The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 26. "TB or Not TB" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 01:36:19 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 362 This was a pretty good episode to showcase the fact that they've done extensive remodeling on the main floor lobby set, cafeteria set, and fourth-floor hallways, not to mention filming the balcony from the outside. Unfortunately, they've remodeled the characters as well. One note of respect: They took on Big Pharma again and threw in international health policy for good measure. But they did Big Pharma last season, and _ER_ did the sub-Saharan medicine thing better. (To be fair, _ER_ has the budget to shoot in Hawaii to simulate the Congo, whereas _House_ doesn't, but they also went into more depth and detail, at least implying a lot more complexity to the problems faced.) I'd be more impressed if they took on some other resistant problem, like the protective conspiracy of silence that surrounds incompetent doctors. (Yes, I've been watching BBC America's _Bodies_. Good show.) HOUSE: Patients aren't usually part of the diagnostic process. CHARLES: Well, I'm a doctor. Even so. It was unprofessional for Charles to expect to waltz into someone else's office and cut himself in on the action when he wasn't his own patient. The only reason I could see why House didn't just tell him to leave was that the writers wanted them to clash some more. I could easily see House doing the same thing in Charles' place, though. (In fact, the self-injection and heart attack diagnosis in "Three Stories" were proof of that.) FOREMAN: Talk to Chase. He's rich. CHASE: My dad, not me. Chase used to acknowledge being rich, not equivocate or duck the designation. Evidently Chase Sr. is doing better with his cancer than the original prognosis of three months to live would have indicated, and father and son were on good enough terms even during their estrangement that Chase Jr. accepted a generous allowance from his disappointing dad. Actually, I smell yet another retcon, but what the hell, at least it's not baldly contradictory. My first suspicion was that Charles' body powder was involved in his problems. I'll give them this much credit though: it hasn't been that obvious since the nuns' herbal tea in "Damned If You Do." That was a much better episode, though. House used to have reasons for hating people. Nowadays it just looks like an empty bad habit. Did anyone not guess that House paged all the fellows just to get them to ditch the patient? HOUSE: The nameless poor have a face, and it's a pompous white man. I could have bought House's vituperation of Charles more easily if he had come up with a concrete criticism that wasn't demonstrably wrong. Even if House had managed to prove that Charles was patronizing the people he was saving, no one refuted the fact that he was saving them (and House himself is a past master at patronizing the people he saves), nor the fact that there weren't exactly legions waiting in the wings to do Charles' work if he were to walk away from it. If Charles were to withdraw his "pompous white" face from the media, would House expect those photos of sick Africans that Charles kept shoving in people's faces to suddenly get more or less attention once he was gone? HOUSE: Nobel invented dynamite. I won't accept his blood money. Wilson should have quipped, "So when are you giving your Corvette back to the Mafia?" Foreman still takes bets from House? I don't understand how such supposedly bright people can have no learning curve at all. HOUSE: There's an evolutionary imperative why we give a crap about our family and friends. There's an evolutionary imperative why we don't give a crap about anybody else. If we loved all people indiscriminately, we couldn't function. FOREMAN: Mm. So the great humanitarian's just as selfish as the rest of us. HOUSE: Just not as honest about it. House and Foreman were both there when House practically trampled all the ties he cared about -- his job, his friend's job, his proteges' jobs -- to denounce Vogler's drug and fraudulent patenting practices on behalf of anonymous sick people he'd never even meet. So why wasn't Foreman calling bullshit here? Or was this a new "Wouldn't it be cool" version of House, one that doesn't have a sense of a greater good after all? One that didn't berate Wilson for placing loyalty to a friend above ethical duty to a stranger in "Control"? I didn't see anything to mark out Charles as questionable until he put the romantic moves on Cameron knowing full well that he was trying to pull her into a professionally unethical situation, and even then, being unprofessional about one's personal life doesn't necessarily mean that one is a fraud about one's work. I kept waiting for someone, anyone, to ask House what would be a better use of Charles' time and abilities than what he was already doing. I couldn't say that I took to Charles' personality, but House himself is Exhibit A as to how one doesn't have to be personally charming in order to be doing serious work. Actually, I did used to like House most of the time and even admired him on occasion. Now about the most I can do is respect his professional skill. CHASE: The guy's just a selfish jerk. Where on earth did this come from? Even if Charles wasn't an altruist, how was he profiting at other people's expense? Was this supposed to be genuine proof that Chase is nothing more than House's suck-up? A patient with as much attitude as the breast-lump patient had is going to have a regular PCP and a regular gynecologist. That