HOUSE, M.D.: 3. "Occam's Razor"
Micky DuPree
was better than the pilot and could have even served as the first
episode if for some reason the pilot had been pulled. It not only gave
us a good snapshot of all the characters, but it also broke down for us
how the methodology of differential diagnostics both drove the plot and
illuminated character. It told us the most about House, of course: his
playing the numbers, the rationality, the emotional detachment, the
associative flashes, the arrogance, the obsessiveness, the reluctance to
work on cases that don't really need a diagnostician, and finally, his
reliance on the old Sherlock Holmes adage about how, after you've
eliminated the impossible, whatever's left, however improbable, must be
the truth. But it also told us things about the other characters, like
how they sometimes took different approaches from House's, notably
Wilson's caring approach, Foreman's difficulty in believing how House
worked the probabilities, and Cuddy's refusal to see House's prima donna
behavior as doing him any favors in the long run.
Elapsed time numbers are for the DVD copy.
PROLOGUE
This was the episode that reportedly had its sex scene in the prologue
trimmed and a warning added when it was repeated. I'm not sure what the
fuss was about though. The characters were college students, so
presumably they were legally adults, and as TV sex scenes go, this one
was pretty tame. Maybe I watch too much HBO. On broadcast channels,
"safe sex" seems to mean keeping your underwear on to make sure the
camera doesn't see anything.
ACT I
2:48
HOUSE: Why do you want me to treat this guy?
WILSON: Blood pressure's not responding to IV fluids.
HOUSE: No, no, I didn't ask how you plan to con me into
treating him. I asked you why YOU want me to treat him.
WILSON: He's sick. I care. I'm pathetic.
HOUSE: There are about a billion sick people on the planet.
Why this one?
WILSON: Because this one's in our emergency room.
HOUSE: Ah, so it's a proximity issue. If somebody was sick in
the third-floor stairwell, that's who we would be
talking about.
WILSON: Yes, I checked the stairwell. It's clear.
HOUSE: O.K. then. Emergency room guy it is.
WILSON: Wait. Why was that so easy?
HOUSE: You know why.
WILSON: Blood pressure's not responding to IV fluids?
HOUSE: Yeah, that's just weird.
If the production numbers are anything to go by, this was the next
episode shot after the pilot. Like Wilson's scene with Rebecca in the
pilot, this scene established that the two character foils, Wilson and
House, have each found different impetuses for practicing medicine,
caring for the patient at hand vs. solving only difficult puzzles. It
also introduced the idea that House is curious about other doctors'
motives for practicing medicine.
HOUSE: CBC was unremarkable.
Later, though, we would learn that colchicine kills your white blood
cell count, so why did Brandon have an "unremarkable" complete blood
count? Does the white blood count recover *that* quickly once the
colchicine is ceased? (And geez, colchicine sounds a lot worse than the
gout it's supposed to treat.)
People Who Shoot in Glass Sets Dept.:
You could see the reflection of a crew member in white pants (bermuda
shorts?) in the glass of House's office just before House went to fetch
the book to plop down in front of Foreman.
All that glass in the sets has its tradeoffs. On the plus side, it
gives directors a lot of extra choices, like deliberately shooting both
a reflection in the glass and what lies beyond the glass at the same
time (there was a nice shot of Chase's reflection as he watched House do
research in this ep.), pulling back for longer shots in a cramped space
by shooting through glass walls, and even what seemed to become an
emblematic shot of House spying on patients from afar through a glass
wall, but not wanting to enter the patient's room.
At the same time, though, keeping the crew and equipment, not only out
of the camera frame, but also from reflecting in all that glass that's
in the camera frame, must be a constant headache.
HOUSE: Foreman, if you're going to list all the things it's not,
it might be quicker to do it alphabetically.
House got on Foreman's case for offering up what the ailment wasn't, but
Foreman wasn't the only one doing that.
The date on the screen of Brandon's cardiac evaluation was "19 JULY 04".
I suppose that was when the footage was actually shot. I'd be fine with
saying that that was the date of the story as well, but the characters
all had sweaters and jackets. You don't wear a leather jacket like
Chase did to go to a suburban pharmacy in New Jersey in the middle of
July, not even at night.
