HOUSE, M.D.: 31. "Deception"
Micky DuPree
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This took me a lot longer than usual. Ordinarily, I don't get too put
out by questionable medical points as long as they're internally
consistent. I'll make an open query as an educated layman just out of
curiosity, but if they say that drug A cures disease B, then fine, as
long as they don't say the opposite in another episode or forget all
about drug A the next time disease B is mentioned. But there was so
much that just didn't make sense in "Deception" purely from a
methodological standpoint, that I slowed down and transcribed almost
every single medical discussion to make sure that the problem was them,
not me.
There were some really funny lines in this episode, but the particulars
of the antagonism between the characters made them look stupid and
amnesiac, which faults really lay with the writers. Michael R. Perry
was the credited writer, and I'm pretty sure that's a new name.
Christmas tree at the OTB, candy canes and stockings in the Diagnostics
office, poinsettia in Cuddy's office, Christmas lights around the
nurses' stations, Charlie Brown music at the end. I think they were
trying to tell us something.
PROLOGUE
Sign on the betting shop window:
Lower Yardley
???
Presumably Yardley, Pennsylvania, just across the state line, because
New Jersey doesn't yet have off-track betting.
Gambling is the second thing that we've seen House spend his money on.
I wasn't sure how good at it we were supposed to think he is. He gave a
decent rationale for betting on a jockey, but by the end of the episode,
the onscreen score for diagnosing races seemed to be House:0, Anica:1.
House dressed down to go to the OTB: pea coat with a mismatched button,
dull-red canvas sneakers. (Canvas sneakers? When it's been snowing?)
The zebra literally had stripes this week.
ACT I
I had trouble with the chronology on this one. The action opened with
House and Anica at the OTB shop betting on daylight races in real time
at Gulfstream Park in Florida when it seemed to be dark outside the
shop. But they ended up at the hospital when it was twilight and House
was wearing the same clothes. The easiest explanation is that the color
timing on the exterior shot of the OTB shop was darker than it should
have been.
I assume that the Christmas decorations in the Diagnostics office were
all down to Cameron, who seems to be a self-styled atheist with a
sentimental attachment to Christmas commercialism.
HOUSE: Hot OTB babe has grand mal and inexplicable bruising.
I wonder why at no time did anyone suggest epilepsy (plus something else
for the bruising) even if only to dismiss it.
House took a Vicodin during the initial diagnostic conference.
CHASE: "Hot OTB babe"? Obviously a working girl. Probably an
STD, infection.
HOUSE: No fever, no infection.
FOREMAN: Alcohol abuse explains it all. Causes seizures and
affects the blood's ability to clot, which causes
bruising. Start her on heparin. She'll be fine by
morning.
FOREMAN: She's a regular at OTB. Somehow I don't see her
holding down a nine-to-five and going to PTA meetings.
Probably true, but how did Foreman know Anica was a regular at this
stage?
HOUSE: Cushing's. Explains the seizure and the bruising.
FOREMAN: Not the anemia.
HOUSE: So she doesn't eat a lot of meat.
Interestingly, while no one got the exact diagnosis right on the first
try, House immediately shot down Chase's idea of infection and dismissed
Foreman's concern over the anemia, both of which ended up being
relevant.
FOREMAN: DIC brought on by alcohol abuse is far more likely.
Usually it's House who's eager to shoot down potential zebras as horses
with delusions of grandeur. Here, Foreman played that role.
HOUSE: Whoa-oa. Did you just ever so subtly order me to get
her medical history?
FOREMAN: Cuddy put me in charge last week, so yeah.
This strongly implied that this was the first case that the Diagnostics
Dept. had handled since the previous week. Otherwise, the issue of just
how "pretend" the new power structure was would have arisen earlier.
This would also date the hearing of the disciplinary committee in "The
Mistake" as taking place approximately around Dec. 5, 2005 (see time
line note infra), despite internal indications in that episode that it
took place on roughly Nov. 11, 2005.
It was strange to me that the Cushing's in this episode had no overlap
of symptoms with the Cushing's in "Heavy."
On House's t-shirt:
[...]THVALL[E...]
CUDDY: [To House] Those licensing board folk love to play
dress-up and pretend.
I thought the disciplinary committee was strictly an internal hospital
matter. Why would House's case have gotten as far as the New Jersey
licensing board?
CUDDY: [To Foreman] If there's a screwup, it's your screwup.
You won't have Doctor House to fall back on.
I could have understood if Cuddy was merely making Foreman sign off on
everything that House did. That would just be Cuddy making Foreman do
the scut work of being her proxy. But when they said that Foreman was
genuinely in charge of the department, that seemed somehow off to me.
I'm not an expert on hospital hierarchy, but I thought that there were a
lot of hoops to jump through to be able to wield the power of an
attending physician, not just from the standpoint of not upsetting the
personnel organizational chart, but also from a legal and insurance
liability standpoint. If there was a screwup resulting in a lawsuit,
wouldn't the plaintiff's lawyer be able to make hay out of the fact that
a non-attending physician was filling an attending's role? Usually
Cuddy is very keen to reduce the hospital's exposure to liability.
ANICA: [Reading form] How about, um, "Were you vaccinated for
polio?" I think you gave me the form intended for FDR.
HOUSE: You really like Teeny Tiny Mo in the fifth?
ANICA: [Snatches back her racing picks.] I went four for six
yesterday. You want winners, cure me first.
lol.
ANICA: "Are you generally satisfied with your life?"
HOUSE: It does not ask that. [Takes history form. Reads.
Scoffs. Sets it aside]
House didn't take the medical history form seriously, and yet he's often
made diagnoses that hinged on stranger points of medical history than
the form was asking for. Is it really less important to know whether
the patient was vaccinated for polio than to know what the patient's cat
died of?
ANICA: You know, I was going to ask what a respectable doctor
was doing in an OTB parlor. Somehow the question doesn't
seem relevant anymore.
This along with the fact that Anica chose to have the seizure in front
of a doctor made me wonder if Anica had somehow targeted House, either
by figuring out he was a doctor when they were at the OTB, or even
finding out who he was and stalking him. (Kalvin managed to look him up
and stalk him in "Hunting," so it's demonstrably doable.) However, I
rewatched the prologue, looking specifically for any sign that she knew
what he did for a living, and didn't spot anything. I suppose she could
have just chosen the OTB as a crowded area where someone was sure to
dial 911, and realized House was a doctor only after he caught up with
her in the emergency room.
HOUSE: [To Anica] Came here without a job. That means you
didn't move here. You moved away from somewhere else.
I originally thought that was going to be significant, but it didn't pan
out.
HOUSE: [Presses her bruises.] Does that hurt?
ANICA: No.
HOUSE: Are you on prescription meds? Hormones? Prednisone?
ANICA: I already answered that one. I think it was question
number twenty-something.
HOUSE: Well, yeah, and I could reach down and get it, but that
would kind of spoil the whole cool move.
I guess we can't say that House was getting used to the idea of having
contact with a patient, since in this particular case we know that he
thought the patient was hot and he was actually flirting with her during
a physical exam. I was *really* surprised (and very let down) that none
of the other regulars pointed out that it was Dr. Gregory "Everybody
lies" House who was so insistent that Anica didn't have Munchausen's.
They could have even pointed out that he violated his own dictum about
not caring about the patient, so he was biased in favor of not wanting
her to be faking. "What, everybody lies except for patients you think
are hot?" But they didn't, because frankly, I think the writers missed
it too. As set up, this case should have been depicted as a major
stumble for House because he broke his own rules, but given Cuddy's
glowing testimonial at the end, it was treated as just another House
triumph in a series of same.
