HOUSE, M.D.: 5. "Damned If You Do"
Micky DuPree
not give away any real surprises. I also gripe about characterization
in the second season (from which you can derive some indication of what
that characterization is like). That is the extent of my spoiler
warnings.
Elapsed time numbers refer to the DVD copy.
PROLOGUE
A lot of the sound at the very beginning of the prologue was not
synchronized. They did a decent job of disguising that, but a lot of
the dialogue wasn't spoken while the camera was on the speaker's lips.
Strange. Maybe there were a lot of last-minute script changes and
dialogue dubbing?
HOUSE: We are condemned to useless labor.
WILSON: Fourth circle of Hell. Charting goes a lot faster when
you eliminate all classic poetry.
I really miss the House that could make casual allusions to ancient and
medieval works. I don't mind that he can do Scooby-Doo impressions and
demonstrate familiarity with street lingo. I just miss that he used to
be at home with both classical texts and pop culture.
WILSON: You're over two weeks behind in your charting.
HOUSE: [Flicks a piece of paper near Cuddy's cleavage.] Oops.
I missed.
CUDDY: What are you, eight?
HOUSE: Could an eight-year-old do this? [Makes a face. Wilson
smiles.]
CUDDY: Better stop or it'll stick that way.
Heh. I had very mixed feelings about House's behavior at the beginning.
On the one hand, flicking pieces of paper at the straitlaced Wilson and
Cuddy was amusing. They do seem ripe for a little classroom
provocation.
However, House's failure to keep accurate medical records just because
it's boring was unsympathetic, a character flaw even, and given that he
ran afoul of his own omissions later in the episode, I think that
portrayal was deliberate. (On the other hand, I can't fathom why
medical charts are still kept in frequently illegible longhand on paper,
so while I can't agree with House that it's useless labor, I will grant
that the execution is outmoded.)
CUDDY: You have a patient in exam room one.
HOUSE: Yeah, but see, I'm, I'm off at twelve and it's already
five of.
CUDDY: She's been waiting for you since eleven.
Another unsympathetic trait. Mind you, I'd be in favor of fining
patients who don't call ahead to cancel appointments, since they
encourage doctors to overbook, which louses up things for everybody.
But simply wasting 55 minutes out of some sick person's life, an hour
they're never going to get back, was pretty low.
Where did the clinic nurses go that House could sit in at their desk
without a nurse in sight during clinic hours? Lunch break?
House took a Vicodin upon coming into the exam room and seeing the nuns.
EUCHARIST: Show him your hands, Augustine.
The name was an early clue to the patient's backstory. St. Augustine
was a libertine until he converted to Christianity.
Sister Pius' name was pretty simply demonstrated.
I didn't hit on an obvious meaning for Sister Eucharist's vocational
name, though. Bread, wafer, body, Host ... nothing jumped out. That
which needs to make the transformation between the temporal to the holy?
A name assigned to her to remind her of the task of starting with
worldly shortcomings and achieving spiritual goals? The
transubstantiation of base matter through the Divine spark? She was
pretty easily distracted by pettiness. Apart from that, I got nuttin'.
HOUSE: I've been a doctor for years. Why do I have to keep
assuring people that I know what I'm doing?
Considering that House doesn't trust most other doctors either, how
would his patients know to make a distinction between him and lesser
doctors except by questioning? Was he insisting that others have a
faith he does not practice himself?
HOUSE: You want some water?
AUGUSTINE: I have some tea.
I knew the tea would be implicated at the outset, because there was no
other plot reason to introduce it, but it could have just as easily been
a red herring for the doctors as a genuine problem. Fortunately, it
didn't stop there, but with the nuns portrayed as unwilling to move five
steps without their tachycardia tea, I had to wonder if maybe it had a
little too much chemical oomph and dependency for an unworldly order of
nuns.
On the other hand, they didn't share the clue of the tattoo with us
until later, so it wasn't like we could have been expected to keep up
with that.
HOUSE: How do you solve a problem like dermatitis?
Do kids today even see _The Sound of Music_?
EUCHARIST: Doctor? I want to thank you for your patience.
WILSON: [To House] She talking to you?
HOUSE: [To Wilson] I don't know. She's certainly looking
at me.
EUCHARIST: Oh, it's good to get a secular diagnosis. The
sisters tend to interpret their illnesses as divine
intervention.
HOUSE: And you don't? Then you're wearing an awfully funny
hat.
WILSON: Ooh boy. Excuse me. [Exits.]
lol.