Cuddy's a southpaw. She was writing with her left hand when House
entered the clinic.
CUDDY: You're half an hour late.
HOUSE: Busy case load.
CUDDY: One case is not a load.
HOUSE: So how are we doing on cotton swabs today? If there's an
acute shortage, I could run home --
CUDDY: [Looks at his right leg and smiles.] No, you couldn't.
HOUSE: Nice.
This was the same woman that we would later be told was using guilt as
her fundamental method of approaching the world in general and possibly
even House in particular? Doesn't fly.
HOUSE: [Walks over to the waiting area full of patients.]
Hello, sick people and their loved ones! [Cuddy turns
and looks at him.] In the interest of saving time and
avoiding a lot of boring chitchat later, I'm Doctor
Gregory House. You can call me Greg. I'm one of three
doctors staffing this clinic this morning.
CUDDY: Short, sweet. Grab a file.
HOUSE: This ray of sunshine is Doctor Lisa Cuddy. Doctor Cuddy
runs this whole hospital, so unfortunately she's much too
busy to deal with you.
Actually, we would see Cuddy with a clinic patient at least once, in
"Babies & Bathwater."
HOUSE: I am a BOARD-[Looks at Cuddy.]-certified diagnostician
with a double specialty of infectious disease and
nephrology. I'm also the only doctor currently employed
at this clinic who's forced to be here against his will.
That is true, isn't it? [Turns to Cuddy. Cuddy just
looks at him.] But not to worry, because for most of you
this job could be done by a monkey with a bottle of
Motrin. Speaking of which, if you're particularly
annoying, you may see me reach for this. [Brandishes
pill bottle.] This is Vicodin. It's mine. You can't
have any. And no, I do not have a pain management
problem; I have a pain problem. But who knows? Maybe
I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too stoned to tell. So, who wants
me? [No one moves.] And who would rather wait for one
of the other two guys? [Everyone raises their hand.]
O.K., well, I'll be in exam room one if you change your
mind.
CUDDY: Jodi Matthews? [Jodi stands.] Please accompany Doctor
House to exam room one.
This remains one of the best speeches of the entire series, and
reinforces the idea that this episode was originally designed to come
second, because it more smoothly continued the clinic duty antagonism
between House and Cuddy where they left off in the pilot.
You could see where Hugh Laurie's hair is thinning on top during this
speech. They should have just left it that way and not started filling
it in. It's not like Laurie didn't turn into a strange sleeper sex
symbol anyway without the Hollywood glamour machine kicking into action.
MINDY: No, I was wondering if maybe I did this to him. I was
kind of rough.
Chase's wordless reaction as to how to take this confession was very
well done, more understated than Jesse Spencer's later reaction to
Cameron's sex speech.
HOUSE: [To Jodi] You're getting the most of your health
insurance while you still can.
Been there, done that.
JODI: I just don't like being told what to do.
HOUSE: I can get you in for a full body scan later this week.
lol. What a sweetie. This was one of the reasons why I think House can
sometimes find back avenues of empathy for his patients. If I revisit
"Humpty Dumpty," I'll revisit this point.
ACT II
9:58
Cameron was writing on the whiteboard in House's presence right after
the patient went into kidney failure. (She's right-handed.) Foreman
handled a marker in House's presence to put dots by the symptoms. (He's
a southpaw.)
CHASE: It's a ten-million-to-one shot.
FOREMAN: I thought that's what we dealt with here.
Foreman was all kitted out with his zebra gun this time.
HOUSE: [To Foreman] You read the book. Impressive.
House seemed to mean it, too. I couldn't see where Foreman found the
time, though. They were all still wearing their clothes from the first
day, so he couldn't have gone home and read it.
FOREMAN: Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is always the
best.
But Occam's Razor is a conceptual convenience, not a law of nature.
HOUSE: Each one of these conditions is about a thousand-to-one
shot. That means that any two of them happening at the
same time is a million-to-one shot. Chase says the
cardiac infection is a ten-million-to-one shot, which
makes my idea ten times better than yours. Get a
calculator, run the numbers.
Making explicit what has been implicit most of the time: they start with
what they consider to be the most likely diagnosis and work their way
through the probabilities.