I wonder, had House actually completed the lumbar puncture, would that
have yielded any clue as to Anica's infection?
FOREMAN: Her initial symptoms could have been caused by alcohol-
induced DIC. She had a hypertensive crisis because
it's been at least six hours since she had her last
drink. She's detoxing.
HOUSE: At the exact same moment that I'm futilely trying to
give her an LP?
FOREMAN: Right, an invisible tumor on her pituitary is much more
likely.
CHASE: What if the tumor is somewhere else? There could be an
ACTH-secreting tumor on her lung or pancreas.
It's consistent that Foreman wouldn't have any sympathy for someone he
assumes is a member of the underclass who refuses to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps the way he did. What doesn't seem consistent is
that in "The Socratic Method," it was Chase who was determined to see
addiction even where there wasn't any, because his mother drank herself
to death. Now Chase was among those arguing against the idea. I think
they should have let Cameron be the one fighting the other two on this.
HOUSE: Get a pan-man scan before she dies of cortisol O.D.
[Mock-pleads with Foreman.] Please?
Man, that was funny.
CHASE: [To Cameron] Being in charge means having to say no to
House. Would you hire you for that?
Right on the nose.
The triumphant return of Grave Digger. Well, all one second of it.
FOREMAN: [To House] You ordered MRIs for the entire maternity
ward?
That was really beyond the pale. How many new parents did House scare
the shit out of with that one? And if House didn't have the power of an
attending, then how could he march in and order tests for patients that
weren't his in a completely different department? That just sounded all
wrong.
ACT II
CAMERON: [To Anica] Doctor Foreman's overseeing your case. He
thought it'd be best if I spoke with you.
Foreman picking Cameron to deliver the news about the probably terminal
nature of the pancreatic mass was a good decision. She's the one who's
needed the most practice in this area, and she finally seemed to have
that particular problem under control. However, given the writers'
performance in the rest of the episode, I couldn't tell whether this was
a point of characterization that they were deliberately closing the
chapter on, or if they simply forgot that Cameron was the one who had
trouble delivering terminal news.
CAMERON: But the bigger point is ... a one-year survival rate
for pancreatic cancer is less than twenty percent.
ANICA: So what's the treatment?
I'm not a psychiatrist, nor even a doctor, but this felt contrived. I'm
surprised that a Munchausen's patient who had been at it for a while
wouldn't be more skilled at giving the right kind of concerned response
to a terminal diagnosis than Anica was. Wouldn't being more distraught
get her more of the kind of attention that a Munchausen's patient would
want? And surely there are differential diagnoses for an undisturbed
affect. House thought it meant that Andie had a clot in her amygdala in
"Autopsy." Why not here?
WILSON: House assisting. That is funny. Too bad Foreman's
going to die.
LOL, but it underscored a problem that even characters who weren't
involved in the org chart rearrangement could anticipate. How effective
could Cuddy expect Foreman to be with the possibility of retribution at
the end of the month hanging over him?
FOREMAN: Anica's biopsy for pancreatic cancer was negative.
You're not really supposed to mention patients' names and medical
results together in front of other patients. Foreman ought to have
known better.
CAMERON: She's had zero symptoms since she got here.
Well, not entirely true since they eventually told us that the anemia
was constant.
CAMERON: [To Foreman] We should check her apartment, look for
medications, syringes.
HOUSE: Venous sampling's easier.
FOREMAN: And more dangerous.
HOUSE: Not if you get caught breaking in.
FOREMAN: So don't get caught -- House.
Funny in isolation, but if part of the point was supposed to be that
Foreman disapproves of House breaking the rules, then Foreman shouldn't
have sanctioned breaking-and-entering orders here even for revenge. No
one called him on it.
House's license plate:
New Jersey
Y91 07
MOTORCYCLE
I don't think they let Laurie and Morrison drive off on the bike. They
didn't let us see their faces once the bike was in motion.
HOUSE: How many hospitals have you contacted? Has one doctor
said she's crazy? It's not Munchausen's!
This REALLY didn't sound like House. For one thing, he has a history of
distrusting other doctors anyway. For another, surely a Munchausen's
patient sees multiple doctors for some time before finally being
detected. No, there was nothing conclusive about anything Cameron had
found up to this point, but neither was there anything to allow House to
so confidently exclude the diagnosis like this.
HOUSE: Of course! We're both right. Excellent solution.
Everybody's happy. C'mon, step up, Foreman. If you
think I'm right, order me to stick a needle in her
brain. If you think Cameron's right, send the patient
home. Either she'll be fine or she'll die.
This didn't make sense. Sending a Munchausen's patient home meant she'd
be fine? The ending to the episode indicated otherwise.
FOREMAN: Do the venous sampling. Get her consent. [Cameron
exits.]
HOUSE: Nice move, boss. Way to cover your ass.
FOREMAN: I just agreed with you.
HOUSE: Not because you think I'm right. You're just taking
the safe route. You're a wuss. Don't worry, your
secret's safe with me. [Enters hallway.] Hey Wilson!
Guess what Foreman just did.
Nice touch, Foreman actually looking to see what the Magic Eight Ball
said.
Overall, the medical story was scattershot, like almost all of them were
going off half-cocked. The Diagnostics office must have smelled like
urine from everyone except Chase pissing on the furniture to establish
territory. When House has been in charge, he has at least entertained
other theories and has been willing to run through more than one of
them. Here, it seemed like a contest to see who could make the right
guess first, and anyone who entertained another theory was nothing more
than a wuss who was playing it safe. In the past, the philosophical
arguments between House and Foreman over playing it safe have not been
about whether or not to test for more than one possible diagnosis, which
House has been entirely willing to do and Foreman has never previously
objected to. The "safety" argument has been over whether or not to
practice experimental, aggressive *treatment* in the absence of a
confirmed diagnosis, especially when all or part of that treatment is
counter to standard medical ethics.
So why all of a sudden was House acting like testing for more than one
diagnosis was wussy instead of his own standard operating procedure?
Why didn't Foreman (or Cameron or Chase) point out to House that he's
acted on contingency theories himself in the past? This idea that you
got only one guess, after which you had to treat and discharge or else
be called a wussy doctor, was counter to the entire practice of
differential diagnostics, and was a painful failure of the writing in
"Deception." Whoever's writing the series these days seems to have
watched "Damned If You Do" and "DNR," picked up on some vague notion of
the "safe" vs. "risky" antagonism between House and Foreman, and yet
managed to miss the actual substance of what the characters were arguing
over.
In "DNR," House didn't suggest a single one of the diagnoses he ended up
testing or treating for. Not one. He took Chase and Cameron's
differential diagnoses and pursued aggressive, experimental, and
unethical treatments for them, and THAT was what he and Foreman (and
Hamilton) clashed over. Arguably, they would have realized the original
diagnosis was wrong even if House had done nothing, since the patient's
paralysis was altered, not through anything that House did, but through
the unforeseen effects of the steroids that Foreman had prescribed for
the pneumonia. The thing that was admirable about House in that episode
wasn't his aggressive medicine (which was a poor first resort
considering he didn't even bother talking to the patient) nor even his
diagnostic brilliance (which was given a rest in that episode), but his
unwillingness to give in to a terminal diagnosis without double-checking
everything first, which the punch-the-clock Hamilton wasn't willing to
do.
Anyway, even if the scientific aspects of the medicine in "Deception"
were entirely accurate (and some things definitely felt questionable),
the *practice* of medicine felt really wrong and out of character from
the standpoint of intellectual methodology. All four members of the
Diagnostics Dept. should have been saying, "Whoa, patient care first,
winning the office betting pool on the diagnosis second."
