The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 24. "Autopsy" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 22:33:34 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 418 Disjoint observations on the 9/20/05 episode. Spoilers abound. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The actors in the roles of patients on this show are so consistently good that not only do I want to praise the kid in the A plot to this episode, but I also want to praise the casting director and the roster of episode directors they've used on the show for their work with the actors. The hustle-bustle pace continued from last episode, but they did slow things down for the big talk between House and the patient. So far the writers seem determined to get out of the season-one formula of three red-herring misdiagnoses before they nail it in the final reel. That's not a bad thing, although they had also developed a pretty good strategy for upping the stakes each time too. But now the watchword seems to be dual diagnoses with sequelae. All the patients in the U.S. with more than one unusual thing wrong with them are now going to be magnetically drawn to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Spotted in Andie's medicine cabinet: "VALIUM", "DR. ESPINOZA", what looks like "VICOCIN" but I'm guessing is "VICODIN", and probably "CODEINE". CHASE: Benadryl might help. HOUSE: Already did a thousand milligrams. That's 20 times the standard dose. Shouldn't his nose have fallen off? I find it strange that someone who was so stoic while going through Vicodin detox would whinge and try to take time off because of hay fever. They've spent a little money building scenery to go outside the windows so they don't have to keep the blinds drawn all the time. I kinda wish they hadn't, though. Now whenever I do notice it I'm always going to think it's a painted backdrop like the Ponderosa ranch. HOUSE: Differential diagnosis. On your marks, get set -- FOREMAN: Hallucinations could be caused by -- HOUSE: Whoa! Wait for it. -- and go. I know this is a small point, but this was a strange line to me. I can't remember House ever trying to restrain the fellows from brainstorming before once a case was taken. If anything, I'd have expected him to praise Foreman's initiative. What with all this "You can use the markers. You can't. Wait for it" business, it was like House had turned into a petty control freak putting them through obedience school not fellowship training. Foreman seemed to think this was strange behavior too. HOUSE: [To Cameron] And you, stay away from the patient. Is House finally throwing in the towel on making Cameron do her job? Doesn't sound like House. HOUSE: What the hell is this? CAMERON: Black walnut and ginger. HOUSE: It's nice. Is it supposed to be an herbal remedy? And if so, since when did House find nice words to say about an herbal remedy? Was it supposed to be Cameron's way of saying, "You were right," about the cancer patient last week? Was it supposed to be House's way of accepting an olive branch? 'Cause House hasn't cared for such gestures so far. HOUSE: If people could choose the sex of their doctors, you gals would be out of business. Not from what I've heard. Women consume more health care services than do men in the U.S., and women have increasingly been choosing female doctors. But it was nice to see Cuddy cracking the whip on House's clinic hours again. So much for my theory that other cast members would be given the clinic stories to give Hugh Laurie some time off. This week they just cut back on clinic time. HOUSE: And you wanted Rivkah to feel all _gemutlicht_. I get it. It's a _shandah_. (Spelling taken from the closed captions.) As near as I can piece it together from Yiddish sites, "You want your Rebecca to be at ease. It's a [matter of some] shame [to you]." But feel free to correct. DIY translations from the nonfluent should be mistrusted only slightly less than DIY surgery by laymen. While Laurie can do a horrified double-take with the best of them, I had to wonder if this was the same House who once assured a patient that he had been a doctor for 20 years and wasn't going to be surprised; the same House who once took an infected pierced scrotum in stride. Is it hideously expensive to get a circumcision from a real surgeon with a local anaesthetic and the usual medical precautions? Is it difficult to find a surgeon willing to perform one on an adult male? It CAN'T hurt worse than DIY with only gritted teeth to sustain you. What am I missing here? (Besides the subject genitalia, I mean.) CHASE: I'm thirty. Time compression is one thing, but aging four years in one season is ridiculous. It does make for a sensible retcon, though, and resolves the time-line contradiction in "Cursed." Chase has caught Cameron's disease of overidentifying with the terminal. Major alarms were going off in my head when he kissed the patient, but I have to admit, I can see him being susceptible to a wide-eyed dying kid's pleas. Spencer played it with excellent discomfort. I loved that House sussed Chase out just by looking at his demeanor. I wish that House had given him a harder time over the kiss, but I liked that he took the humiliation approach rather than the anger approach, and I liked that Foreman and Cameron were doing a silent omigod thing around him. I wish that it had turned out that Andie had been molested (yeah, like they'd necessarily be able to tell from running a rape kit months after the fact), because there seemed to be something to what House said about her manipulating people. It wasn't an evil sort of manipulation, but she was working Cameron as well as Chase. I could have sworn the oncology department was in the