type doesn't go to walk-in clinics. So Cuddy is just going to continue to be played for a fool while House gets his underlings to do his clinic duty for him? I guess this is the new "Wouldn't it be cool" version of Cuddy who didn't win a protracted contest of wills with House over clinic duty last season. None of this makes any practical sense either unless there's been a nurse colluding with House to fake the clinic log, but as recently as "Autopsy," there was a nurse refusing to let House skip out early on clinic duty. Why doesn't Cuddy know about this behavior? I really did not get why Foreman considered only two options in the breast-lump case and offered only those two options: dismissal after palpation vs. biopsy. Every doctor I've ever had would have done at least an ultrasound and maybe a mammogram first before doing a biopsy. CAMERON: Who knows, maybe he'll just get better. HOUSE: You'd like that, wouldn't you? And House wouldn't? The guy for whom patient care used to come first? The only patient whose welfare we've previously seen House get conflicted over was his ex-girlfriend's husband. Are we really expected to think that House is so emotionally bound up in this stranger that he'd be happier if the guy didn't simply get better? WILSON: You see hypocrites every day. Why is this guy so special? HOUSE: You think I have a hypocritical attitude to hypocrisy? The accurate word would be 'inconsistent.' (All hypocrisy is inconsistent, but not all inconsistency is hypocrisy.) Treating different hypocrites differently would merely be inconsistent. House would have to not practice what he preached in order to be a hypocrite (which is a separate issue). That was the second time they made the previously articulate genius House misuse the word 'hypocrisy' this season (and as with Foreman in "Acceptance," Wilson should have been bright enough to call House on it). Wilson's question was actually a good one. Unfortunately, there was no satisfying answer to it. HOUSE: He treats thousands of patients with one diagnosis. He knows the answer going in. It's cheating. Even if House didn't respect the guy as a doctor, this was a specious argument for attacking him on other grounds. House knows full well that diagnostics isn't the only way to practice medicine. He's never been represented as disgruntled with the medical division of labor before. House doesn't want to take on *all* the specialists' jobs himself, nor does he particularly want all the other doctors to start doing his job. It's not like Charles was poaching cases away from House or from other more qualified doctors (well, except maybe for his own case, but doctors are like that). The one thing that everyone in the episode seemed to be able to agree on was that there's no shortage of sick people. House himself implied that he recognized that it's not humanly possible for one person to minister to the entire human race indiscriminately. What skin is it off House's nose if some guy with limited medical skills but good media savvy picks a severely undertreated disease that he can handle and goes somewhere the developed world doesn't care about to do the best he can with the resources he can muster? Isn't that an optimized use of his talents? In fact, that's exactly what House has previously seen as the purpose of lesser doctors (though on the smaller scale of the clinic): they're there to handle the easily diagnosed cases that House finds boring. House's entire running antagonism towards this guy just didn't gel. I could have understood if House had been merely professionally dismissive of Charles, but House took his dislike to a level of moral indignation that didn't have any prior grounding. I really miss the old version of House, who, even when I didn't agree with him, could at least reason his way out of a wet paper bag to make his argument. House as a petty thief. I can't think of anything offhand to directly contradict it, but it still smelled suspiciously of "Wouldn't it be cool." When Charles adopted the opinion that he'd be more valuable to his cause dying of tuberculosis than he would be if he took his pills, I honestly thought House was going to add psych symptoms to the whiteboard, because the American news media really don't give much of a shit. Sure, sure, the media are always mobbing the folks at Doctors without Borders in real life. They can't get enough of sub-Saharan epidemics. Crazy how that's always dominating the headlines, pushing the repetitive terror alerts off the front page, taking up space that could be devoted to individual cases of missing white people with no progress to report. Actually, if the characters were real people, I'd be putting "personality changes" down on the whiteboard for most of them. Time stamp on House's desk phone: 01 53 09/07/05 Perhaps 9/7/05 was when the ep. was filmed? I guess since Cameron once talked herself into dating her boss, she could also talk herself into dating a patient once he looked terminal. Ugh. Why did that have to be the most consistent point of character continuity in the episode? I couldn't believe that Cameron didn't just switch the thermostat back to normal as soon as House left Charles' room. The only reason why she didn't was that the writers needed a way for House to test Charles' ability to sweat, and just coming right out and saying so would have spoiled the not quite so clever surprise. HOUSE: If TB caused cardiac arrest on a hot day, your work in Africa would be even more futile than it already is. So House managed to jump from thinking that Charles was hypocritical to thinking that his