And while I could more easily forgive Foreman for not realizing it, it
was stranger to me that Cuddy seemed unable to grasp (and then share
with Foreman) the fact that leadership and technical brilliance aren't
necessarily to be found within the same individual. There's no shame in
telling House that you're going to follow up on his diagnostic hunches
because his diagnostic judgment is better than yours, because it still
doesn't mean that House has the temperament to run the department well.
All Foreman really needed House there for was to pick his brains, not
for House to call the shots. Should Spock have been in charge of the
_Enterprise_ because he was more intelligent than Kirk? (Sorry, it was
the only example I could think of that everyone would instantly get.)
You'd think that both House and Cuddy would want Foreman to come away
from the experience having learned something, but both House and Cuddy
acted like there was nothing more to the job than whoever made the most
right guesses. It was not only a childish view of what management is
supposed to be about (7th-grade nerds insisting that whoever plays first
board automatically gets to be president of the chess club), but it
didn't even sound like Cuddy.
FOREMAN: You chose me to make House miserable, didn't you?
CUDDY: Apparently he's making you miserable. That's
impressive.
What on earth did Cuddy expect? It wasn't as if she didn't already know
what it was like to try to police House, and that was when she had the
proper authority to do so, not temporary, unenforceable authority like
she gave Foreman.
FOREMAN: Find someone else.
CUDDY: No. For the first time in six years, I'm getting
copied on all experimental tests and procedures.
Clinic hours have been logged and completed.
That last part didn't jibe with past episodes. House has been obsessive
about telling the clinic nurses when he's logging in and out, and while
he sometimes isn't seeing patients while he's doing clinic hours, we've
seen no indication that he (or a surrogate) is not spending the hours
there.
CUDDY: You've given me four months of House's dictations so I
can finally bill insurance companies.
Finally, we find out at least one of the reasons why House's department
is a "financial black hole." If the lagging or nonexistent insurance
payments really represent that much revenue, the hospital might be
better off if Cuddy got the Diagnostics Dept. a medical secretary to
speed things up (but have the secretary report to Cuddy, not to House).
At the point where Anica took the pills that Cameron left out as bait, I
started to suspect that the answer was going to be that everyone was at
least partly right. House had to be right, because it's his show.
Cameron at least seemed to be right, since normal people don't take
pills marked "dangerous, might cause seizures" for no reason. Since I
knew the episode title going in (maybe I need to start avoiding even
those from now on), I thought back to how Anica might be staging a
deception without having Munchausen's. I remembered House pointing out
that since she moved to the area without having a job, she must be
leaving somewhere else. Then I thought, "Are hospitals somehow her way
of hiding when someone else gets too close?" Was she running from a
mobster ex-boyfriend who wouldn't let go, for example? But none of that
came to pass.
ACT III
On Anica's chart:
Javanovich, Anica
ID: 85873 295-13-7865
ADM: 12-12-05
DOB: 04-09-66
The prologue took place on Dec. 12, 2005
In hindsight, the point at which House accepted that Anica had
Munchausen's was the point at which I would have expected his usual
associative diagnostic brilliance to kick in. The cause of the
Cushing's was artificial, but the effects were manifestly real. He
later informed us that the Cushing's suppressed her immune system, which
should have informed his own reading of her earlier charts with the low
hematocrit results. "I'm not a doctor, but" if you have reason to
expect the entire blood panel to read low (aplastic anemia), and yet the
white count is in the normal range, wouldn't that suggest a clue that
the induced Cushing's could be suppressing a high white count,
indicating that the Cushing's could be masking an infection instead?
That was, in fact, a lot like how House ended up explaining it, so given
his genius, shouldn't he have at least been suspicious of the truth all
the way back when he was going through Anica's old charts instead of
just assuming that since the cause of the Cushing's wasn't physically
significant, the effects of the Cushing's weren't significant either? I
have no idea whether Cushing's syndrome actually behaves like this in
real life, but from the standpoint of the internal consistency of the
story, this was really fishy to me.
HOUSE: Look, I checked the records. All her hospitalizations
were for different things: brain tumor, fainting
spells, skin rashes, seizures. She's had every blood
test known to man and the results were all over the
map. There's only one constant: low HCT. The anemia's
real.
CAMERON: There's a million things she could have taken to have
done that.
HOUSE: True. It could just be her M.O. She self-induces two
illnesses. One always changes, one never does.
Except that this was the second time (that we know of) that Anica
induced Cushing's.
Since Cameron was the one who first went back over Anica's previous
hospitalizations looking for a pattern, why didn't she catch this? If
the point of Foreman's approach was to prove House wrong, then why
didn't Foreman catch that House's initial dismissal of the anemia was a
bad guess? If the point of Cuddy's admiration was that House is all
that, then why didn't House go through the records to begin with (he who
*used* to insist on getting an exhaustive medical history) and catch
this instead of dismissing the anemia? The characters felt contrived to
always be looking the other way just so that in the final reel, House
could spring the Colonel-Mustard-in-the-conservatory-with-the-
candlestick ending.
HOUSE: You may not have Salma's ass, but she doesn't have your
eyes.
I had a lot of trouble believing a PPTH lab tech would fall for a line
like that, especially given House's reputation and the fact that House's
underlings are usually crowding the lab themselves with no respect for
turf because House doesn't trust other people to do lab tests.
If I had to deal with cancer patients, I don't think I would have an
edgy poster for an edgy Hitchcock movie in my office, but what the
hey. :)
CHASE: No way. I just got back from a suspension.
HOUSE: And if it wasn't for me, you would have been fired.
True in the larger sense, but all House really did was get Chase to save
himself from himself. Chase should have told his once and future boss
that he now needed the same thing.
HOUSE: Right now, Blackpoleon Blackaparte has got the nurses on
red alert.
It's not even offensive anymore. It's just boring. How could they do
that to House: put boring lines in his mouth?
CHASE: I also realize that no matter what I do, you're still
gonna treat me like crap.
HOUSE: 'Crap' is a relative term.
Loved Spencer's economy of crestfallenness.
FOREMAN: Nurses called the attending as soon as a trocar was ordered.
So Foreman did have the practicing privileges of an attending? That
sounded way off base. Or did he mean that Cuddy was notified and
Foreman was her proxy?
CUDDY: I just processed your patient's discharge papers.
She's on her way out right now.
With a diagnosis of Munchausen's, wouldn't discharging (even after a
quick psych consult, which didn't seem to happen) be out of the
question? Wouldn't the patient being a danger to herself (submitting
herself to unnecessary surgeries and inducing seizures) be enough to
warrant at least a temporary involuntary admission before they had to
let her go?
HOUSE: Sit.
ANICA: Why?
HOUSE: So you don't crack your skull when you pass out.
So House warns only those patients he thinks are hot, not obnoxious
cheating bicyclists?
HOUSE: Colchicine decimates your white blood cells, leaves
almost no trace. It's great for faking your way into
hospitals.
Just so Anica didn't miss its future applications, nor how to ask her
friendly online pharmacist for it by name.
HOUSE: I'm going to give you a cocktail of insulin for seizure
and colchicine to kill your white count. This will
absolutely confirm my diagnosis of aplastic anemia.
There is one small catch. If you've actually done
something to yourself to cause the anemia, then I'm
wrong. And if I do what I plan to do, then the treatment
will kill you instead of saving you. So I need to know.
Have you been taking anything besides the insulin, the
ACTH, and the pills Cameron left in your room.