Based on some of the longer tracking shots through the corridors in the
early episodes, I think they started out with a pretty limited set that
had to stand in for both the fourth floor, where the Dept. of Diagnostic
Medicine is located, and the second floor, where most of the A-plot
patients are housed, leading to the amusing sight of the characters
sometimes walking seamlessly from the second floor to the fourth without
their feet ever touching an elevator or staircase. Some directorial
cheats worked better than others. I think that as the first season
developed, they found the money to add some corridors and shift the
atrium around. Plus, I think they would redress the set by swapping
signs around and hoping we wouldn't notice it was the same set.
Personally, I'm very forgiving of budgetary limitations, and treat set-
spotting as a game to play on the side. It doesn't affect the story any
more than the fact that you can see that it's still the same stage in a
theater no matter how they redress it between acts. I started to get
annoyed only when they didn't bother to disguise the fact that they had
done massive remodeling at Princeton-Plainsboro between the seasons
without once writing a construction crew into the story (which might
have even had the potential for humor and plot complications).
FOREMAN: So, is that our job? House's puppets? He comes up
with an insane idea; we get to pretend it's not?
CAMERON: His insane ideas are usually right. We've been here
long enough to --
FOREMAN: You've been here long enough to have Stockholm
Syndrome. [Chase and Cameron laugh.]
ROTFL. Reinforcing the idea that Chase and Cameron had been there long
enough to watch House handle more cases, while Foreman was still
relatively new. There was probably even a grain of truth in the
"Stockholm Syndrome" crack.
CHASE: What? Because we don't hate him? He thinks outside
the box. Is that so evil?
FOREMAN: He has no idea where the box is!
An early clash of philosophies.
CHASE: She's weird, isn't she?
FOREMAN: Bad idea.
CHASE: What?
FOREMAN: Bad idea. You work with her.
CHASE: What did I say? Is 'weird' some new ghetto euphemism
for "sexy," like 'bad' is "good" and 'phat' is "good"?
Then what the hell does 'good' mean?
FOREMAN: "Ghetto euphemism"? You don't think she's hot?
CHASE: No.
FOREMAN: Wow. Well, then you're brilliant. And I am using
'brilliant' as a euphemism.
CHASE: Obviously, the girl is hot. I, you, you're not talking
about her aesthetics. You're talking about if I want
to jump her. I don't.
FOREMAN: Brilliant.
In a second season episode, Foreman would seem to give Chase a look that
undercut his approach here, which is why I prefer the interpretation
that Foreman was looking behind Chase at House, as if to say, "Damn,
how'd you do that?"
HOUSE: [To Cuddy] You once asked me why I think I'm always
right, and I realized that you're right. At least, I
think you're right. I don't really know now, do I?
[Cuddy smiles.]
Another direct reference to the pilot. Occam's Razor also says that the
simplest explanation is that House is right more often than not.
FOREMAN: I'm impressed.
CAMERON: Thank you, I was born to run gels.
FOREMAN: I meant about Chase.
CAMERON: What about Chase?
FOREMAN: Well, the man has no physical interest in you. He has
a completely professional relationship with you. He
respects you as a colleague and a doctor. And yet he
can't look at you without thinking sex.
CAMERON: Because I asked what kind of sex could kill you?
FOREMAN: You now have total control over your relationship with
him.
CAMERON: So, a woman can't express her interest in sex without
it being some professional power play?
HOUSE: No. If you look the way you do, and you say what you
said, you have to be aware of the effect that it's
gonna have on men.
I was wondering how House knew what Cameron said, but I watched it
again, and you could see his reflection approaching the lab at the
critical point.
CAMERON: Men should grow up.
HOUSE: Yeah. And dogs should stop licking themselves. It's
not gonna happen.
Then wasn't Chase the one that House should have been worried about
here? Like this was the last job in which Chase would ever be
confronted with a pretty female colleague? (Foreman managed to keep his
mind on work, and so did House.) Shouldn't men be more aware of the
effect it has on men? Or do women have the moral responsibility for
both their own behavior and for men's? 'Cause that's the same
fundamental argument used to justify female circumcision.