work of saving lives was futile. That was an enormous leap, not only in magnitude of moral significance, but also from one train of thinking to another, and yet the writers didn't feel compelled to show their work. This was incongruous for a character who risked his career to get a bulimic patient a heart transplant, and who poured tons of resources into giving a single nine-year-old one more year of painful life. On Charles' patient bracelet: Charles, Sebastian DOB: 10-13-63 Foreman, Cameron, and Chase all wrote on the whiteboard without incident. The calcium test was the first time I can remember seeing one of those mysterious blue badges on House. HOUSE: We are who people think we are. People think he's a great doctor, so they give him stuff. CAMERON: He is a great doctor. HOUSE: The reality is irrelevant. Yeah, right. House thinks there's nothing more to people than what other people think of them. Shouldn't the reality be the relevant part? Isn't that what separates those who are hypocrites from those who aren't? I can't believe House wouldn't think that making the distinction is important. He's been reduced to babbling nonsense and none of the other characters call him on it. They just lump it all under misanthropy. The only thing I really liked about the episode was House's demonstration of getting away with feigned clumsiness because of being a cripple. However, the explanation beforehand didn't prove anything particularly insightful nor did it prove House's superiority to others, since House has reacted to people based on preconceived notions as well and has sometimes had to be disabused of them through experience. In the pilot, House didn't trust an HMO lab's results because it was an HMO. When his team redid the labs, he trusted them. For the exact same reason of past performance, why shouldn't Cuddy believe a patient's complaint about House's bedside manner sooner than she'd believe a patient's complaint about Foreman's bedside manner? She was just playing the percentages, something that House himself does all the time, including this case, in which he shared Cuddy's automatic assumption that if the doctor in question was Foreman, the patient's complaint couldn't possibly be justified. Except that in Dr. Charles' case, House had no previous experience of the man from which to form an opinion. HOUSE: It's not about the kids dying every eight seconds. It's about the media stroking: adulation, pats on the head. In my experience, while I might not be personally attracted to people who are comfortable in the limelight, nevertheless, it is just such people who seem best able and best suited for the long haul in endeavors where the biggest positive difference is made by marketing good causes to those who have resources but don't share an altruistic urge. John Lennon once said that we needed to sell peace as effectively as we sell soap. At least judging from the pragmatic results, the same goes for other good causes. Shouldn't the people who don't want to be the salesmen be glad that there are others out there who do, or who at least don't mind? Derisive at first of a media-courting politician in "Role Model," House capitulated to his sincere goodwill before the end. What about House was supposed to have changed since then? (Apart from a lack of supra- authorial continuity in the scripts?) Why didn't House similarly accept this similarly cheerful fighter for a similarly supposed lost cause in "TB or Not TB"? Why didn't any of the other characters, notably Wilson, ask House that very question? If I could feel that the writers were perfectly aware that they've been writing changes, I could look on the changes as developments (however peculiar or clumsy) rather than as slipshod oversights. But if the other characters are written as oblivious to changes that they've been present for, then I have to suspect a systemic, extra-textual problem. HOUSE: Listen, I saved his life. That means I get credit for every life he saves from here on out. WILSON: I'll make sure Stockholm knows. Hey, "Wouldn't it be cool" if House was jealous of the attention Charles got, and if House's prior utter indifference to praise has been just an act all along? And the second-season pacing continued to rush along, with no time for contemplative scenes this episode, so even serious issues were treated breezily again. I'm not sure what the point of this episode was supposed to be. That House isn't a fascinatingly complex character with some flaws like I used to think he was? That there's nothing more to him than an annoying character with some practical medical skills after all? Because that's what they gave us. I was reminded more of the _Mad TV_ parody of _House_ than I was of the _House_ of old. The characters have turned into caricatures, easily summed up by surface simplifications. This was quite a comedown from David Foster's first scriptwriting effort, "DNR," and I didn't even find any consolation in Hugh Laurie's formerly astonishing performance, which, particularly in this episode, was relentlessly petty, obnoxious, and unnuanced instead. This is not compelling television. In case you weren't counting at home, I think this was the first episode in which House was not shown taking a single Vicodin. Maybe there have been notes from the network after all. Or maybe it's the network that's been getting the notes. House's hair just gets trendily shorter all the time, and they even seem to be soft-pedaling the stubble a bit. He's prettier, gratuitously nastier, inexplicably stupider, and the ratings go up. I guess I'm not the target audience.