EUCHARIST: If I break my leg, I believe it happened for a
reason. I believe God wanted me to break my leg. I
also believe He wants me to put a cast on it.
House smiled a little at this. He and Sister Eucharist didn't get off
to such a bad start.
I liked how for once the zebra was a clinic walk-in, disproving House's
contention that the clinic yields only boring cases. But it shouldn't
happen often since that would undermine the premise that they're truly
zebras. It's especially improbable that out of all the potential
doctors an unsuspecting zebra might see at the clinic, the zebra would
just happen to be assigned to the hospital's #1 zebra specialist purely
by chance as he logged his clinic hours.
ACT I
5:02
Fancy. Shooting Cuddy's reflection off a glass Christmas ornament.
CUDDY: You diagnosed the patient with allergies and prescribed
antihistamine. She went into respiratory distress, and
you injected her with epinephrine. Presumably one cc.
HOUSE: POINT-one cc. That is the standard dose. That is what I
gave her.
CUDDY: People don't go into cardiac arrest from point-one cc
epinephrine.
The first time a symptom happened to be one of the potential side
effects of treatment.
HOUSE: She must have a preexisting heart condition that got
exacerbated by the epinephrine.
CUDDY: It's too bad you didn't make a notation in the chart.
Zing.
FOREMAN: That wouldn't give you an elevated eosinophil count.
Slight spoonerism. Epps pronounced it "eosiphonil" and they let it
stand.
HOUSE: What the hell are those?
CAMERON: Candy canes.
HOUSE: Candy CANES? Are you mocking me?
CAMERON: No! It, it's Christmas and, I, I, I thought --
HOUSE: Relax. It's a joke.
As I suspected, though I previously had no proof, House doesn't give a
rat's ass about gimp jokes.
FOREMAN: If it was any other attending doctor, I'd say that he
made a mistake and gave her too much epinephrine.
HOUSE: Saying you wouldn't say it was my mistake is saying it
WAS my mistake.
FOREMAN: Everyone screws up. Your rule. I think you fit within
the subset of everyone.
Fair point.
Unless I read House's medical soap radically wrong, the sportive beach
scene that dazzled the nuns was from the cancelled Fox show _North
Shore_ (per the acknowledgement in the closing credits).
FOREMAN: I don't trust a man who won't admit he might be wrong.
Not a bad point, but denying you made a mistake in a given instance
isn't the same thing as claiming general infallibility. House did admit
that the fellows were right and he was wrong in "Occam's Razor," when he
finally agreed that it wasn't two illnesses after all. (Actually it
was, since the cough wasn't induced by the colchicine, but, moving on.)
FOREMAN: I notice you weren't so quick to tell her she's got
Churg-Strauss and only has a couple years to live.
CAMERON: I don't tell patients bad news unless it's conclusive.
And sometimes not even then.
HOUSE: I recognize that confidence is not my short suit. I
also recognize that I am human and capable of error.
WILSON: So you might have screwed this up?
HOUSE: No.
WILSON: So, it's merely a theoretical capacity for error.
HOUSE: Good point. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe that's my error.
Cuddy and Wilson's discomfort with House's lack of self-doubt seemed to
predate Foreman's. Wilson almost talked House into killing his patient
with surgery in "Occam's Razor."
I had no problem with Santa Claus coming to the clinic, 'cause it was
just funny. It was fitting that the A plot was the religious side of
Christmas while the B side was the more commercial face of Christmas:
bloated, painful, and foul-smelling.
HOUSE: Studies have shown that cigarette smoking is one of the
most effective ways to control inflammatory bowel.
Nicotine gum or patches wouldn't do the trick?
AUGUSTINE: Well, I love to hear all about people.
CHASE: Yet you live in a monastery.
I originally thought nuns lived in nunneries, convents, and cloisters,
while it was monks who lived in monasteries, but a google search turned
up some nuns who were said to live in monasteries. I didn't stop to
pick up the nuances of the terminology, though.
AUGUSTINE: It's where I serve our Lord and the world best.
CHASE: Our Lord, maybe. The rest of the world, on the other
hand, would probably get more out of feeding the
homeless or --
This line sounded dubbed, and they cut away from Chase's face as he got
to the part about "feeding the homeless." It led me to suspect that the
example had originally been different, and they had second thoughts
after filming. I think they overdubbed "feeding the homeless" and hid
the lip desynchronization in the editing.
They seemed to be using the same prop as both the MRI machine and the CT
machine, and the same set for both functions. And the lighting effect
that I thought they were achieving with green lights is actually green
glass around the control room.