Given later plot developments, House's lecture to Cameron on how not to
rob the opposite sex of their reason struck me as highly ironic, and
possibly not even intended to be so by the writers.
In Cameron's place I would not have said what she said, and mostly for
the reasons House gave. But in House's place, I wouldn't have butted
in. Foreman was already doing a really adept job at the peer counseling
level of telling both Chase and Cameron where they had screwed up. For
House to eavesdrop and then add his two cents about how it was Cameron's
fault partly because of her appearance smacked too much of the old adage
about how rape victims are asking for it by virtue of how they look.
Plus, it was yet another explicit acknowledgment from House that he
thought Cameron was attractive (NOT helpful).
House took a Vicodin in the lab.
FOREMAN: It means the antibiotics didn't cause the kidney
failure. How'd you know?
HOUSE: Well, if you guys hadn't been so busy trying to prove
me wrong, you might have checked in on the poor kid.
FOREMAN: YOU visited a patient?
HOUSE: I was sitting by his bed all morning, just so he'd know
someone was there for him.
WILSON: I looked in on him. He's much better.
Wilson cares to an almost unprofessional degree. In fact, here, it
looked like he was reinforcing House's bad habits by picking up House's
slack.
WILSON: I get that you're not a big believer in the catching-
flies-with-honey approach, but do you honestly think
you'll collect a jarful by cleverly taunting them?
HOUSE: Flies, no. Doctors, sure. If I'd said to Foreman,
"Nice try, it was a great guess, but sorry, not this
time," what do you think he'd be doing right now?
WILSON: I think he'd be going home not feeling like a piece of
crap.
HOUSE: Exactly.
WILSON: You want him to feel like a piece of crap?
HOUSE: No. I don't want him going home.
One of the truly great things about House's clashes with Foreman was
that he worked it to the patient's advantage (or at least used to).
Instead of trying to browbeat Foreman into agreeing with him, House
would provoke him into justifying his own position, which sometimes even
meant proving House's theories wrong.
Cute. There was a shot in exam room one where the director had almost
framed House in pseudo-bars, like he was trapped in a cage, or
considered himself to be.
HOUSE: I figure she was on the eighth hole when I paged her.
So Cuddy plays golf as well as tennis? Or was House just making a
doctor joke to the patient?
FOREMAN: He's getting better. That doesn't prove you're right;
it just proves he's getting better. [House smiles.]
It, it's not two illnesses! It can't be two illnesses!
HOUSE: I am so glad you work here.
FOREMAN: If I'm right, the antibiotics you prescribed could box
his kidneys and liver, impeding his ability to fight
off the virus. Could kill him.
HOUSE: Well, that certainly would be a concern. Fifty bucks?
I wasn't sure whether House was betting that it was two illnesses, that
the antibiotics were working, or simply that the patient would get
better.
Since Foreman was determined to prove House wrong in spite of Brandon's
improvement, I was a little surprised that Foreman didn't hypothesize
that the problem was something environmental that being at the hospital
had gotten Brandon away from. Of course, that might have led to House
having the fellows do a b&e on Brandon's living quarters, which activity
Foreman wasn't crazy about in the pilot, but Foreman always had the
option of simply asking Brandon for a key and saying he was going to
check for asbestos.
FOREMAN: You wanna bet on the patient's health?
HOUSE: You think that's bad luck?
It usually is to bet against House on medical matters.
WILSON: [To House] Hey, Cuddy said you needed a consult.
What's up? I'm busy.
Cuddy was right. She's better at this game than House is.
I wasn't sure what the writers were trying to accomplish with Cameron's
sex speech to Chase, unless it was to first raise and then quash (for
the time being) all the potential questions of what do you do about
sexual tension in a professional environment. The only other answer I
could think of was just to indulge in some med school humor. It wasn't
like she wanted him to be interested in her, and despite the
discomforted look on his face, it wasn't like he continued to be
distracted by her past this episode. In fact, that kind of thing would
backfire more often than not. Cameron wasn't giving Chase too much of
what he wanted, which might have resulted in aversion overdose. She was
teasing him with too much of what he couldn't have, which in real life
could lead to obsession. It just looked obnoxious. Chase didn't even
start to ask Cameron out or otherwise *express* interest in her until
after her extended "hazards of sex" speech. As Foreman called it, Chase
was thrown off his game, but at least Chase had been keeping his private
thoughts private, which was completely professional.
