laurie is playing the character. (I don't mean up on the roof after
Stacy left, but just in general in the second season while Wilson kept
telling him how much happier dying cancer kids were than he was.)
: Also, they are trying to get Ward (Stacy) back for the last two
: episodes.
For a quickie? My god, the fun just never stops, does it?
-Micky
khal...@netzero.com
> Spoilers for "Distractions," 2/14/06.
<deeply respectful snippage>
I didn't see it. I got involved playing Puzzle Pirates and lost track
of time. Now I'm glad I did, but still curious (kinda like a
train-wreck or other disaster).
So "House" is effectively dead, then, I take it?
Kate
Jack Bauer's Spunky Sidekick, Ian J. Ball
khal...@netzero.com wrote:
No yet. At least in my book. I'll give them until season #3 to turn it
around.
But if next year keeps up the lousiness of season #2, I'll probably drop
"House" from my 'Must See' list.
Micky DuPree
the season.
.
.
.
In article <1140195400.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
khal...@netzero.com writes:
: I didn't see it. I got involved playing Puzzle Pirates and lost track
: of time. Now I'm glad I did, but still curious (kinda like a
: train-wreck or other disaster).
If I could divorce my old expectations from my viewing, I'm sure I could
get more out of the experience. If I could treat this as the remake or
"re-imagining" of _House_ (which is, de facto, what it's coming off as),
I could sit more peacefully and just shake my head about how the
original was better. But damnit, I had hoped for at least a second good
season and I STILL can't figure out why this has happened. As House has
said, "Anomalies bug me."
Add to that the potential casting spoiler and it's that much more crazy-
making. Every time they've tried to rekindle the House/Stacy thing this
season it's been baked dead horse, fried dead horse, grilled dead horse,
dead horse sushi, Swedish dead horse meatballs, _pate' de cheval mort_,
Cajun blackened dead horse, toasted campfire dead horse 'smores, and now
they want to make dead horse soup to flog the last bit of marrow out of
old Dobbin's bones. Gak! It's like they took a meeting to determine
what was the worst thing they could do for the rest of the season. For
some reason they tossed aside the top two contenders -- have House kill
a man for no reason and sexually molest a patient -- and went with
trying to bring Stacy back.
: So "House" is effectively dead, then, I take it?
If you mean the character with a strong, coherent, if complex,
utilitarian ethical foundation, yes, and that was his biggest single
draw for me. If you mean the show where they put together intellectual
puzzles that could at least seem plausible to a layman, yes as well.
Or as a friend of mine suggested for the revised _House_ drinking game:
Drink every time House does something immoral for reasons of
personal gratification or ease.
I'm trying to remember House doing that in the first season. The one
running gag on that theme was House ducking clinic duty, and we know
that he considers clinic duty to be beneath his level of skill, and that
he therefore haughtily doesn't consider it wrong to duck out of it. I
disagree with him on that, but it's at least a coherent ethical position
based on what he thinks he does contribute. This season, House does
things that he knows are wrong but he just doesn't care, as when he
demonstrated to Cameron how he could play the cripple card when he
crushed the clinic patient's foot. Or as he once said to Wilson, "I'm
not terminal, merely pathetic. You wouldn't believe the crap people let
me get away with." It's as if the current writers watched the first
season and took away from it, "O.K., simple. House is unethical. Got
it."
I'm sure there has to be at least one such immoral instance in the first
season as well. House wasn't a saint. But nothing comes readily to
mind. Barring the whole clinic-duty struggle between him and Cuddy,
almost all of House's ethical shenanigans in the first season were in
the service of his own twisted approach to either patient care,
mentoring, or friendship. This season, House does unethical things just
because he feels like it. The fact that the other characters don't
comment on it -- and I don't mean Wilson saying, "You shouldn't do
this," but someone telling House, "This isn't like you" -- means that
it's a retcon. We're not meant to believe that this is a new thing, but
that he's been this way all along, though maybe getting more exaggerated
now because skidding out of control is meant to be his response to
losing Stacy again. Why he was able to keep it together after he lost
his thigh muscle AND Stacy, but can't keep it together now, is just
one of those questions we're not supposed to ask.