ANICA: No.
HOUSE: Good. Gimme your arm.
What, "Everybody lies" except Munchausen's patients?!? House was taking
a huge risk that Anica would trust him not to be running some kind of
scam on her the way Cameron did, and that she wasn't lying about other
self-medications and simply counting on being resuscitated because she
was so close to a hospital.
And shouldn't House have found a more hidden place to inject Anica with
the insulin/colchicine? If the other doctors found the fresh needle
puncture, wouldn't they have suspected Anica of self-injecting again?
Or House of injecting her?
ACT IV
FOREMAN: Once she's stable, we need to get her out of here
before she does more damage to herself.
Why not involuntary psych admission then? They already knew Anica had a
pattern of moving from hospital to hospital. Why was turfing her being
treated as the safe option? House has certainly been willing to argue
in court in the past that someone was mentally incompetent even when
they weren't.
ANICA: Who are you?
FOREMAN: I'm Doctor Foreman. I'm in charge of your case.
I wasn't sure what kind of message they were trying to send with Foreman
pulling a House and not meeting the patient until the very end. That he
was more like House than he realized? That he didn't have an
appreciation for how the time spent on the administrative aspects of the
job got deducted from the time spent with patients (not that House ever
spent much time on administrative matters)?
FOREMAN: I know this is scary, but a bone marrow transplant
could cure you.
FOREMAN: We'll uh, we'll check the registry, see if there's a
donor match.
You don't need to get a sample of bone marrow in order to match it
against the transplant registry? (Just asking.)
WILSON: We have to kill all the old bone marrow before we give
you the new stuff. You'll have no immune system.
I really didn't get this. All the previous objections to House doing a
bone marrow biopsy had been removed. Foreman finally thought House was
right. Why didn't House, Foreman, or Wilson then go ahead with the
biopsy without jumping straight to irreversible bone-marrow destruction?
Given that we were supposed to be looking down on Foreman as the overly
safe doctor here, why didn't he do a simple confirmation of the
diagnosis? And then there was House, who had been *pleading* for a
biopsy before, but once he had the phony symptoms to show off, was
perfectly content to treat those as just as good as real symptoms. That
wasn't just "risky medicine"; it was a snake oil medicine show. There
was no science in it at all. Yes, I understand that he did it in order
to keep Anica from being turfed with suspicious symptoms and a "Do Not
Take Seriously" sign on her forehead, but once he had her readmitted via
his ruse, he should have persisted in his quest for the *genuine*
confirmation of the bone-marrow biopsy. And it's not like Wilson is Dr.
Live-on-the-Edge. At least one, and preferably all three of those
doctors should have put on the brakes before House literally sniffed out
the final diagnosis (and it wouldn't have come amiss for Cameron, Chase,
or even Cuddy, who was being copied in on everything, to question this
either). That felt contrived by idiot plotting just to allow a
problematic but not yet fatal condition to all of a sudden be made a
matter of life and death so that House could swoop in and save the day.
In "DNR," House didn't even claim to know what was wrong with Giles, nor
even that Hamilton's diagnosis was wrong. It wasn't about who was the
best diagnostician. It was about House being a fanatical
epistemologist; i.e., about questioning and going over the possibilities
again in a methodical manner to make sure of the diagnosis, and Foreman
took issue with House using unwanted and unethical heroic measures in
order to go down his checklist. While I agree with House in the
abstract that "error rates" need to be double-checked, if everyone's
going to argue based solely on results (like Cuddy's, "[House] gets
lucky a lot"), then it's worth noting that if House had done nothing and
just waited for Foreman's steroids to kick in, he would have gotten the
same diagnostic clue without all the harmful and unethical acts.
I cannot believe that in the space of a single year, House would go from
being obsessive enough about double-checking a diagnosis to risk prison
and his career, to just popping diagnoses out and then not wanting to
hear alternatives nor even do conclusive testing once he gets his way.
This is a marionette version of House, where the writers jerk on the
strings and the puppet apes the outward motions of past behavior, but
the underlying substance isn't there. It's also a marionette version of
Foreman, who pushes for the rules and for safety except where it suits
the writers' plot devices. It's a marionette version of Cuddy, who has
successfully interceded in House's guesswork before ("Damned If You
Do"), even if the result was only to get House off of an unproductive
path and prod him into exploring alternatives. The idea that luck and
unconfirmed guesses are enough to qualify House for unchecked latitude
didn't used to be enough for her. And since when did Wilson become that
reckless?
HOUSE: She doesn't have aplastic anemia. She has an
infection.
CAMERON: No. Her white count would be through the roof. Hers
is on the floor.
CHASE: She had no fever.
HOUSE: 'Cause her self-inflicted Cushing's suppressed her
immune system. It stopped her from having a fever and
hid the infection. _Clostridium perfringens_ could
cause the bruises, the schistocytes, the anemia --
CHASE: Explains everything except the white count.
HOUSE: She would have gotten sicker when I said she was gonna
get sicker except Cameron dosed her with the
antibiotics.
HOUSE: [To Anica] You have a bacterium. It's on all of us,
but the bruises you gave yourself with the Cushing's
made a lovely home.
Just how long do the effects of injected ACTH last? Anica showed up at
the PPTH emergency room on the 12th and no one was alarmed by her white
count then. House said she should have gotten sicker by the next day,
except that Cameron tricked her into taking antibiotics, which
presumably kept the white count from rising due to the infection. The
bacteria took over that fast and then quieted down that fast from the
rifampin?
Since House confessed to an unethical treatment and Foreman was in
charge, shouldn't that mean more official disciplinary action against
House? Or was Foreman not even going to bother trying because Cuddy
wouldn't back him up?
FOREMAN: If you were serious about the offer, I'm serious about
accepting. I'd like to run the department. And you
said it yourself. Things run smooth.
CUDDY: Except for the part where House went behind your back
and KO'd the patient with insulin and colchicine.
FOREMAN: There was no reason to suspect an infection. Even
House didn't think it was an infection. You would have
done the same thing I did.
CUDDY: And I'd be just as wrong.
This was inexplicable as a reason to prefer House in charge rather than
Foreman. Foreman was right. If Cuddy was going to go strictly by
results, the ends justifying the means and nothing else, then she was
getting the best of both worlds from the current setup. The hospital
was still getting the benefit of House's brilliance but more paperwork
and billing were getting done under Foreman. There was no essential
difference between House going behind Foreman's back in this episode and
House going behind Cuddy's back in other episodes, so why did Cuddy cut
Foreman off at the knees for something she tolerates in herself on a
routine basis? In fact, Foreman functioned in "Deception" in much the
same way that Cuddy did in "Damned If You Do." No, Foreman didn't reach
the right final diagnosis himself, but he and Cameron were instrumental
in forcing House to let go of a bad earlier diagnosis that he was
enamored of to the patient's detriment, and move on to new avenues. The
idea that Cuddy was so dazzled by House's ability to accidentally
stumble into a correct final diagnosis in "Deception" that she therefore
wanted to see him as the alpha male again, just made her come off as
House's biggest fangirl apologist.
CUDDY: What House did was insane, but he saved her life.
FOREMAN: He got lucky.
CUDDY: He got her to admit she's got a problem. She's agreed
to outpatient treatment.
Except that they showed us that Anica was off scamming the system again
at the end with an assist from House. So what did that say about
Cuddy's appreciation of House's results?
CUDDY: He gets lucky a lot.