FOREMAN: [To House] We were both wrong. White cell count is
down, way down, and dropping. His immune system is
shot. We need to get him into a clean room.
And bingo. House's provocation of Foreman did lead to Foreman catching
something that they might have otherwise let slide for too long
(although I still don't understand why Brandon's white cell count wasn't
suffering when he first showed up in the E.R.).
ACT III
23:51
HOUSE: The patient could have died.
CUDDY: The one with the pulled muscle?
HOUSE: Those symptoms are consistent with a dozen other
conditions. I, you know, I'm entitled to a consult.
CUDDY: You are not getting out of clinic duty.
HOUSE: Come on. You got a hundred other idiot doctors in this
building who go all warm and fuzzy every time they pull a
toy car out of a nose. You don't need me here.
CUDDY: No, I don't, but working with people actually makes you a
better doctor.
HOUSE: When did I sign up for that course?
CUDDY: When did I give you the impression that I care?
HOUSE: Working in this clinic obviously instills a deep sense of
compassion. [Starts to leave.] I've got your home
number, right? In case anything comes up at three
o'clock in the morning.
CUDDY: It's not gonna work. You know why? Because this is fun.
You think of something to make me miserable; I think of
something to make you miserable. It's a game. And I'm
gonna win, because I got a head start. You are already
miserable.
This was a perfect House-Cuddy exchange. I think she was right about
House working with people, plus she shouldn't let him out of a
contractual obligation just because he's whining or she's feeling sorry
for him. I was going to say that the only thing that surprised me was
that he didn't reach for the Vicodin during the exchange, but then he
walked out of her office and ordered 36. :)
There was a light-skinned woman with short, light-brown hair seated at
the desk in the space outside Cuddy's office. I'm guessing the reason
they never played up a secretarial role in the past was lack of budget
to pay another regular actor.
WILSON: What's with you and her?
HOUSE: Oh, don't.
WILSON: You have a thing for her? The only people who can get
to you --
HOUSE: No! There is not a thin line between love and hate.
There is, in fact, a Great Wall of China with armed
sentries posted every twenty feet between love and hate.
Cute, but I imagine that anyone who forces House to do something he
doesn't want to do will "get" to him.
WILSON: You will lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want, but
you're incapable of kissing a little ass?
I can't remember seeing House steal in the entire first season.
HOUSE: Yeah, well, we all have our limitations. [Grabs a pill
bottle and starts to leave.]
WILSON: House. Wrong bottle. [Exchanges pill bottles with
House.] Do me a favor. Take one of these, wait five
minutes for it to kick in, then find Cuddy and kiss her
ass.
HOUSE: What was the kid's first symptom? You did the history.
Of his eight hundred symptoms, which one hit him first?
Why did Wilson take the patient's history? Wilson had this case first
and then he enticed House into taking it. This made sense with Rebecca
in the pilot, who had been initially diagnosed with an elusive tumor.
But we know from the dialogue that Brandon in "Occam's Razor" entered
the hospital via the emergency room. What was Wilson doing down in the
emergency room taking a history when there was no talk of suspected
cancer until much later in the evolution of the case? I'd like to
fanwank it as the E.R. docs realizing this one was a real stumper, but
they were afraid of House, so they took it to Wilson and asked him to
pitch the case to House.
There was no door to a balcony in House's office here, where one day
there would be.
Visual continuity glitch:
House was thumping his cane on the floor as he stared at the whiteboard,
but when they reversed on the board, the cane was lying across the desk
and the other contents were shifted about.
I love it when we get to see House actually doing research instead of
him just magically knowing everything there is to know in the universe.
So there was no big "Aha!" moment in this episode, just an associative
suspicion that sent him down the right path.
HOUSE: Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is almost always
that somebody screwed up.
I like this version better. Of course, Foreman already stated it as a
corollary to "Everybody lies" in the pilot.
HOUSE: O.K. Two people screwed up. Not as simple as one,
but ...
Heh. Works for me.
FATHER: How can you treat someone without meeting them?
