The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 25. "Humpty Dumpty" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:42:13 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 504 Disjoint observations on the 9/27/05 episode. Spoilers abound. . . . . . . . . . . I guess it's official. First-season House is virtually gone. One episode could be a blip. Two could be a coincidence. Three is a pattern. What's David Shore *really* doing with his time these days? Got a new project in the works? 'Cause I can barely feel his presence this season. "Humpty Dumpty" was weird, like well-intentioned fanfic that just can't resist having House comfort someone in the end. Strangely, even with deeply somber subject matter, like death row, dying cancer kid, amputation, and crippling guilt, the series seems lighter and breezier now, and one reason as to why is that the pace is inadvertently dictating terms to the tone. Almost everything is off now, and this seems to be a permanent change. Despite Shore's reassurances to the media, House is cuddlier and more approachable now, more of a people person (though that remark should be understood as relative to what he was like before). They have softened him and that really takes the edge off. They've given him a Hollywood haircut and made him more like a crowd-working insult comic than the isolated misanthrope of old. But that will probably be more popular, so most people will be happy with the result. More specific observations: Maybe it was just me, but I thought Edelstein was favoring her knees rather than her side when she was running. I didn't spot any L.A. palm trees lining the street, but there was one reflected in a car window. I suspect that Cuddy choking on water at the beginning was supposed to fool us into thinking that she was the patient this week, but even with trying to avoid trailers and listings, I still knew it was somebody else. I've been driven to the extreme of reading the closing credits not only with the sound muted, but also with my view of most of the screen blocked. HOUSE: [To Cuddy] You haven't been a real doctor in ten years. Which, taken with some later exposition, implies that Cuddy is about 42 in the present. FOREMAN: You really want to screw Whitey? Be one of the few black men to live long enough to collect Social Security. Probably my favorite line in the episode. So maybe they are doling out more clinic cases to the fellows, but the second-season handling of the clinic patients has been a lot more clunky and a lot less entertaining. The shot where Chase told Cuddy about the protein C side effects was so oddly backlit that at first I thought Chase was standing in front of a green screen. HOUSE: It's not pneumonia. He might have missed a finger turning dark. He's not going to miss breathing problems. What else? CUDDY: It's pneumonia. He wanted to go home. I thought he was lying. I told him I had a dinner party. I made him go up there. HOUSE: Well, why didn't you just take out a gun and shoot him? CUDDY: I thought it was just asthma. HOUSE: You might have mentioned this earlier, Doctor. Maybe we could have sent some blood cultures to the lab instead of wasting a day indulging your self-loathing. Not one of these doctors took a history? No one knew Alfredo had asthma except Cuddy, who mysteriously didn't mention it or write it in his chart? Alfredo's inhaler (which we saw him use just before he went back up the ladder) never got mentioned in the history of medications he was taking? No one thought to ask if his asthma had seemed exceptionally bad lately, therefore hinting at something more? Wouldn't Alfredo have kept his inhaler on the table by his bedside just in case, where the doctors could have seen it? Wouldn't he have been likely to overuse his inhaler while he had pneumonia, mistakenly thinking that his breathing problems were just asthma? I had a lot of trouble buying this plot turn, because while it might have been designed to make Cuddy look like a crappy doctor (part of House's point at the end), it also made them all look like they had dropped the ball. HOUSE: So give him garden-variety Levaquin and a garden-variety echocardiogram. The Levaquin wouldn't have had an effect on the psittacosis? Interesting that Wilson admonished Stacy for what he saw as inappropriate interest in House from someone who was married, which is usually the kind of admonishment House gives Wilson. However, I'm not convinced that Stacy wasn't just being somewhat protective of Cuddy rather than sniffing around House, given that Wilson had just confessed that House was about to break into Cuddy's home. I can't believe that Foreman and Chase were stupid enough to take a bet against House at this late stage. And I assume the whole point of House going directly to the hidden key (instead of looking under the mat first) was to tease the House/Cuddy 'shippers into thinking that House simply remembered where Cuddy kept the spare key from when he was last over at her place. CAMERON: He's a great doctor, but any other hospital administrator would have fired him years ago. CUDDY: Four of them did. The question is, why did I hire him? It's not hard to believe that House's last four bosses fired him. But it does make me wonder what was going through the mind of boss #4 when he or she decided to hire someone with three previous sackings on his record and probably no glowing letters of recommendation to show for it. It also struck me as somewhat uncool for a boss to discuss her subordinate's hiring history with his subordinate. HOUSE: Someone as obsessive and insecure as Cuddy probably has three