Since a CAT scan is a fancy 3-D x-ray, shouldn't the controllers have
been behind real lead and not just glass (even if it's leaded glass)?
CAMERON: I don't believe in God.
FOREMAN: You're not even a little agnostic?
CAMERON: I believe in a higher order that's in control of what
happens, but not one anthropomorphic entity called
"God" that's concerned with the everyday workings of
you and me.
Cameron's not a true atheist, then, although I forget the technical term
for belief in an Absolute principle or construct.
FOREMAN: What else is there to control but the everyday workings
of you and me?
CAMERON: It's always about you, Foreman.
FOREMAN: So what are you talking about? The trees, the fish?
Should they be the ones that think it's all about them?
What about you, Chase? Do you believe in God?
CHASE: I believe Sister Augustine has no vascular pathology,
which means no Churg-Strauss.
Foreman never actually declared, but the implication was that he's a
fairly conventional theist. Since he had no special interaction with
the nuns one way or the other, it was easy to infer that, unlike Chase,
he wasn't raised Catholic, nor is he Catholic now.
ACT II
14:05
FOREMAN: Patient tested positive for herpetic encephalitis.
I got that the encephalitis was probably from Augustine's compromised
immune system, and that that was why they didn't want to give her the
customary steroids to treat the encephalitis, since the usual treatment
would have just compromised her immune system more. But they never
mentioned treating the encephalitis, so was the theory that if they
could just improve her immune system function, it would fight off the
encephalitis on its own?
CUDDY: Oh, I know. Prednisone compromises the immune system.
Isn't that the medicine that you gave her for that
thing she doesn't have?
HOUSE: Yeah, that ... Hey. I'm thinking that's a trick
question.
Heh. The second time a symptom happened to be one of the potential side
effects of treatment.
HOUSE: In ten seconds, I'm gonna announce that I gave her the
wrong dose in the clinic.
CUDDY: You're gonna admit negligence?
HOUSE: Unless you leave the room. If you stay, you'll have to
testify. Five, four, three, two ... So, there I was,
in the clinic, drunk. I open the drawer, close my
eyes, take the first syringe I can find -- [Chase and
Cameron smile. Foreman shakes his head. Cuddy exits.]
rotfl.
HOUSE: I am both amused and annoyed that you think I should be
less stubborn than you are.
FOREMAN: You are aware of the Hippocratic Oath, right?
HOUSE: The one that starts, "First, do no harm," then goes on
to tell us no abortions, no seductions, and definitely
no cutting of those who labor beneath the stone. Yeah,
took a read once, wasn't impressed.
This pretty much summed up both the temperamental similarities and the
professional differences between House and Foreman in a nutshell. And
it was so like first-season House to check out the classical reference.
HOUSE: Every treatment has its dangers.
FOREMAN: Which is why we only treat if we're convinced the
patient actually needs the treatment.
HOUSE: I'm convinced. You're not. Question is, what are you
gonna do about it? Hmm?
Interesting that House practically challenged Foreman to go over his
head.
CUDDY: [Into phone] I have an opening Thursday at three. Do
you have a fourth? Is he any good?
Tennis, I'd guess, since we know Cuddy has played the sport.
There was a small menorah on Cuddy's desk when Foreman went in to see
her. It wasn't there the day before when she gave House 24 hours before
reporting him to the disciplinary board. (And it took me this long to
notice it. In my defense, most of it probably wouldn't be visible
unless you had a widescreen copy.) It was in the lower right-hand
corner of the screen while Cuddy was on the phone.
Freestanding signage:
CHAPEL
[Star of David,
Muslim Crescent & Star,
Christian Cross,
Buddhist Wheel,
Hindu? symbol]
Holiday Service
7 pm
It was pretty rude for House to watch TV in the chapel when someone
wanted to pray in it. It wasn't like he didn't have an office to
himself.
TV DOC: So, who's your favorite reindeer, Nurse Arnold?
TV NURSE: Mm, Rudolph.
TV DOC: I would have thought it was Vixen.
TV NURSE: What are you implying?
TV DOC: Nothing. But I saw you at the Christmas party with
Dr. Riles and Dr. Jorkins and Nurse Crandall.
TV NURSE: I was just doing some Christmas dancing.
TV DOC: Right [...] pole dancing [....]
TV NURSE: How dare you? Besides [....]
They didn't credit the soap players, but neither did they credit a real-
world soap source. The dialogue sounded too hokey even for a soap, so
I'm betting it was fake footage. I thought maybe Robert Sean Leonard
and Jennifer Morrison were doing the voices, but I was probably
imagining it.