That he does. Occasionally, House's luck should run out (and I don't
just mean the ponies), since even when you make percentage guesses,
you're not going to be right 100% of the time. I'm even willing to buy
his earlier claim that when he doesn't take risks, more patients die
than when he does take risks. But we should be allowed to see that
once-in-a-while patient on whom House gambles and loses. It's only fair
that after we see House save nine out of ten patients by experimental
treatments, we should also hear House try to explain that the
experimental treatment that's killing the tenth patient would have paid
off in the other nine cases, and this patient just ran out of luck.
Somehow I don't think the patient would be sympathetic to House's
explanation.
In this specific case, this was the first time we've seen House
reclining in a patient's bed. Since he was trying to get at Anica's
racing picks, not gather more diagnostic information, it wasn't his
genius that led him to her room. If Anica's case had gotten up on the
whiteboard via any other means than sharing a love of the ponies and the
same betting shop with House, then House would have gone ahead and put
her through the unnecessary and dangerous destruction of her bone
marrow. This episode's path to the correct final diagnosis was not what
scientists would call a "reproducible result." That Cuddy felt
reassured by House's abilities this week was frankly unbelievable and it
was revolting that the writers seemed to want us to share Cuddy's
reassurance and gross stupidity.
Cameron getting angry at a suspected psych patient just seemed like more
of the same. She didn't *know* it was Munchausen's any more than House
*knew* it was Cushing's, but what she's really learned from House is his
arrogance. If it was Munchausen's, all she needed to do to provoke a
reaction was clinically tell Anica her deception had been discovered and
that as soon as Cameron could convince her colleagues, she was going to
expose Anica. The malice was unnecessary. If we were meant to see it
as deliberate characterization, then Cameron came off the worse for it.
If we were meant to see it as diagnostic, then the writers came off the
worse for it. Plus, we found out that the antibiotics did some harm in
that they suppressed the symptoms of the infection without actually
treating it, thus delaying diagnosis until House got lucky. I know
there are safer ways to discolor urine. There were a lot of lucky
doctors this week.
FOREMAN: She should have died. House is not a hero. A person
who has the guts to break a bad rule, they're a hero.
House doesn't break rules. He ignores them. He's not
Rosa Parks. He's an anarchist. All he stands for is
the right for everyone to grab whatever they want,
whenever they want. You tell doctors that's O.K., your
mortality rate is gonna go through the roof.
The Rosa Parks contrast was true enough. House wasn't engaging in civil
disobedience to protest a bad rule or law and get it changed. But
Foreman is bright enough to know that the anarchism charge isn't true.
He's known for a while now that House doesn't want his subordinates or
other doctors that he sees as inferior doing whatever they want whenever
they want. House wants everyone to do what House wants, or else have
the guts to make their own stands for what they think is right. As near
as I can tell, he's flying by Plato's _Republic_, the rule by
philosopher-kings, but it's the Classics Illustrated version for twelve-
year-olds, where they don't bother telling you that a lot of boring
responsibility comes with the entitlement to rule from on high.
Foreman's anarchism complaint could have been better argued. House
isn't in favor of no rules, just in favor of the rules not applying to
him. But in the larger sense, Foreman was right about the point of
having rules not being to hamper House, but to keep from sending the
message that everyone can use their own judgment when it comes to
breaking rules. (But if Foreman was going to complain about first
House's, then Cuddy's utilitarian approach to ethics, then how did he
justify sending House and Cameron to break and enter Anica's home, and
why didn't one of the other doctors point that out?)
I'm reminded of my favorite episode of _Hill Street Blues_ ("Trial by
Fury," third-season debut). The cops catch some suspects in a rape-
murder case, but the only evidence they can hold them on is for lesser
charges. Capt. Furillo conspires with the D.A. to release them on their
own recognizance rather than hold them on the lesser charges, because
they know there's a community lynch mob waiting for the suspects.
Rather than face the mob, one of the suspects rolls over on the other.
Furillo's pleased with himself and the other cops think he's a hero.
His girlfriend chews him out, though, saying that maybe Furillo's
judgment really is that good, but sending the message to all the other
cops that it's O.K. to bend or even break the law to suit their own
judgment is just plain scary.
Even when House's judgment is at the top of its form, you really don't
want every doctor deciding that his or her judgment is all that it takes
to justify breaking a rule. (And in this episode, House's judgment was
not at the top of its form.) Foreman was right to point out to Cuddy
that the mortality rate would go through the roof if that happened.
On top of everything else, if Cuddy had no intention of giving Foreman
the job permanently, then it was really scuzzy to offer it to him and
then back out. Great ethical leadership skills there. Now Foreman
knows that his subordinate (House) will do anything behind his back that
he feels like doing without fear of disciplinary action, and his
supervisor (Cuddy) will lie to him and refuse to back him up, giving him
all the responsibility of the position with none of the actual power.
This is ridiculous on so many levels for Cuddy (and the writers) to be
so smug about.
Foreman wore nice suits throughout the episode and no lab coat, like he
was consciously rejecting House's homeless chic as a proper look for a
doctor, but had subconsciously picked up from House that the one who
doesn't wear the white coat is the one in charge.
HOUSE: Kinda digging this whole Foreman-in-charge thing.
[Grabs candy.] You know. [Indicates cashier.] Frees
me up to watch my soaps, catch a movie in the afternoon,
have lunch with you.
WILSON: Yeah, that's a big change for you. [Pays cashier.]
HOUSE: Now, Cuddy's up Foreman's ass, not mine. [Takes
change.]
WILSON: You couldn't live with Foreman as your boss.
HOUSE: Why not? People can change, you know.
Wilson said otherwise. Why would House lie about this particular thing
to Wilson, of all people?
Why Wilson doesn't make House pay his own way baffles me.
"People can change" is reminiscent of what House said to Stacy. And no
one really did change in this episode (unless you count simply breaking
with past characterization). I'm not sure what House's motive was in
saying it, unless it was to keep from giving anyone the satisfaction of
seeing him chafe under Foreman, because the writers have decided that
now House does care what other people think after all. But the fact
that Anica went back to embracing her Munchausen's, armed with new and
improved ways to fake illness taught to her by House, and how not to get
caught, taught to her by Cameron, made this final diagnosis hollow.
Meanwhile, at St. Sebastian's:
DOCTOR: Your white count is way down.
ANICA: Oh.
DOCTOR: We're gonna need to admit you. Just run a few more
tests.
ANICA: Whatever you think is best.
Anica promising to get psych treatment only to move on to deceive her
next hospital reminded me of one of my biggest worries about "Control."
House doing nothing more than telling someone with psych symptoms to go
forth and do better next time seemed radically insufficient for the
task. Here they explicitly made that case.
It looked like there were five or so unredeemed betting slips where
House threw down Anica's racing form. Evidently her luck didn't hold.
Isn't there a new _Racing Form_ every day? If so, then wouldn't Anica's
picks from the 12th or the 13th be out of date by the time House got
around to betting on them? (I checked, and it was the exact same
marked-up page that she hid from him behind her pillow during the
initial medical history scene.) Or was he just taking her word for it
that the horses she picked for the previous races were good ones to bet
on in future races?
Since they had House take a Vicodin when he made his final bet, maybe
they were trying to play up the addiction angle after all. Or maybe it
was just disappointment when Anica didn't show, because that meant that
he realized she had probably taken her business elsewhere, in more ways
than one.
Counting up the deceptions, there were Anica's Munchausen's, House's
pretense at botching the lumbar puncture, Cameron's mislabeled
antibiotics trap, House's phonied-up blood tests, House's insulin/
colchicine injection, Anica's lie about getting psych treatment, and
probably Cuddy's permanent job offer to Foreman as well.