extra keys hidden away within ten feet of the door. "Obsessive" and "insecure" were never words I would have used to describe Cuddy before, with the lone exception of swabbing down the hospital in "Maternity," and there it was out a sense of protectiveness. In the first season, Cuddy always came off as extremely self-assured and I never saw her as one to sweat the small stuff (unlike House going through every pill bottle in the pharmacy at the end of "Occam's Razor"). CAMERON: You both went to Michigan. Did you know him while you were there? CUDDY: Uh, I was still an undergrad, but yeah, I knew him. He was already a legend. CAMERON: So you just knew him as a legend. Yadda, yadda. We already know that House is all that and then some. This would have had more of an impact if she had actually mentioned some kind of detail or anecdote that would have gotten the point across. If this is supposed to mean that House was at the University of Michigan medical school while Cuddy was an undergraduate, then that puts the likely difference between their ages at somewhere between one to seven years, which indirectly implies House's age at somewhere between 43 and 49, give or take a year. HOUSE: She uses super tampons. What does that mean? Any guy who is both as curious as House is and has lived with a woman for five years knows what different sized tampons mean. All that sniffing around Cuddy's home and none of them checked up on the roof, the area that Alfredo had actually had recent physical contact with? Geez, that might even have been funny, House directing his long-suffering boys from the safety of terra firma (and maybe even asking about the presence of bird droppings). I did like the bit where Stacy asked House if she had caught him during a commercial. It was an offhand line, but it smacked of five years of experience living with him. Hard enough to believe that not one of those doctors would have spot- checked the urine output from a patient who had been given the ooh-scary antifungal, but not even the nurses noticed the lack of output either? Since when does House go to a patient's room to take the patient's temperature? (Since the writers needed a lame excuse to get him in the room to overhear some Spanish and prove he's the only person in the hospital who can smell gangrene.) House was cool with giving the nun in "Damned If You Do" hyperbaric oxygen treatment with no protocol at all, but not someone with a gangrenous hand? I haven't taken a Spanish class in 32 years, but I'm pretty sure I caught "esta noche," presumably meaning Manny could start working Alfredo's job that night, and "una noche," presumably meaning Alfredo gave Manny permission to take over his night job just for one night. I'd have to guess at the rest, which would only lead to heartache. If I could ignore Cuddy's position as hospital administrator of long standing, then I'd be amused by Stacy scolding House and Cuddy for their presentation of a hospital divided against itself. However, I would expect Cuddy to be a veteran of overseeing numerous hospital lawsuits, so logically, she would have known better before they even went to Stacy's office. (At this stage of the game, I'd expect House to be no stranger to medical malpractice suits either.) CUDDY: He's not like us. HOUSE: Can't work as a cripple? Major left-field comment from House, 'cause he's not too stupid to realize that Cuddy was right about a handyman being unable to work without a hand (unless his stock in trade was mowing lawns on a riding mower), nor too irrational or overinvolved to confuse Alfredo's case with his own. And yet once he said it, I seriously expected Cuddy to matter-of-factly say, "Yeah," without shrinking. She's never cut House the least bit of slack for being a cripple before. I can't buy either character in that scene. Yeah, I got what they were aiming at with the black blood pressure medicine. House's point was that he'll lie to anyone if it will be better for them medically, so he's a jerk, not a racist. But Foreman's point was -- or should have been -- that if you lie to people who have a history of being lied to, it's going to have a different effect from lying to people who don't. (We know that the people in nominal charge of this show are familiar with the Tuskegee study, because it was referenced in the pilot.) Before this season, I would have given House credit for understanding the problem better and I would have given Foreman credit for articulating the problem better. As it was, they both came off as dumber than usual and missing the mark somewhat. CUDDY: I graduated medical school at twenty-five, pissed off that I was second in my class. Chief of medicine at thirty-two. Second youngest ever. First woman. Do they advance by assassination at Princeton-Plainsboro? Not that Cuddy hasn't been a good administrator up until this episode, but when did she have time to prove that she knew her way around medicine before she was promoted? Foreman should be close to 32 by now, and he's still completing fellowship training. HOUSE: Endocarditis. His heart's infected. Little bacteria cauliflowers clinging to his valves. The Levaquin wouldn't have had an effect on the endocarditis? I should be all gooey over the revelation that House speaks Spanish (although every native-born American I've ever met who could read Portuguese could also at least read Spanish, so it wasn't a huge stretch), but once it becomes difficult to buy into the bad parts of the writing, it also becomes difficult to buy into the good parts of the writing. Laurie's delivery was convincing, though. If I were running an illegal