other direction from House's office, but maybe they changed their minds. Hm. Real fake trees waving in the real fake breeze. I could have bought the pebble-throwing bit more easily if Wilson had told House that even 16-year-old Romeos had switched to text-messaging, and House had sniped back that if he had paged Wilson, Wilson would have ignored him since he wasn't Debbie in Accounting. That is a poster for _Vertigo_ in Wilson's office after all. I can read the title this time, plus James Stewart's and Kim Novak's names. Unless House has a muscle-weakening disease they haven't told us about yet, the gag about Wilson opening the jar for him was strange rather than funny. Come to think of it, it wouldn't be funny either way. A cardiologist wouldn't have picked up on the extra heartbeat flap first? This wouldn't all have been recorded via electrodes onto a line graph? This was a little weird. (I thought the three valves were cycling at different rates, but that just shows what I know.) CHASE: I'm not really sure I should be spending more time with -- HOUSE: She'll be unconscious. You'll be safe. Well, at least Chase was having doubts about the kiss. I loved House telling him that his virtue would be protected. HOUSE: If you're dying, suddenly everybody loves you. WILSON: You have a cane. Nobody even likes you. HOUSE: I'm not terminal. I'm merely pathetic. You wouldn't believe the crap people let me get away with. Yes, I would, and House obviously doesn't respect people who let him. But according to this logic, Andie should have been a little monster whose behavior people explained away, not a kid who acted all saintly. WILSON: And if the [heart] tumor's metastasized, there's nothing we can do. Considering that they'd been watching her like a hawk for her other cancer, wouldn't they have discovered evidence of the heart tumor metastasizing before they tripped over the tumor itself? WILSON: [To House] Go to hell. That was overdue, as were the daggers Wilson shot House when he caught House spying on him as he delivered the bad news to the patient. Of course, to put things in perspective, it helps to remember that this is the same guy who sticks out his hand for money from House every time a patient thanks him for the terminal news. Wilson did seem to be pissed off on Andie's behalf here, but it's not like Wilson doesn't know how the emotional distance thing works for doctors (especially after having lectured Cameron on it just last week). Actually, for the sake of the story, I was extremely glad they didn't have House automatically cut a patient some slack just because she was nine and dying. In his reflexive cynicism, House treats the whole human race as guilty until proven innocent. Even if he couldn't attribute deliberate affectation to the kid, he could at least blame her nobility on a pathology. I think the only problem I had with the kid was that when you come right down to it, House is right. Everybody does lie, even certifiable nine-year-old saints. I wanted him to catch her in a minor, non-self-serving lie (like he caught the otherwise truthful and sincere Senator Wright in a lie in "Role Model"), even as he was revealed to have been wrong about her in the larger scheme of things. Andie did come off as a little too good in the end. I bet she'd lie in a heartbeat (no pun intended) to protect her mother. There was a wonderful unguarded expression on House's face when he had finished pitching the live autopsy to Cuddy, going from smart-mouthed to all of a sudden pleading with her not to tell him there's no Santa Claus. Whoa. They had someone pass by the window visible *through* Cuddy's window. Does the set go back that far or is it just a facade with a window? I bought into the expressionistic lighting on House's face when Wilson gave him the autopsy consent forms. Even though it looked a little artificial to have a narrow band of light fall across his face, by this time House was already contemplating his talk with Andie, and the light seemed to indicate that something was up. Unfortunately, because the summer trailers spliced in the footage of House offering to assist Andie with suicide after footage of Clarence from "Acceptance," I knew just by the shirt that House was wearing what was coming. But it still played well. I have to admit, offering to assist a nine-year-old in suicide is even more radical a concept than offering the same thing to a death-row inmate. HOUSE: What if you're right about her? What if she just is that brave? WILSON: That doesn't mean she's mature enough to handle this kind of decision. HOUSE: Either she understands or she's not brave. You can't have it both ways. If she does understand, then she deserves to know what's going on. True, and well reasoned (I missed this version of House last week), but it's not like House hasn't decided on his own before that a mentally competent patient should get more treatment whether said patient wanted it or not. I suppose this week it was evidence that House was completely confident in the rapidly terminal diagnosis. It almost seemed like House wasn't just offering Andie the option of suicide, but pushing it as an agenda. But I can buy that he was probing for affective anomalies at the same time, looking for emotional symptoms of her problem, and trying to break through any potential martyrdom. I think that by the end of the talk, House knew she was for real (just as he came to realize about Senator Wright) and that the clot wasn't in the amygdala. I counted 15 people at the "dress rehearsal" (not including the dead guy). Why was House the only one not wearing a surgical cap? Morty the corpse flinched at one point. :) HOUSE: Gruesome and low-tech. Kiss me, I love