Based on the wardrobe changes and Anica's chart, the action took place
on four or five distinct days starting on 12/12/05. The prologue may
have been on a separate day, but it was hard to tell. The days were
probably continuous, except for the last day, which seemed to take place
after Anica had had time to benefit from her course of antibiotics (but
the Christmas decorations were still up at the OTB).
Vicodin count: 2
Medical synopsis:
grand mal seizure, bruises on torso, anemia, blood alcohol level of .13,
afebrile
differential diagnoses: STD, infection, alcoholism w/ DIC (disseminated
intravascular coagulation), SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus), familial
telangiectasis, Cushing's syndrome
MRI (negative), abortive lumbar punctures
hypertensive crisis
IV Lopressor drip
differential diagnoses: ACTH(adrenocorticotropic hormone)-secreting
tumor on the lung or pancreas, alcohol detoxification
pan-man scan
mass on her pancreas
emotionally undisturbed upon hearing potentially terminal diagnosis
biopsy of mass (negative)
elevated ACTH level
differential diagnoses: brain tumor, Munchausen's syndrome
two appointments with two doctors
reading glasses w/ multiple prescriptions
diagnosis: tumor pressing on the optic nerve
self-administered mislabeled rifampin (antibiotic)
low HCT (hematocrit)
diagnosis: Munchausen's syndrome and aplastic anemia
injection of insulin and colchicine
induced seizure, induced low blood panel symptoms
three minutes of radiation
schistocytes (they slipped that one in at the last minute)
"grapey" odor
final diagnosis: Munchausen's syndrome and _Clostridium perfringens_
(bacterial infection) whose symptoms were suppressed by self-induced
Cushing's syndrome
Augmentin
presumed self-injection of colchicine to gain new hospital admittance
Clinic patient:
vaginosis from self-administered bacterial culture medium and chronic
stupidity
antibiotics and sexual abstinence
And, because it's a Christmas episode, The Ghosts of Medical Aspects
Past:
Explaining away all the symptoms as alcohol abuse ("The Socratic
Method," although this time it was Foreman rather than Chase).
Diagnosis of DIC ("Humpty Dumpty," although this time alcohol-induced).
Diagnosis of lupus ("Detox," although they named a specific type this
time).
Cushing's syndrome ("Heavy," although here self-induced).
House calls his boss into the clinic for an unnecessary consult just
because he's chafing at being told what to do ("Occam's Razor," although
it was Foreman this time instead of Cuddy).
Patient is emotionally undisturbed upon hearing potentially terminal
diagnosis ("Autopsy," although 'terminal' is a relative term).
Reddish tears from rifampin ("Kids").
Diagnosis A causes doctors to stop considering any further diagnoses
("Three Stories," although here it was Munchausen's rather than drug
addiction).
Injections w/ insulin to induce seizure ("Histories," although here
joined in by House).
Colchicine fools doctors by mimicking symptoms of other illnesses
("Occam's Razor," although this time it was deliberate).
Bone marrow transplant proposed, then dropped ("Daddy's Boy," although
this time they explained why).
Schistocytes ("Kids").
Barry Margolin
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
> I was *really* surprised (and very let down) that none
> of the other regulars pointed out that it was Dr. Gregory "Everybody
> lies" House who was so insistent that Anica didn't have Munchausen's.
> They could have even pointed out that he violated his own dictum about
> not caring about the patient, so he was biased in favor of not wanting
> her to be faking. "What, everybody lies except for patients you think
> are hot?" But they didn't, because frankly, I think the writers missed
> it too. As set up, this case should have been depicted as a major
> stumble for House because he broke his own rules, but given Cuddy's
> glowing testimonial at the end, it was treated as just another House
> triumph in a series of same.
I don't think any of the doctor characters have picked up the pattern
that House thinks everyone lies. If they did, he wouldn't have to point
it out every time. So the corollary is that they wouldn't call him on
the fact that he doesn't consider it in this case.
I think it's a general fact about TV that the audience is able to see
these patterns of behavior that the other characters don't. If you want
to rationalize it, it's because we don't see them every day, just during
those special occasions that are worthy of making an episode about. And
in the case of "House", many of those cases involve him accusing someone
of lying, but it's not such a frequent occurrence the rest of the time.
--
Barry Margolin, bar...@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***
Barry Margolin
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
> ANICA: Who are you?
> FOREMAN: I'm Doctor Foreman. I'm in charge of your case.
>
> I wasn't sure what kind of message they were trying to send with Foreman
> pulling a House and not meeting the patient until the very end. That he
> was more like House than he realized?
You just noticed this then? You pointed out several times in your
analysis of the episode that House wasn't acting very House-like. And
Foreman is acting more like House since being put in charge of him.
Lorraine G
>MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply
>(Micky DuPree)
>.
>.
>.
>This took me a lot longer than usual.
Wow! No wonder it took so long. That was really in-depth.
I have been reading your posts about House here at rec.arts.tv for the
last few episodes. I like your analyses.
There were several things in the episode that just didn't feel right to
me and you point them out in terrific detail.
Thanks for taking the time to do so.
Lorraine
Lee@DVDDebate
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
>I assume that the Christmas decorations in the Diagnostics office were
>all down to Cameron, who seems to be a self-styled atheist with a
>sentimental attachment to Christmas commercialism.
>
Aren't all atheists the same? I still enjoy Christmas. Has nothing to
do with religion for me, it's more a time for celebrating life rather
than death, which is what I associate religion with.
Lee.
--
lee at w2designs dot co dot uk
If I have one flaw, it's that I'm a perfectoinist.
Lee@DVDDebate
<bar...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>In article <do4lfr$mn9$1...@pcls4.std.com>,
> MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
>
>> ANICA: Who are you?
>> FOREMAN: I'm Doctor Foreman. I'm in charge of your case.
>>
>> I wasn't sure what kind of message they were trying to send with Foreman
>> pulling a House and not meeting the patient until the very end. That he
>> was more like House than he realized?
>
>You just noticed this then? You pointed out several times in your
>analysis of the episode that House wasn't acting very House-like. And
>Foreman is acting more like House since being put in charge of him.
There have been plenty of references to Foreman being more like House
than he wants to admit before this one. From memory there was the joke
about them wearing the same shoes in one episode.
ANIM8Rfsk
l...@nospamw2designs.co.uk wrote on 12/20/05 4:43 AM:
> On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:48:43 +0000 (UTC),
> MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
>
>> I assume that the Christmas decorations in the Diagnostics office were
>> all down to Cameron, who seems to be a self-styled atheist with a
>> sentimental attachment to Christmas commercialism.
>>
> Aren't all atheists the same?
Not hardly.
I still enjoy Christmas. Has nothing to
> do with religion for me, it's more a time for celebrating life rather
> than death, which is what I associate religion with.
>
> Lee.
--
You Can't Stop the Signal
SERENITY on DVD TODAY!!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000BW7QWW/tvshowsondvdcom
Micky DuPree
Barry Margolin <bar...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
: In article <do4lfr$mn9$1...@pcls4.std.com>,
: MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
:: I was *really* surprised (and very let down) that none of the other
:: regulars pointed out that it was Dr. Gregory "Everybody lies" House
:: who was so insistent that Anica didn't have Munchausen's. They could
:: have even pointed out that he violated his own dictum about not
:: caring about the patient, so he was biased in favor of not wanting
:: her to be faking. "What, everybody lies except for patients you
:: think are hot?" But they didn't, because frankly, I think the
:: writers missed it too. As set up, this case should have been
:: depicted as a major stumble for House because he broke his own rules,
:: but given Cuddy's glowing testimonial at the end, it was treated as
:: just another House triumph in a series of same.