Mexican cockfight (muchos Chicanos in southern New Jersey, are there?) and I saw a black guy and an Anglo white woman coming in together, I'd immediately assume they were undercover cops. Bad ones, but cops just the same. Maybe that's just me. I couldn't help but feel that by the end of the episode, the only stereotypical note they hadn't hit in the story of Alfredo's struggling Latino family was that it would turn out that they were illegal aliens all along and would be deported before they could file their lawsuit. If the writers thought they had made some kind of point with Foreman's speech against the benevolent white father looking out for minorities who can't take care of themselves, they certainly undercut it with the Alfredo plot, since he got himself into that mess with the bird disease via illegal activity, made it worse by not reporting bird contact or lack of renal output to his doctors, and it took the Great White Father's medical expertise and the Great White Mother's largesse with the insurance company's money to bail Alfredo out of his own stubborn mistakes. And while I'm on the subject of the writers' left hands taking away what their right hands giveth, I can understand having one female character who tosses reason and professional discipline out the window to indulge in groundless emotion, particularly when she's young and House seems determined to beat it out of her. But doing the same thing to the supposedly more mature female character, who's in a position of responsibility that she achieved despite her unusual age and gender (a fact that they expositionally shoved in our faces)? How could Cuddy have possibly risen to where she is today if she's such a basket case every time something goes wrong on her watch? Yet more mixed messages, and a sad tearing down of the character to my eyes. You know, I kind of miss Mark. (You remember Mark? Mr. Stacy?) But I guess he's not necessary for the plot until there's the implication of romantic sparks flying between House and Stacy. And speaking of a lack of same ... except for a couple of comments here and there, I think they could have had any hospital lawyer take Stacy's place in the story and not lose anything. That's an extremely strange use of that particular guest character. HOUSE: Cuddy. Your guilt. It's perverse and it makes you a crappy doctor. It also makes you O.K. at what you do. CUDDY: You figure a perverted sense of guilt makes me a good boss. HOUSE: Now, would the world be a better place if people never felt guilty? Makes sex better. [Points at Stacy.] Should have seen her in the last months of our relationship. Lot of guilt, lot of screaming. I know this wasn't just because it was your roof. Cuddy, you see the world as it is and you see the world as it could be, and what you don't see is what everybody else sees: the giant gaping chasm in between. CUDDY: House, I'm not naive. I realize -- HOUSE: If you did, you never would have hired me. You're not happy unless things are just right. Which means two things: you're a good boss and you'll never be happy. By the way, why does everybody think you and I had sex? Think there could be something to it? Personally, I can't see where irrational guilt would be an advantageous trait in a hospital administrator. (Nor in anyone else, for that matter, but especially not in someone who holds a position of measured responsibility.) I cannot extract a sensible through-thread from House's speech. Either we're supposed to believe that House is consciously spinning bullshit in order to give Cuddy a backhanded boost, or else -- and this is where my money is -- once again, the writers have encumbered the character with their intellectual deficiencies. They should have stuck with the supremacy of patient care, the one issue on which House and Cuddy have usually found their most committed common ground: a simple, practical recognition that without Cuddy constantly running interference for House, he'd be brilliant but hamstrung, because no one would hire him unless he reined himself in and licensing boards would be all over his ass if he pulled that shit in private practice. That's not guilt. That's just the unsung but valuable work of the offensive lineman. Character discontinuity. Cuddy has previously been portrayed as the realist, the pragmatist, the compromiser, and that's why the hospital supposedly keeps running (though perilously close to running into the ground when she closed her eyes to what Vogler represented). Far from torturing herself over the world not being the way it should be, Cuddy has previously been the one who could most easily accept that things aren't always going to be perfect. She was satisfied with all manner of compromises to keep Vogler's money, including getting rid of House for nonmedical, power-struggling reasons, until Vogler started going after other doctors as well. Even at the very end of the Vogler arc, she was still insisting that it was really all House's fault for just not getting along with the guy and she accepted no personal culpability for any of it. Double character discontinuity. Well, in the first place, House doesn't give pep talks, not even ones riddled with insults. Trying to make him lovable just makes him annoying. Second, if he were going to give a pep talk, he wouldn't want an audience present. Third, the character who came closest in the past to fitting House's analysis above was House himself. "Just because you don't know what the right answer is -- maybe there's even no way you could know what the right answer is -- doesn't make your answer right or even O.K. It's much simpler