HOUSE: It's easy if you don't give a crap about him.
Of all the things that might reasonably have caused one to say "Huh?"
about this show right from the beginning, the idea that House would have
such delicate sensibilities as to use euphemisms is the one I have the
hardest time buying. In real life, someone like House wouldn't flinch
from using any curse word in front of almost anybody.
HOUSE: 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.
An early lesson in physician objectivity, although given how readily
House spots what others don't, I don't think it could hurt for him to
physically examine his patients.
CHASE: This is cough medication. This is what Brandon was
supposed to get. [Displays three pills.] They're
small, round, and yellow. Can you tell this man what
the pills in your son's medicine bottle actually looked
like?
MOTHER: They were small, round, and yellow, exactly like this.
MINDY: Those were the pills that Brandon was taking.
Why didn't Chase take a few back to be analyzed? Occam's Razor doesn't
prohibit someone from making the same mistake twice.
HOUSE: This doesn't bother you?
WILSON: That you were wrong? I try to work through the pain.
HOUSE: I was not wrong. Everything I said was true. It fit.
It was elegant.
WILSON: So, reality was wrong.
HOUSE: Reality is almost always wrong. [Takes Vicodin.] The
cough medicine did something. Aggravated the condition.
It's all over the place. Must be in his blood.
WILSON: What if it is his blood?
HOUSE: Lymphoma?
WILSON: Unless you've got something better.
HOUSE: Well, we foolishly ruled out lymphoma because his CT
scan showed no adenopathy, CBC showed a normal differen.
smear, bone marrow showed no --
WILSON: Screw the tests. Do an exploratory laparotomy and find
out what's in there.
HOUSE: He has no blood pressure, no immune system, and no
kidneys. Surgery will kill him.
WILSON: Yeah, you're right. Let's stick with the wrong-pill
theory.
HOUSE: I'll schedule him for surgery.
Yeesh. At least based on this example, House was right. He's better
off not doubting himself, because when he does, he lets himself be
talked into stupid decisions. And Wilson looked like a classic case of
the specialist who interprets everything through his own specialty,
which I guess was why he was urging an otherwise ridiculously risky
procedure with no certain benefit.
ACT IV
34:23
At this point I had to wonder what a neurologist was doing snaking
things into someone's heart.
CAMERON: He can't tolerate any cardiac arrhythmia. Pull back.
FOREMAN: He needs the surgery.
Wow, conservative Foreman caught the wrongly radical bug from House, who
caught it from Wilson.
HOUSE: I get to knock off an hour early today. Know why?
`Cause I kissed my boss' ass.
Damn! I'd have given a lot to hear that conversation. It was
interesting that House could bring himself to work under Cuddy, if
recalcitrantly.
HOUSE: Do you ever do that? I think she just said yes 'cause
she wants to reinforce that behavior, wants me to kiss a
lot of other people's ass, like she wants me to kiss
yours.
House was wise to the operant conditioning aspect of his relationship
with Cuddy, but it wasn't like civilized talking had worked for her.
HOUSE: I've been a doctor twenty years. You're not going to
surprise me.
Time line note. If House got his medical degree when he was around 26
(which would be pretty standard), that would place him at around 46 near
the beginning of the series. Laurie was around 45 when the series
began, even though he looked closer to 51 to my eyes.
House took some Vicodin when Cameron informed him of Brandon's
neuropathy. It was also another unusual instance when you could
actually see the pill.
House took the time to gather up Wilson on his way to the clean room
probably because he wanted to make sure that Wilson didn't miss his big
"I TOLD you the butler did it, but does anybody listen?" scene. I loved
Robert Sean Leonard during that scene. Wilson didn't even have
practically anything to do except stand around in the background, but he
had that "He's got the bit between his teeth again" look on his face.
It bugged me that they never figured out what was causing Brandon's
cough. It never seemed to develop into a cold, so what gave him a
persistent cough over all those days? There were four changes of
clothes during the episode, indicating the passage of at least four
days, plus Brandon had had the cough since before the episode began.
WILSON: The fact that I know that it's a gout medicine OD would
seem to indicate the case is already solved.
HOUSE: Well, you'd be wrong.