it. "Gruesome," "low-tech," "I love it," all good, but I can't imagine House saying, "Kiss me," even in jest, unless the next line was to tell Chase he was just kidding. Loved Foreman's self-assurance in the final surgery. I guess House's lesson about self-doubt being a bad thing when you're right has sunk in, although the fact that they had to depend solely on eyeballs didn't ring true. Surely they took stills of the MRI? Hasn't medical imaging at PPTH moved into at least the 20th century? They have to use ears alone to find heart valve irregularities? They have to use eyes alone to find clots? I think that was an x-ray of conjoined twins right before we saw House chopping up his meds, but why they'd have that on House's desk, I don't know. House was back in two shirts and a jacket at the end. Is this the last of the one-shirt experiment? WILSON: It's all about speed, isn't it? One thing to another, never standing still. Boy that line sounded hokey. Yeah, it ended up tying into the very last scene of the episode, but it seemed forced here. HOUSE: I know my way around a razor blade. Since when? I can think of at least three ways to go with that. The gag either needed more explanation or else needed to be dumped. It is worth asking why House is so good at cutting up drugs. He never seems to be in so much of a hurry to take Vicodin that he can't wait for it to go through his stomach. It's also worth asking why he didn't just use a mortar and pestle. HOUSE: I was wrong. I was surprised Wilson didn't alert the media. I don't think the extreme closeup on House in his office near the end entirely worked. It will probably look slightly better in widescreen, though. WILSON: [Andie] stole that kiss from Chase. What have you done lately? I have to admit that despite my discomfort with the kiss, I'm highly amused by the fact that Chase's coworkers (correctly) treated Chase as the bigger naif in the encounter. And Andie stole another one on her way out the door. Andie triumphantly running the gauntlet of appreciative hospital personnel at the end was just too much for me. They really shouldn't make me root for her to have a relapse. I think I was more touched by the fact that House trusted Foreman's eyesight over his own than I was by the fact that House came downstairs for Andie's departure. I liked the character better when he spied with concern on the 12-year-old diver from afar in "Kids" than when he mingled with the crowd and let a dying kid hug him here. Squishy Uncle Greg (not quite soft yet since he didn't seem to hug back, but give him time) just doesn't have the same edge. A '65 Corvette isn't enough to scratch a midlife crisis itch? If one fast toy isn't the cure, is a second one really going to do the trick? And they couldn't manage even a single shot of Laurie on the bike? I kept waiting for House's hay fever to tie into the rest of the plot somehow. If it did, though, I missed it. Usually there's some sort of free association going on between the A plot and the subplots. The live autopsy was audacious enough that you'd expect it to be written up in a journal. I have difficulty imagining House being interested in writing about a case once it's over, but I have no difficulty imagining him farming out the actual writing to the fellows. In fact, that would make a cool framing device for an episode, having one of the fellows type up a case history for a journal article, a la Scully doing her reports on the _X-Files_, as the story unfolds in flashback. On the other hand, maybe the live autopsy was too audacious and they'd all just as soon not attract the notice of the law or medical licensing boards. I assume that House had to publish *something* before he got tenure, though, and that the fellows still need to stack their C.V.s. It would also be cool if an old case history looked House up because the medical problems were starting to recur. There's something odd about the second-season House. He's more extroverted, more of a showman, like he's deliberately playing to the crowd. In fact, he seems to be running the whole hospital now. I could buy him winning over Cuddy on the request for a live-patient autopsy this week, since they've almost always overlapped on the issue of patient care (and a nine-year-old is bound to play on more heartstrings than LL Cool J), but House playing ringmaster/choreographer in the operating room (like they wanted House to channel the Bob Fosse character from _All That Jazz_) was something I just couldn't swallow. It's one thing to postulate that House doesn't trust other doctors, so that's why his own team does a wide variety of procedures that anywhere else would be performed by nurses, technicians, and doctors in other specialties. But when a diagnostician gets to boss around an operating room full of neurosurgeons, cardiac surgeons, anesthesiologists, and assorted whatevers without anyone saying boo about it, I'm completely unconvinced. What surgeon would agree to that? And as for House himself, he's always been portrayed as a brilliant but antagonistic loner, and yet here he was flawlessly leading a large team of independent specialists who were eager to do his bidding without friction, personality conflicts, professional differences, or turf disputes as if he had been born to the role (even getting them to laugh at a joke at one point). Who was this maestro conductor of the orchestra? He seemed like House's more socially engaged twin brother, the one who can actually get other professionals to trust him. On the other hand, House seemed more intelligent and professionally thorough this episode than last, so at least I didn't get the feeling that the writers simply couldn't keep up with their own character this time. -Micky