EUCHARIST: Sister Augustine believes in things that aren't real.
HOUSE: I thought that was a job requirement for you people.
This was the first definitive indication in the series that House is an
atheist, and not merely irreverent.
EUCHARIST: She's been known to lie -- to get sympathy. She's a
hypochondriac.
HOUSE: So, you're warning me that I may be treating a
nonexistent ailment.
EUCHARIST: Sore throats, joint pains. There's always something
wrong, and there's never a reason for it.
I guess one of the footnotes to "Everybody lies" is that people
sometimes tell the truth just to throw you off.
HOUSE: So, we've got pride, anger, envy, gluttony. That's
four out of seven deadly sins in under two minutes.
I loved that House could name the seven deadly sins.
EUCHARIST: They say you have a gift.
HOUSE: THEY like to talk.
I had to wonder who "they" were, to dish to strangers so quickly.
EUCHARIST: You hide behind your intelligence.
HOUSE: Yeah, that's pretty stupid.
EUCHARIST: And you make jokes because you're afraid to take
anything seriously. Because if you take things
seriously, they matter, and if they matter --
HOUSE: And when things go wrong, I get hurt. I'm not tough;
I'm vulnerable.
This made me laugh, because House mocked the obvious cliche of the
character who goes on the offensive out of fear and insecurity. He was
obviously familiar with the cliche, but was neither fazed nor bothered
by it.
EUCHARIST: I barely know you, and I don't know if I'm right. I
just hope I am. Because the alternative is, you
really are as miserable as you seem to be.
Well, it's a popular theory. We've heard Cuddy subscribe to it.
Rebecca in the pilot seemed to as well. Wilson would weigh in on this
side. House doesn't seem to agree, though.
HOUSE: You know, from the way you're looking at me right
now, I'd say you just hit number five: lust.
[Eucharist returns the candy bar and exits.]
Not full-blown lust, but it was probably the longest and most intimate
conversation Sister Eucharist had had with a man who wasn't a priest or
a family member since she took her vows. Plus, she was sitting close
enough to get a snootful of pheromones.
Eucharist was trying to have a cozy tete a tete, an imagined meeting of
minds, and House drove her off. He didn't care for her hypocrisy? Her
dismissal of a manifestly real medical ailment as hypochondria? Her
getting in a stranger's face unbidden and presuming he shared her taste
for backbiting? Her getting in a stranger's face unbidden and presuming
to tell him what was wrong with his life? His being interrupted in the
middle of his soap? He's competitive by nature and couldn't resist
showing her what it's really like to read people well?
They never flashed the brand at the camera (Cadbury's too cheap to pay
for product placement?), but the chocolate bar had the right color
wrapper to be Cadbury's, and I could make out the letters "D[...]RY
MI[...]", making Cadbury's Dairy Milk(tm) bar a shoe-in.
CUDDY: She comes in with a rash and you put her into cardiac
arrest.
HOUSE: That well just never runs dry, does it?
Heh.
This conversation between House and Cuddy took place during a master
steadicam shot that was designed to confuse the audience. But if you
paid attention, you could see them walk three sides of a square (the
usual second-floor set), only to arrive at House's office (on the fourth
floor), which they could have gotten to faster by walking along only the
fourth side of the square. _The West Wing_ would do this sometimes too,
make characters walk around the set aimlessly while the audience wasn't
supposed to notice that they could have gotten where they wanted to go a
lot faster by taking a more direct route.
HOUSE: Look, we obviously have a difference of opinion, and
that's fine, but unfortunately I've used up all the time
I've budgeted today for banging my head against a wall.
That one's proved useful.
House smiled as he spotted Foreman in the background and figured out
that Foreman had set Cuddy in motion to take House off the case.
ACT III
21:12
CUDDY: We're gonna treat the symptoms.
CAMERON: Not the underlying condition?
CUDDY: There is no underlying condition. What's her status?
Though House and Cuddy approached the case from different sides, they
both made the same initial mistake of assuming there was nothing more
that needed to be known about the case.
CHASE: The sister's breathing is labored.
CUDDY: Pneumonitis from the hyperbaric chamber.
The third time a symptom happened to be one of the potential side
effects of treatment. Each of the first three acts opened with this
accusation.
WILSON: Can't get enough of this place, huh?
HOUSE: Came for my stethoscope.
WILSON: So, I shouldn't read too much into the fact that you
were looking for it in the drawer with the epinephrine
syringes in it?