WILSON: What about the fact that the kid is now, I believe the
technical term is, "not sick"?
HOUSE: You know how many forms of colchicine there are on the
market?
WILSON: Stop it.
HOUSE: Neither do I, but it's a lot. Pills, powders, liquids,
IV fluids .... Somewhere at a party, in his coffee, up
his nose, in his ear, this kid had some.
WILSON: So you're not happy with your ecstasy theory?
HOUSE: He said he used it twice.
WILSON: People lie.
HOUSE: Yeah, but if you're gonna lie, it's --
WILSON: You know what, I'm not interested.
HOUSE: Not curious?
WILSON: No, because I'm well-adjusted. [Exits.]
HOUSE: Right.
One of my favorite scenes in the entire series: the well-adjusted
physician vs. the obsessive who was not content to merely scare off the
quarry, but had to run it to ground.
You'd think the pharmacist would have made House wear gloves before
pawing through his stock like that.
The only problem I had with the wrong-pill theory was that every glimpse
I've ever gotten of a pharmacy's shelves has shown the bottles to be
lined up alphabetically, not by size, shape, and/or color of pill.
Barring deliberate mischief, I don't know what would make a *layman*,
much less a trained pharmacist, walk over to the wrong shelf and get a
look-alike pill with a noticeably different name from the one
prescribed, unless two meds with orthographically close names also
happened to look alike, which would be a real zebra of a screwup (one
that Brandon's suburban pharmacist managed to make twice). This plot
point would have been more believable if the meds had looked somewhat
different but had had similarly spelled names, but then we wouldn't have
gotten that great scene of House obsessively pawing through the haystack
at the end of the episode trying to nail down the needle.
Speaking of which, THIS is the character on the show best described by
the word 'obsessive,' not Cuddy. Unless it pertains to the hospital's
liability, Cuddy can let things go just as Wilson could here. I also
liked the depiction of obsessiveness as exploitable for useful purposes.
But then, I would.
CHASE: You should invite Doctor House.
BRANDON: Will he come?
CHASE: No, but he'll send a gift.
CAMERON: I'll make sure it's a good one.
In structural synopsis, _House_ resembles a traditional episodic series.
There's a new self-contained plot about a new guest character in
distress every week, whom the heroes help out and then never see again.
But the balance has shifted over the decades. It used to be that the
audience would get to know about the guest character and it was the
regular characters who would help to facilitate this (the _Bonanza_
model). The regular characters would remain largely unchanged
throughout the process, no more but no less illuminated from their
status in the show's premise. Now it's the guest characters who exist
only to illuminate the regulars, who, while they may be slow to exhibit
any changes over the course of a series, nevertheless get a little more
fleshed out in an accretive process. As a result, though, some of the
guest characters end up being more forgettable than others, and I found
that to be true of Brandon & Co. this time. About the only real
significance to the guest characters' background was that the engagement
revealed to us that Cameron not only answered House's mail, but she also
ran his errands for him like a 1950s secretary.
CHASE: Hey, you want to go get some --
CAMERON: No.
That was quick.
I'm pretty sure those weren't Hugh Laurie's hands in the insert.
Vicodin count: 3
Medical synopsis
A plot
cough, rash, loss of consciousness
hypotensive, fever, abdominal pain, nausea
CBC (complete blood count) (unremarkable), CT (computerized tomography)
scan (negative)
broad-spectrum antibiotics, cort-stim (cortisol-stimulation?) test,
echocardiogram
fluid in the lungs, rising creatinine, kidney failure
diagnosis: sinus infection and hypothyroidism
IV levothyroxine, Unasyn
diagnosis: acute interstitial nephritis
TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), T3 (triiodothyronine), and T4
(thyroxine) tests (negative)
white blood cell count (low)
clean room
bone marrow biopsy
G-CSF (granulocyte-colony stimulating factor)
diagnosis: colchicine overdose
laparotomy prep
cardiac arrest
neuropathy
hair loss
final diagnosis: colchicine overdose
Fab (Fragment antigen binding) fragments [of immunoglobulin/antibodies],
Tylenol
Clinic patients
1) extra-thorough checkup
2) sore throat
3) pulled leg muscle
4) rectally inserted MP3 player
--