:
: I don't think any of the doctor characters have picked up the pattern
: that House thinks everyone lies. If they did, he wouldn't have to
: point it out every time. So the corollary is that they wouldn't call
: him on the fact that he doesn't consider it in this case.
After this initial pronouncement of "Everybody lies" in the pilot ...
HOUSE: Everybody lies.
CAMERON: [To Foreman] Doctor House doesn't like dealing with
patients.
FOREMAN: Isn't treating patients why we became doctors?
HOUSE: No, treating illnesses is why we became doctors.
Treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable.
FOREMAN: So you're trying to eliminate the humanity from the
practice of medicine.
HOUSE: If we don't talk to them, they can't lie to us, and we
can't lie to them.
... most of its subsequent pronouncements have been by other regulars
*to House*, including Foreman twice repeating back the lesson he had
learned later on in the pilot (with Cameron and Chase present):
FOREMAN: [To House] I assume it's a corollary, if people lie,
that people screw up.
And:
HOUSE: Told you. You can't trust people.
CAMERON: She probably knew she was allergic to gadolinium,
figured it was an easy way to get someone to cut a hole
in her throat.
HOUSE: Can't get a picture, gonna have to get a thousand
words.
FOREMAN: You actually want me to talk to the patient? Get a
history?
HOUSE: We need to know if there's some genetic or
environmental cause that's triggering an inflammatory
response.
FOREMAN: I thought everybody lied.
HOUSE: Truth begins in lies. Think about it. [Exits.]
FOREMAN: [To Chase and Cameron] That doesn't mean anything,
does it?
Wilson also parroted it in the pilot, establishing that he's well aware
of how attached House is to the saying:
WILSON: [To Rebecca] As Doctor House likes to say, "Everybody
lies."
From "The Socratic Method":
CAMERON: [To House, with Foreman and Chase present] What is it,
"Everybody lies," except for schizophrenics and their
children?
In "Role Model," Wilson was well enough versed in House's rule to
ridicule him for violating it:
WILSON: You were sure he had AIDS, then you talked to him, then
you had doubts. What, what did he say?
HOUSE: He said he had not engaged in any risky behavior.
WILSON: Huh. And you believed him.
HOUSE: Well, he didn't have any reason to lie --
WILSON: "Everybody lies," except politicians? House, I believe
you're a romantic. You didn't just believe him, you
believed IN him. You want to come over tonight and
watch old movies and cry?
From "Honeymoon":
CAMERON: [With Foreman and Chase present] What happened to
"Everybody lies"?
HOUSE: I was lying.
From "Acceptance":
CUDDY: Oh, so "Everybody lies," except a convicted murderer.
HOUSE: [Removes the sheet. Clarence is bleeding rectally.] I
don't think he's faking this stuff.
From "Spin":
STACY: [With House, Cuddy, Wilson, Foreman, Chase, and Cameron
present] Somebody once told me that everybody lies.
Since you're the only people who know he has cancer --
HOUSE: He doesn't have cancer.
House has said it a few other times to patients and medical students as
well, so it's certainly a constant in his life. All the regulars plus
Stacy know the drill now. Any one of them could have (and should have)
cocked an eyebrow at his emotional attachment to Anica and his steadfast
refusal to believe she was lying in "Deception." Cameron especially has
internalized the lesson well enough to parrot it back to him twice in
the past and challenge him on it. And yet in this episode, when he was
shooting down her Munchausen's theory after he had taken only a cursory
medical history and had not even studied the old records as well as
Cameron had, she managed not to challenge him this time? We know it
wasn't because she was in one of her wallflower moods, since she went
behind Foreman's back and proved House wrong. As House would say, "What
up wit dat?" And the obvious answer is that the writers simply aren't
that good anymore.
There was another issue bound up in this as well. House pointed out to
all of them in "Occam's Razor" and drilled it into Foreman in "Poison"
that not caring about the patient allows a doctor to be objective. From
"Occam's Razor" (with all the fellows present to hear it):
FATHER: How can you treat someone without meeting them?
HOUSE: It's easy if you don't give a crap about him. That's a
good thing. If emotions made you act rationally, then
they wouldn't be called emotions, right? That's why we
have this nice division of labor: you hold his hand, I
get him better.
And from "Poison":
HOUSE: You know the kid?
FOREMAN: No, he just came in.
HOUSE: Mom real good looking?
FOREMAN: I ... didn't notice.
HOUSE: Then it's a mystery. Not why he's sick, but why you
care so much.
HOUSE: You don't care about the kid. You just find his
illness intriguing.
FOREMAN: His CAT scan was clean. There's no sign of infection.
It's not diabetes.
HOUSE: And you don't care about him.
FOREMAN: That's what you wanna hear. Not in the slightest.
HOUSE: Me neither. Means we'll be objective.
And Wilson has sometimes been driven to exasperation with House over his
lack of emotional empathy, much less involvement with patients, most
notably in "Autopsy":
HOUSE: Can I come with?
WILSON: To tell Andie she's going to die? That's very un-you.
HOUSE: Well, she's such a brave girl. I want to see how brave
she is when you tell her she's going to die.
WILSON: Go to hell.
There was at least the implication that Cameron was challenging House's
emotional involvement with the patient's wife in "Honeymoon":
HOUSE: I had to dope him up to get him in here. Guy doesn't
think he's sick.
CAMERON: Who does?
HOUSE: His wife.
CAMERON: The woman you used to live with.
HOUSE: That's her Indian name. On her driver's license it's
Stacy. I assume you have a point.
CAMERON: You believe her over the patient himself. That's why
we're taking this case.
HOUSE: The truth? I hear voices, all the time, telling me to
do stuff. It's crazy, huh?
CAMERON: What happened to "Everybody lies"?
HOUSE: I was lying.
Lying and objectivity have been recurring themes throughout the series,
even in the vastly more uneven second season, to the point where not
only the characters, but also the cast and crew are aware of this. In
the DVD extras, you could make out that Katie Jacobs, one of the
executive producers, was wearing a t-shirt that said, "Everybody lies."
To quote one of the actors:
EPPS: The best "House-ism" is just that everyone lies. And
actually, what, we're, you know, we're filming an
episode right now where, you know, he's, that, that
question is brought up: "I thought you said everyone
lies," and he says, "Well, I lied."
As soon as House described Anica as "hot" in "Deception," the fellows
should have wondered if House was violating his own rule. It would have
been a much better story if that had indeed been the point: that House
was off his game precisely because he had stepped over his own line.
Then the conclusion of the story would have made more sense because the
point wasn't that House doesn't believe in rules; it's just that he has
his own rules, and he's an exceptional doctor until he ignores his own
self-imposed structure. That could have been an excellent episode. I
wish I had been able to see it.
: I think it's a general fact about TV that the audience is able to see
: these patterns of behavior that the other characters don't.
I think it's a general fact about episodic series that over time, the
audience sometimes forgets what the characters have done in previous
episodes. It's a demonstrable fact about _House_ that the other regular
characters have been present for House saying, "Everybody lies," and that
the other regular characters have said it back to him as a challenge.
So why did no one challenge him on this case, where he openly admitted
an attraction to the patient? Why did no one challenge him when he
mule-headedly insisted over and over again that this particular patient
couldn't possibly be lying as a symptom? Why was the audience allowed
to see (even if the other regulars weren't) that even after House
accepted the Munchausen's diagnosis, he continued to trust that the
patient was telling him the truth? For the first three-quarters of the
episode, "Deception" looked for all the world to be about House
violating his own rules and screwing up because of it. I thought the
punch line was going to be that the episode was also about
self-deception.