HOUSE: O.K. Yeah. I'd like to clear my reputation.
WILSON: Oh, right. I forgot how much you care about what people
think.
As a pretty sweeping rule, House hasn't cared what other people think.
He seemed to have complete equanimity, apart from annoyance at being
interfered with, whenever other people would doubt his abilities. And
yet he did look alarmed at being caught rummaging in the exam room
drawer. He seemed to be afraid to let others see *him* doubt himself,
or even appear to doubt himself. (It was a little contrived that the
exam room door was left conveniently open even though House didn't want
to be interrupted, and Wilson just happened to walk by and look in, but
whatever.)
The folder that House reached for in Cuddy's secretary's office had
"[??? ???] / INVENTORY STATS" on the spine.
WILSON: You're not here to find your stethoscope. You're not
here to clear your reputation. You're here because
you're having doubts. You might have screwed up.
HOUSE: I'm here because, if I'm right, Cuddy is killing that
patient.
WILSON: O.K. But if you're wrong?
HOUSE: Then she's saving her.
WILSON: Fine. You're gonna have to go through every record of
every patient who's been through this clinic in the last
two days. And you're gonna have to hope that those
records can be trusted. Which, by the way, yours can't.
Zing!
Augustine's pulse rate:
CHASE: One oh four.
Except that Chase took her pulse for all of five seconds, which isn't a
good sample.
If someone popped a yo-yo at me, no matter how good they were at keeping
it from hitting me, I'd steal their cane the next time they weren't
looking. Assuming that asking nicely not to do it wouldn't work. Which
I'm assuming.
CHASE: My mother's been dead for ten years.
The first mention of Chase's mother, and the first datum to later figure
into the Chase time-line anomalies.
HOUSE: I have a theory about what makes good boys good. It's
not because of some moral imperative. Good boys have the
fear of God put into them. Catholic Church specializes
in that kind of training, to make good boys afraid of
Divine retribution so they'll do what their daddies tell
'em, like, for example, going into medical school when
it's the last thing they wanna do. What do you think?
CHASE: I think if she did have a secret, her boss would know.
Unlike the case with House's racist or sexual harassment provocations on
general principle, this religious provocation took a personal turn.
Chase flinched, but kept an even tone. Because House is House and
because Chase flinched, there was probably something to what House said,
but as with House's first guess about Cameron's issues, it probably
wasn't 100% on the money either. For one thing, it didn't sound like
Chase dropped out of seminary because his father told him to go to
medical school instead, but because of a crisis of faith.
There's something almost clinical about the way House prods people,
poking around until he finds the wound.
I liked Mother Superior. Except for initially sticking to the party
line about Augustine's past, she was down to earth and had a sense of
humor.
The copper cookware was dutifully placed in the monastery kitchen and
refectory in full view of House and the audience.
CUDDY: [To House] What's this? Hemlock?
Possibly House's love of Socrates was wider known than just Wilson.
This episode was filmed after "The Socratic Method," though aired
before.
Just after House tossed the tea bag at Cuddy, the angle of the shot made
it seem like he was standing under some mistletoe. A little director's
joke? "Kiss me, I cracked the case"?
FOREMAN: And if you take the cardiac arrest out of the equation --
HOUSE: -- all the rest of the symptoms can be explained by a
severe long-term allergic reaction.
FOREMAN: Well, that's what Cameron said in the beginning.
HOUSE: Yes, she did. [To Cameron] Well done. But your
unwillingness to stick by your diagnosis almost killed
this woman. Take a lesson from Foreman: stand up for
what you believe.
House doesn't want yes-men around him. That's why I suspect that
Foreman is his favorite (or at least used to be) and why Foreman has the
most prestigious of the three fellowships, despite the fact that Foreman
has always given House the hardest time.
What I don't think the second-season writers appreciate about the
history between House and Foreman is that their clashes weren't a simple
king-of-the-hill contest between two alpha males, nor did either of them
treat it as a race to see who could come up with the right diagnosis the
quickest. They had profound philosophical differences as doctors going
right back to first principles, and House respected the fact that
Foreman stuck to his guns. Foreman's medical conservatism wasn't about
fear. It was about doing what he thought was right. And at least in
the first season, House's medical radicalism didn't always work each and
every time. No, Cuddy didn't have the right answer either, but if she
hadn't taken House off the case, he would have missed the diagnosis
because he was insistent on a single cause for all the symptoms. By
forcing House off an unproductive line of inquiry and into gathering
more information, Foreman and Cuddy made positive contributions, which I
don't think the second-season writers grasp.