than that. It's just plain wrong." That would seem to assume blame even for things that were beyond anyone's ability to diagnose. Fourth, if this was supposed to make us believe that Cuddy hired House because of guilt after the infarction, then the old House wouldn't have a shred of respect for her. Fifth, it doesn't seem consistent for the guy who once complained about people being ashamed of sex to now say that guilt improves sex. I also preferred the contrast in last season's version of House, who would sexually harass Cameron until she got serious and then he suddenly shut up, got private, and refused to dish even to Wilson before or after The Date despite the fact that nothing actually happened. As strange as it seemed, when things got serious, he'd manifest some form of sexual ethics. This new version of House, who cares nothing for either his privacy or his ex-lover's and will crack wise about his actual sex life with that woman in the presence of others, is just an overgrown frat boy. Triple character discontinuity. Up until now, Stacy has been represented as completely unrepentant about overriding House's decision to not surgically treat his leg. Now she's supposed to have been riddled with guilt over it in the last months of their relationship? Yeah, theoretically, that could have been just a wholly invented joke on House's part, but as recently as "Honeymoon," House hasn't shown any sense of humor on the subject whatsoever. Perversely, taking the emphasis off the medical mystery plot and putting it on the characters has been detrimental to the characterization. I couldn't believe that not once in all of Cuddy's ham-fisted attempts to treat someone she knew (major no-no), was it ever mentioned exactly which medical specialty she trained in. Is she supposed to have been a practicing diagnostician back in the day and that's why she was beating herself up over her failure to diagnose Alfredo? (Dubious, since she told House, "*You're* the diagnostician.") And if not, could anyone have immediately leapt to the right conclusion about the psittacosis, even infectious disease specialists (like House) that have been "real doctors" for the past ten years? Are we supposed to believe that Cuddy was such a basket case that she went into administration as an alternative to slitting her wrists over the patients she couldn't save? She's never seemed that unstable before. The plotting and the characterization here felt like fanfiction. So the hospital is just going to throw tons of money at a bizarrely misplaced case of liberal guilt on Cuddy's say-so without a peep from the ace hospital lawyer, because the guy with the bird disease is just lucky enough to know the hospital administrator. Since when are insurance companies cool with paying out just to make their clients' acquaintances' lives easier? No matter. An implausible six-figure bandaid at a really stupid insurance company's expense allows us to just breeze on by to the topic that everyone knows the episode was *really* about: teasing the House/Cuddy 'shippers. Hinting at once and future soap is more important than taking the subject matter seriously. HOUSE: It's raining. We're having another State the Obvious Contest? This character was a lot better when he stared out his window and said, "Beautiful organ donor weather." I don't get House's last scene. Was he supposed to be moping because he had the same guilt over not diagnosing psittacosis earlier too, but he was just better at hiding it? Because this episode went from being subtle like a kick in the head to suddenly being downright cryptic. Not so very long ago, the writers would strike a happy medium all the way through an episode between writing on the nose and being oblique. The closing song lyrics were different in the closed captions: Yesterday I got lost in the circus Feeling like such a mess Now I'm down just hanging on the corner I can't help but reminisce I know we all All got our faults We get Locked in our vaults And we stay But when you're gone All the colors fade When you're gone No New Year's Day parade You're gone, colors seem to fade The lyrics actually sung, as best I could make out: In my ? We are alone Nobody's watching I might take you home So I just fill my sorrows With the words you borrow From the only place you've known And why'd you say hallelujah If it means nothing to you? why'd you save(?) me(?) me(?) at(?) all(?) If anyone has better ears, have at. Are lollipops just more family-friendly for a broadcast network than Vicodin? Because I can remember seeing the former, but not the latter this time, which I'm pretty sure is a first for the series. Damn. I know all good things come to an end, but I was hoping to get at least another season at the same level of quality as the last. This season is a mess. It feels more like a remake of _House_ using a similar premise, but reinterpreted through the eyes of a different set of writers. It's not a different set, though. There are some new names, but most of the writer-producers from last season are still in the opening credits. I don't know what's gotten into them. -Micky -- STAR: Once hit shows become hits, they -- and this is a terrible thing to say, but it's actually true -- they don't really have to be good anymore. But in the first and second season, it's got to be really great, because you've got to, like, grab that audience. And that audience, once they're there -- INTERVIEWER: The bar comes down? STAR: They're just sticking around. Yeah, they're just happy to see those characters every week. -- Darren Star, TV writer/producer, interviewed on _Face Time_