But no, even if only by accident, House had to be depicted as saving the
day and being a hero. So I guess it's also a general fact about good TV
that eventually the good writers turn their attention elsewhere and
other writers, who don't have a very good grasp of what's gone before,
take over. I guess they're banking on the fact that a lot of the
audience has forgotten or has not even seen what's gone before, and
judging from the ratings for _House_, that's a commercially successful
formula. But it's also a fact about good storytelling that paying
attention should reward you, not punish you.
-Micky
Micky DuPree
<l...@nospamw2designs.co.uk> writes:
: On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:48:43 +0000 (UTC),
: MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
:: I assume that the Christmas decorations in the Diagnostics office
:: were all down to Cameron, who seems to be a self-styled atheist with
:: a sentimental attachment to Christmas commercialism.
:
: Aren't all atheists the same?
You don't have to look any further than _House_ to see that they're not.
They've contrasted Cameron with House before. House made no plans for
Christmas in "Damned If You Do" and Cameron took him completely by
surprise when she gave him a Christmas present. (In "The Socratic
Method," we saw that House doesn't observe birthdays either.)
: I still enjoy Christmas. Has nothing to do with religion for me, it's
: more a time for celebrating life rather than death, which is what I
: associate religion with.
Which just goes to prove that some atheists are more culturally
conventional than others. It's possible to see life as inherently good,
and no day more intrinsically better than another on that account. What
does it say about all the other days of the year if you don't celebrate
life then? I'm not looking for an answer. That's just a for instance.
Besides, Cameron isn't technically an atheist. She admitted that she
believes in an Absolute principle, just not in an Absolute personality.
-Micky
Micky DuPree
<l...@nospamw2designs.co.uk> writes:
: On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:15:09 -0500, Barry Margolin
: <bar...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
:: In article <do4lfr$mn9$1...@pcls4.std.com>,
:: MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
::: ANICA: Who are you?
::: FOREMAN: I'm Doctor Foreman. I'm in charge of your case.
:::
::: I wasn't sure what kind of message they were trying to send with
::: Foreman pulling a House and not meeting the patient until the very
::: end. That he was more like House than he realized?
::
:: You just noticed this then?
You wouldn't believe what I've noticed. No, really. You demonstrably
already do not believe what I've noticed, and I'm not just talking about
matters of interpretation, but points of fact.
They made a point of Foreman unconsciously buying the exact same model
of shoes as House in ep.8, "Poison." But the matching sneakers were
only a superficial resemblance, which was underscored in the very next
episode, "DNR." Despite Cameron's claim that Foreman was bucking for
the position of House Jr., I think we were pretty forcefully shown that
Foreman didn't want to *be* House; he wanted House to be an older friend
to him, the way we saw he was in "DNR" with Marty Hamilton, his previous
boss. If you ever watch "DNR," notice the contemptuous look on House's
face when the old colleagues met again, with Foreman hugging Hamilton
and Hamilton calling Foreman by his first name. Foreman had obviously
missed that easy conviviality and reinforcement, none of which he got
from House. But as far as House was concerned, none of that had
anything to do with practicing good medicine.
I think House is basically right on that score. I think we saw in "DNR"
how a desire to be loyal to Hamilton, to not undermine him in front of
his patient, led Foreman to turn the patient away from exploring other
options. House sees personal loyalty as having the potential to
interfere with patient care because one doctor may fail to follow his
convictions and challenge another doctor. In fact, I think House has
shut down all three fellows when they've sought anything other than
instruction from him. He's refused to be an older friend to Foreman, a
lover to Cameron, and a father figure to Chase.
This season Foreman hasn't been much like House at all except for the
two overt details of not wearing a lab coat and not seeing the patient
until the end of the episode in "Deception." The entire rest of
"Deception" was devoted to how House and Foreman approached the case
differently (even if they had to give both characters amnesia to pull
off that ham-handed conflict). In fact, Cameron's deception in laying
out her Munchausen's trap without getting approval from her superior
reminded me more of House's M.O. than Foreman's approach to the case
did. So my question is what was the point of showing just those two
similarities between Foreman and House amidst a sea of their
differences? Do the writers *think* they're portraying Foreman as
similar to House even though the actual evidence to that effect is weak?
Or is it something else? The former wouldn't surprise me and is my best
guess.
:: You pointed out several times in your analysis of the episode that
:: House wasn't acting very House-like.
House has been acting un-House-like on and off throughout the second
season. There's been no correlation between his out-of-character
behavior and whether or not he's been in charge. He was in charge in
"TB or Not TB," but that didn't stop him from being jealous of the media
attention devoted to another doctor.
The problem with House's specific behavior in "Deception" was that he
was practicing bad medicine (by which I mean scientifically unsound, not
just unethical), and while they had Foreman protest, they also had Cuddy
shoot Foreman down, as if bad medicine was now good enough for her as
long as the dice were favorable. The exchange between Foreman and Cuddy
in "Deception":
FOREMAN: [House] got lucky.
CUDDY: He got her to admit she's got a problem. She's agreed to
outpatient treatment. He gets lucky a lot.
... was basically a reworking of the exchange between Foreman and Chase
in "DNR":
FOREMAN: You make enough calls, one of them is bound to be right.
CHASE: [Sarcastic] Yeah, [House is] just a lucky, lucky guy.
But unlike the case in "Deception," what House was doing in "DNR" was
unethical, but it wasn't unscientific. It was just fanatically
thorough.
Again and again in the second season, the writers have acted like
they've watched the first-season episodes but picked up only superficial
readings of what the characters were represented as. They picked up on
the previous "luck" exchange, but they don't seem to have realized that
they really have reduced House to being little more than lucky in
"Deception." In fact, House wasn't at all thorough in "Deception" the
way he was in "DNR." If he hadn't been trying to get racing picks from
Anica, he would have destroyed her bone marrow on a hunch that he didn't
even bother to confirm with a test that he had been pleading to perform
earlier. Shoddy thinking by the writers can lead only to shoddy
writing.
:: And Foreman is acting more like House since being put in charge of
:: him.
Only in fairly superficial ways. Foreman and House (and Foreman and
Cuddy) still butted heads over the whole "safe" vs. "risky" dichotomy,
even if the writers didn't understand the underlying basis for the
clash. Foreman is the most independently minded of the fellows, which
he has in common with House, but that's been true since the get-go.
What the two characters choose to be independently minded about is
frequently different, and that's been true since the get-go too.
If I tried to put the best spin on it that I could, I could say that
House and Cuddy together were colluding to teach Foreman something about
being a leader; i.e., they were both doing stupid things on purpose for
reasons as yet undisclosed. But I tried that line of thinking, that
House was doing it on purpose, on the Stacy plot line and seemed to get
nowhere with it. Based on their performance so far, I do not trust the
second-season writers to know what they're doing.
: There have been plenty of references to Foreman being more like House
: than he wants to admit before this one. From memory there was the joke
: about them wearing the same shoes in one episode.
Name one besides the ones I've brought up in this thread.
-Micky
Erin Woodbridge's Bestest Friend, Ian J. Ball
MDu...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) wrote:
> From "Honeymoon":
>
> CAMERON: [With Foreman and Chase present] What happened to
> "Everybody lies"?
> HOUSE: I was lying.
This one is my favorite. :)
--
"I did *NOT* have sex with Gil Kurvers!" - Erin Woodbridge
(on numerous occasions), "Edgemont"