Nowadays, Foreman isn't portrayed as medically conservative, but as
chicken. He's no longer independently principled, but contentiously
ambitious. Cuddy isn't portrayed as intervening, but as merely
meddling. House isn't radical; he's magical. They all used to put
patient care first. Now it's just a competition.
AUGUSTINE: Can the other sisters come in and pray with me?
CHASE: It'd be better if you don't have any visitors.
The clean room had an intercom to the outside in "Occam's Razor." But
it would have spoiled Chase's big scene if Augustine had chosen that
option.
CHASE: [Augustine begins to cry.] I-I can pray with you.
AUGUSTINE: I don't wanna die. Why has He left me?
CHASE: I was in seminary school. They asked us once what
our favorite passage was. I chose First Peter,
chapter one, verse seven: "These trials only test
your faith to see whether or not it is strong and
pure. Your faith is being tested as fire tests gold
and purifies it."
AUGUSTINE: "And your faith is far more precious to the Lord than
mere gold; so if your faith remains strong after
being tested, it will bring you much praise and glory
and honor on the day of His return."
Interesting. I looked for this biblical translation online (including
all the English translations at Gateway), but the only clear sources
were quotes from this episode of _House_. Presumably they used a
Catholic version that the Church doesn't like to put on the web.
CHASE: He hasn't left you. The only thing in the way of you
knowing He's there is your fear. You have a choice:
faith or fear. That's the test.
AUGUSTINE: Choosing faith doesn't mean I won't die.
CHASE: But it will affect how you experience your death, and
therefore your life. It's up to you.
AUGUSTINE: Why did you leave seminary school?
CHASE: That test? You passed. I didn't.
I suppose there was a chance Chase could have been faking, but he seemed
sincere to me. The implication was that he was estranged from the
Catholic Church in particular, but he was still a believer in general.
The fellows should have been wearing masks in the clean room, but I can
understand the director not wanting to cover Chase's face during his big
scene with Augustine.
When Augustine went into shock in the clean room, I was beginning to
suspect she was allergic to her own tattoo for lack of other culprits.
ACT IV
33:26
HOUSE: How do you get an allergic reaction in a clean room?
The medical equivalent of the locked-room mystery.
WILSON: Maybe it was the preservatives in the IV?
HOUSE: Checked that.
WILSON: Latex tubing?
HOUSE: Checked that. Checked everything.
But I wondered how Team House checked them since Cameron had said
earlier they'd have problems testing for specific allergens because
Augustine was currently too reactive, that "She'd test positive to
everything." Did they just find substitutes for all these materials?
WILSON: Well, it could be mast-cell leukemia. It can cause
anaphylaxis.
HOUSE: Checked the blood levels. And it's not eosinophilia or
idiopathic anaphylaxis.
WILSON: Maybe it's just Divine will.
From oncology to ontology in one step. It sounded like Wilson is an
ill-defined believer.
HOUSE: It's not my will. [Takes a Vicodin.]
WILSON: You do realize, if you're wrong -- about the big
picture, that is -- you're going to burn, right?
Pascal's Wager presumes that everyone would necessarily rate staying out
of Hell as their number one priority, though. I don't see House
agreeing.
HOUSE: What do you want me to do? Just accept it? Pack it in?
WILSON: Yeah. I want you to accept that sometimes patients die
against all reason. And sometimes they get better
against all reason.
HOUSE: No, they don't. We just don't know the reason.
WILSON: I think the nuns would agree with you on that.
CAMERON: I just wanted to say that I know that you did
everything you could.
HOUSE: I don't need verification from you to know that I'm
doing my job well. That's your problem, not mine.
Making explicit House's lack of need for approval.
CAMERON: Merry Christmas. [Hands House a small wrapped box.]
House's initial (lack of) reaction didn't surprise me at all. His later
reaction did, though.
It did not register at all the first time I saw this that House was
wearing a white lab coat when he went to visit Augustine. (The fellows
had worn special yellow gowns to work inside the clean room.)
House's trip to talk to Augustine in the clean room was either the
longest or second-longest excursion I could remember him making without
the cane in the first season. (The other contender being House's trip
to talk to Sean in "Babies & Bathwater.")
AUGUSTINE: This illness is a test of my faith. If it's His will
to take me, it doesn't matter where I am. I can
accept that.
HOUSE: Does anybody believe anything you say? You're not
accepting. You're running away. Just like you
always do.