Drink every time you spot something wrong with the medical
mystery.
The medicine has always been fast and loose, but spotting it used to be
a game for the health-care professionals or people who like to google.
It used to be a *lot* harder for a layman to pick off the gaffes without
aid. In the first season, I spotted only one really big crappy medical
plot from a layman's standpoint, in "Poison." But there have been
several instances in the second season when the medical mysteries didn't
add up, sometimes because the medicine is really that bad, and sometimes
because the writers' thinking is slipshod, with the result that the
thinking of the vaunted House and his handpicked proteges comes off as
slipshod as well. There's no way to suspend my disbelief through
something that's aimed at adults but plotted at a twelve-year-old level.
Drink every time another character tells House he's miserable.
Drink twice if they say he's making himself miserable.
rantrantbitchbitchmoan
-Micky
George W Harris
:
:(Irony mode) Nice to see Dr. House taking Dr. Wilson's advice, in the
That, or she just has a really deep tan. Actress's
name is Kristen Pate, which doesn't sound particularly
Indian, not that that means a whole lot. She appeared in
an episode of "The O.C." last year.
--
e^(i*pi)+1=0
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
record...@gmail.com
Jack Bauer's Spunky Sidekick, Ian J. Ball wrote:
> Ian (After all, even "The O.C." has managed to come back somewhat from
> the trainwreck that was the second-half of season #2.
I am loving the OC again, esp. Julie Cooper Nichol living in a trailer
with her girls. And the Seth v. Summer for the single place at Brown
story. I had gotten to hate it, but not anymore. Seth is so...Seth-y,
and Julie is so Julie-y. Ryan's almost peripheral. Mischa Barton is one
of the most beautiful people alive.
{©¿©}
Laddy wrote:
snips
> Instead it's just a vehicle to demonstrate the immature, selfish, craven, self-destructive
> personality of House.
What's your point : ) Seriously, unlike most of you I find House's
spiral downward rollicking good entertainment though one of my biggiest
gripes would be not enough screen time for my sweet baboo Lisa
Edelstein. I am continually entertained by the Gilmore Girl like
complex medical jargon that the docs espouse in rapid order. I like
skinny doc girl's love/ hate relationship with House though if truth be
told I think that she is getting rapidly so over him. I would have
liked to have seen House mini stroke out with all the drugs that he was
taking in the last ep and one of my other gripes would be that House is
not mistaken enough and I do not mean minor mid ep errors but Great
Googly Moogly blunders. House for me is still one of the few remaining
network shows that are worth the price of admission.
Chelsea Christenson
"Micky DuPree" <MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply> wrote in message
news:dt6ga3$ecq$1...@pcls4.std.com...
> Spoilers for "Distractions," 2/14/06, and a casting rumor for the end of
> the season.
>
> .
> .
> .
>
> In article <1140195400.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> khal...@netzero.com writes:
>
> : So "House" is effectively dead, then, I take it?
>
> If you mean the character with a strong, coherent, if complex,
> utilitarian ethical foundation, yes, and that was his biggest single
> draw for me.
What I liked was evidence of rigorous thought processes. House would say
something more or less outrageous, and sometimes he would explain himself
enough that you could see the analysis he did to get there. Now, House
doesn't say outrageous things because he's a deep and original thinker; he
says outrageous things because he's a rebel and rebels are cool.
Micky DuPree
Christenson" <nob...@nowhere.com> writes:
: "Micky DuPree" <MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply> wrote in message
: news:dt6ga3$ecq$1...@pcls4.std.com...
:: In article <1140195400.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
:: khal...@netzero.com writes:
::: So "House" is effectively dead, then, I take it?
::
:: If you mean the character with a strong, coherent, if complex,
:: utilitarian ethical foundation, yes, and that was his biggest single
:: draw for me.
:
: What I liked was evidence of rigorous thought processes. House would
: say something more or less outrageous, and sometimes he would explain
: himself enough that you could see the analysis he did to get there.