House's talk with Augustine was essentially a theological variation on
his talk with Rebecca in the pilot: House gets told the patient wants to
go home to die, so he tries to talk her out of it in his hand-holding-
is-for-wimps manner, but is unsuccessful. In the pilot, though, Rebecca
was insisting on hard proof of the problem within. Here, House was the
one still looking for hard proof of the problem within. He had a
theological out, though. He could have told Augustine that it's
presumptuous to assume that God wants you to give up trying to live
before all the options have been exhausted. It did indeed sound like
she was running away, even when viewed from within the structure of her
own belief system.
AUGUSTINE: Why is it so difficult for you to believe in God?
HOUSE: What I have difficulty with is the whole concept of
belief. Faith isn't based on logic and experience.
A rigid epistemologist. House would amend this later, though.
AUGUSTINE: I experience God on a daily basis, and the miracle of
life all around. The miracle of birth, the miracle
of love. He is always with me.
HOUSE: Where is the miracle in delivering a crack-addicted
baby? Hmm? Then watching her mother abandon her
'cause she needs another score. "Miracle of love."
You're over twice as likely to be killed by the
person you love than by a stranger.
A Dostoyevskian rationale for atheism, essentially, "When bad people
happen to good people." In fact, David Shore has a Dostoyevskian
ability to honestly represent skeptical positions despite being a
believer himself. <http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=7484>
AUGUSTINE: When I was fifteen, I was on every kind of birth
control known to man, and I still got pregnant. I
blamed God. I hated Him for ruining my life, but
then I realized something. You can't be angry with
God and not believe in Him at the same time. No one
can. Not even you, Doctor House.
True, but I've never gotten the impression that House was angry with
God. House just usually demands irrefutable proof, which is
incompatible with faith.
WILSON: How'd it go?
HOUSE: She has God inside her. It would have been easier to
deal with a tumor.
WILSON: Maybe she's allergic to God.
And House had an epiphany.
Reprising Bryan Singer's trick of shooting House through the x-ray he's
looking at.
HOUSE: The copper cross, a form of birth control pulled off the
market in the 'eighties.
I had to wonder if the high-concept pitch for this episode was, "Nun
undone by cross."
AUGUSTINE: You told me your favorite passage. Would you like to
hear mine? [Chase nods.] "Celebrate and be glad,
because your brother was dead and is alive again."
CHASE: The Prodigal Son.
AUGUSTINE: He'll be waiting for you when you're ready.
Said one prodigal to another.
WILSON: The sixth circle of Hell.
Said one heretic to another.
HOUSE: Confined in a sweat box with a bloody nose and all the
tissues are soggy.
WILSON: I think that's the seventh.
HOUSE: Nope. The seventh is when you --
WILSON: God, you must be fun at parties.
HOUSE: I think we both know the flaw in that theory.
lol.
HOUSE: Told you I didn't screw up.
WILSON: You screwed up.
HOUSE: I gave her point-one cc of epinephrine.
WILSON: Yeah, and if Cuddy hadn't taken you off the case, you
would have killed her.
Not that Foreman and Cuddy had the answer either, but at least they
forced House off of his single-minded determination to make all the
symptoms fit one diagnosis and got him working on a more productive
angle.
WILSON: You want to come over for Christmas dinner?
HOUSE: You're Jewish.
But Wilson sounded pretty well assimilated if this was anything to go
by. He sounded like he believes in something nebulous, mysterious, and
unknowable, but he didn't sound particularly observant.
WILSON: Yeah. Hanukkah dinner. What-What do you care? It's
food, it's people.
HOUSE: No thanks.
WILSON: Maybe I'll come to your place.
HOUSE: Your wife doesn't mind being alone at Christmas?
WILSON: I'm a doctor. She's used to being alone. [Off House's
look.] I don't want to talk about it.
HOUSE: Neither do I.
The first indication of Wilson's marital problems. Given House's look
and his acute nosiness, though, I think he would have listened had
Wilson kept talking.
CUDDY: [Enters. To House.] You did good with the nun.
Congratulations.
HOUSE: Thank you.
CUDDY: Merry Christmas, Doctor House. Doctor Wilson. [Exits.]
WILSON: [To Cuddy] Good night. [To House] That was sweet.
It was at that. Cuddy didn't mitigate her praise, and House didn't
throw it back in her face.
The first of the closing montages.
Holy cow. House actually laughed (though they didn't bother to tell us
at what). I don't know what it is about Wilson that makes him the
exception to the rule, but he must be doing something right.
I still couldn't tell for sure that it was Foreman in the Santa suit,
but logically, it had to be him, since the closing montage dealt with
the regulars, not with random black guys volunteering at the hospital.
This was the first time House played the piano onscreen. I really miss
House playing the piano. I think the last time he did was in "Role
Model."
House giving Cameron a Christmas present was one of the very few times
in the first season when I thought they wrote House as out of character.
I REALLY couldn't see him as the type to think, "Well, I wasn't going to
get you a Christmas present, but now that you've given me one, I have to
give you one too." I cannot see House as a slave to social obligation,
not after the way they've portrayed him as ignoring social obligation at
best and flouting it at worst.
It's worth noting that Cuddy did some hands-on medicine in this ep.,
both when she tried to treat Augustine's symptoms, and when she saw
patients on Christmas Eve.
I was delighted that many of the characters were allowed to weigh in
with their religious views, delivering what amounted to a composite
group portrait of belief, and I appreciated that no one changed their
mind. The believers' belief remained intact, the unbelievers didn't
suddenly embrace God, and the heterodox still walked to one side of the
primrose path. True conversions aren't that common in real life either.
The only regular who didn't weigh in was Cuddy, who's apparently
ethnically Jewish but didn't make any spiritual or doctrinal
declarations. She might have been seeing patients on Christmas as a
_mitzvah_ to let the Gentiles be with their families, or because she's
management and she was letting some staff have the holiday off. Nice
boss either way.
Someone was listed as "Priest" in the closing credits. Perhaps they
meant the officiator at the chapel service the nuns attended at the end,
but that wasn't a speaking role and barely even counted as an extra.
Maybe there was a different priest part originally, but it got cut?
Based on the wardrobe changes and dialogue mentions, the action took
place on five distinct days, the first four being continuous and the
last one possibly being several days later.
"Damned If You Do": Well, this could be read a million different ways
given that anytime you take action and something goes wrong, you're
damned for doing it. Just about the only characters in the entire
episode that didn't do something wrong were Sister Pius and Mother
Superior. But particularly in House's case, everything he tried at
first just got him more condemnation from Cuddy. (That must have been
interesting to plot, such that each new symptom of Augustine's just
happened to be a potential side effect of House's previous treatment, or
alleged treatment, so that he'd always be under a cloud of suspicion.)
And on a lighter note, House and Wilson joked about literary forms of
damnation in the prologue and epilogue.
Then there was the literal, theological interpretation of the title set
up for us in the episode. Augustine and, to an extent, even Chase and
Wilson were ready to resign themselves to what they expected was God's
will in Augustine's ailment. House rejected Divine will, either as
explanation or as guidance, and forged ahead, despite Wilson's warning
that if he was wrong about the whole God thing, he was going to Hell.
There was a theological fallacy in this, though. Unless you're a member
of a sect that rejects medical intervention (e.g., the Christian
Scientists), it's not blasphemy or rebellion to reject medical failure
until all options have been exhausted.
Vicodin count: 2
Medical synopsis:
A plot
rash, swelling
Diagnosis: contact dermatitis
diphenhydramine
asthma attack
.1 cc epinephrine
tachycardia, cardiac arrest
CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation)
CBC
mildly elevated eosinophil count and sed rate
ANA (antinuclear antibody) test (negative)
Diagnosis: Churg-Strauss vasculitis
40 mg. prednisone TID (_ter in die_, three times/day)
chest CT (negative)
olfactory hallucinations, nausea, religious visions, seizure, rash,
temporal lobe swelling
Ativan
Secondary diagnosis: herpetic encephalitis
Primary diagnosis: mixed connective tissue disease
ANA test
hyperbaric oxygen chamber
sore throats, joint pains
labored breathing
Diagnosis: pneumonitis from the hyperbaric chamber
40% oxygen
rising BUN (blood urea nitrogen) and creatinine, ALT (alanine
aminotransferase) and AST (aspartate aminotransferase) twice the normal
range
Diagnosis: liver and kidney distress from the cardiac arrest
labs
nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug
lungs and kidneys worsening, fever, spreading rash
Secondary diagnosis: cardiac arrest from the interaction of epinephrine
and figwort tea
Primary diagnosis: long-term systemic allergic reaction
clean room
anaphylactic shock
.1 cc epinephrine
intubation
whole-body CT scan
Final diagnosis: long-term systemic allergic reaction to copper
surgery to remove copper IUD (intrauterine device)
Clinic patient:
bloody diarrhea, gas, pain
Diagnosis: inflammatory bowel disease
one cigarette twice a day
--