Oh yeah, I loved that it was written right into the script how House
taught the fellows why Occam's Razor is a conceptual convenience, not a
law of nature or mathematics. A lot of educated people get taught
Occam's Razor, take it on faith, and don't work out its logical
weaknesses for themselves, as when Foreman insisted that his single-
illness theory had to be better than House's two-illness theory in
"Occam's Razor" just by virtue of being simpler.
HOUSE: Each one of these conditions is about a thousand-to-one
shot. That means that any two of them happening at the
same time is a million-to-one shot. Chase says
[Foreman's] cardiac infection [theory] is a ten-million-
to-one shot, which makes my idea ten times better than
[Foreman's]. Get a calculator, run the numbers.
The closest they've come to something like that in the second season was
when House told Wilson that Dying Cancer Kid "won the lottery twice" in
"Autopsy," and the intellectual rigor has been getting steadily more
flaccid ever since.
Even when they used to screw up, it was usually the kind of mistake that
they could have recovered from with some dialogue tweaking (like
attributing the screwup in "Paternity" to lack of parental disclosure,
when it should have been attributed to mistaken parental disclosure).
I'm usually inclined to be generous about things like that because I
figure they were under deadline pressure. But now in "Distractions" we
get a teenager with cigarette burns and nicotine stains that my mother
never manifested in 40 years of smoking. There's no way to bug-patch
that with a minor rewrite. Or even worse, when House stumbled blindly
into the final solution in "Deception" by sitting in the patient's bed,
and yet, like the dumbed-down Cuddy, we're obviously supposed to still
be convinced of his Sherlockian brilliance because he got lucky.
: Now, House doesn't say outrageous things because he's a deep and
: original thinker ...
E.g., from "The Socratic Method" (which I'm still working on because the
real world keeps intruding):
HOUSE: We don't even know how to treat it. Come on.
Fumigation of the vagina?
WILSON: A little louder. I don't think everyone heard you.
HOUSE: Two thousand years ago, that's how Galen treated
schizophrenics. The Marcus Welby of ancient Greece.
WILSON: Oh, clearly you're not interested.
HOUSE: Oh, I'm interested. I'm interested in how voices in the
head could be caused by malposition of the uterus.
WILSON: There's a better place for it?
HOUSE: And now what do we got? We got lobotomies, rubber
rooms, electric shocks. My, Galen was so primitive.
: ... he says outrageous things because he's a rebel and rebels are
: cool.
E.g., contrast this from "TB or Not TB":
HOUSE: Well, there was this gal I met in `Nam who could blow out
a candle without using her --
An overlap in subject matter, but not in substance. I suspect that the
official line on what House is these days was proclaimed in "Deception":
FOREMAN: [House is] an anarchist.
The closest formal description I could make of House in the first season
was not an anarchist, but a Platonic philosopher-king, who thought he
knew better than the common man what was best for him. (Since the
subject in question was usually medicine, he was usually right, but his
screwups were all the more fun because of his arrogant presumption.)
House is still not an anarchist this season (the comparison is an insult
to real anarchists), since he's perfectly happy for *other* people to be
bound by rules. He's gone from being a mostly harmless 13-year-old brat
part of the time (monster trucks, sexual innuendo with colleagues who
snap back at him, playing duck-the-principal with Cuddy) to being a
malicious 13-year-old brat almost all of the time and bushwhacking
people (revenge for an ancient injury in which he was in the wrong,
putting Cuddy's professional reputation on the line with his petty
scheming, leering at an underaged molestation victim, adultery, theft,
even battery). We get House telling us that the proper interpretation
of the Golden Rule is "an eye for an eye." Jesus Christ (not to put too
fine a point on it), even if you don't agree with the Golden Rule, you'd
have to be an idiot to come up with that interpretation. However, the
writing formula is characterization-by-proclamation this season, so I
expect that the writers are sticking with the "anarchist" theory. I
doubt they could even find the word in the dictionary.
"DNR" is on USA tomorrow night. That House broke a lot of rules too,
but the difference between him and the current one is like night and
day.
-Micky