The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 27. "Daddy's Boy" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 10:50:31 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 464 Spoilers for "Daddy's Boy," 11/8/05. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At first I wondered if Princeton was on a quarter system since they seemed to have graduation ceremonies in the fall. Later, however, there was this line: HOUSE: Spring break was over a month ago. ??? This entire season so far is supposed to have taken place before June 2005? But the time stamp on the phone last episode was in September. They've done some screwy things with the time line of the backstory before, but this was the screwiest thing I could remember them doing with the onscreen time line. I went back and checked. The radioactive plumb was hanging from Carnell's backpack in the opening scene. I realize that at least a week passed between the time he first felt shocks and when the Diagnostics Dept. got hold of him, but I would have thought that milder symptoms would have crept up on him before that, things that he might have shrugged off as a cold or the flu. Of course my first suspicion while watching the prologue was that the episode was going to be about binge drinking. Evidently Wilson isn't such a bad diagnostician after all. Did he get involved in the case at the point where they wanted to rule out cancer and then just kept his claws in it so he could hand it off to House? Patch on the front of House's jacket: KTAI SPORTS FOREMAN: ANA is negative for lupus -- again. CHASE: House wants more information, not the same information done over again. Actually, House often wants tests repeated, going all the way back to the pilot. FOREMAN: "Find what's missing." For all we know, the kid is dying, and he's giving us riddles? I didn't have any problem with this. At some point, the fellows are going to have to fly on their own. I took House's instruction to mean, "Go be me for a while. I'll come back later and check your work." CAMERON: It was graduation weekend. He barely drank in the weeks before that and he didn't drink at all during his wrestling season. FOREMAN: If you believe him. CAMERON: I did a tox screen -- CHASE: It doesn't matter if she believes him or not. It's already in the chart. We're supposed to find out what's missing. What, "Everybody lies" except for college students (and House's dad and Cameron)? Exposing a lie has often been the very thing that was missing in these stories. All of a sudden, all the characters have forgotten that. On the side of House's bike: HRC ? HONDA ? CBR ? REPSOL The patch on the front of House's jacket changed to "RTAI SPORTS" out in the parking lot. It was probably supposed be cool and it's probably seen as cool by everyone but me, but the whole motorcycle-and-leather-jacket motif at work looked embarrassingly like a midlife crisis to me. Not that there's any harm in it, but it was a bit of an eyeroll. WILSON: Yesterday, when I loaned you five thousand dollars to buy a new car. Did the Corvette quietly slip through the cracks in the retconning? And speaking of retcons, House had a designated spot in a covered parking garage last we saw. Now we're supposed to believe that he embraces being seen as a cripple in a handicapped spot and parks out in the elements? By the time the amount had gotten to $5000, in Wilson's shoes I would have said yes, but I also would have asked point blank what I was enabling, because the need for someone with a six-figure income and no dependents to borrow four figures for a car usually indicates a lie and bad trouble. Lending $5000 to someone who's turned to the street for stronger drugs or has gotten into gambling is no favor. Since House doesn't seem to spend his money very often or have any dependents, nor do his parents seem to need any, nor does he have any siblings and therefore any nieces or nephews, I'm going to guess he gives a lot of his money to charity. It would be funny if one day Cuddy found out that House was an anonymous donor to the hospital; even funnier if it turned out he was the source of one of his department's own directed donations. If House left the Diagnostics Office right after finding out he had a new patient but before Cameron got the info about Carnell's mother dying in a car accident, then how did House know to look up the police report on the accident 15 years ago? Is he just supposed to be nearly omniscient now? HOUSE: You'd rather have dinner with your wife? WILSON: Yes, I would ... if she were speaking to me. A very brief note to let us know that things may be deteriorating. lol. Someone redid Wilson's illegible whiteboard notes. HOUSE: They lie to us because they love us. Who's getting teary? Filled with sarcasm, and yet House would later get upset about not being lied to? One token Vicodin this episode. Since they've stripped House down to just a t-shirt at work, I expect they'll get that shirt off of him sometime during this sweeps or the next (and not because he's going into cardiac arrest this time). On House's t-shirt: RED DRAGON ??? 19?? TATTOO HELL YEAH IT HURTS I have trouble believing that the ordinarily extremely private House would share his parents' travel plans with his subordinates, except as an excuse to allow the writers to get Cameron scheming. CAMERON: You really think that was his mom on the phone? CHASE: Probably. Don't know why he'd lie about that. FOREMAN: Who cares? CAMERON: You're not the least bit curious what his parents are like? FOREMAN: I'm sure his mom's a piece of work. Only a mother could do that much damage. CHASE: My bet's he was born the way he is. Probably tormented his parents, not the other way around. FOREMAN: Yeah, he was either a fast runner or one hell of a fighter. My favorite parts of the episode were the fellows speculating on what House's parents were like. Left shoulder patch on House's jacket: Molyna ? I have to admit I really liked Wilson's comeback when he found out House had been experimenting on their friendship. In Wilson's shoes, I'd also ask point blank if I had given him cause to doubt me, or if he was just feeling insecure. The answer may well have been simple scientific curiosity, but they've known each other for at least five years. Why had the experiment manifested during the time frame in which it did? (Hey, if House gets to run scientific experiments on the friendship, Wilson is entitled to ask scientific questions about the parameters.) Why did Carnell's case come to Cuddy's attention in the first place? Other than the writers wanting an excuse to put her on the screen, I mean. The father wasn't a donor and the patient wasn't famous. Unless one of the fellows told her they were treating Carnell for pesticide poisoning without proof, there'd be no reason for her to familiarize herself with the particulars or anticipate a lawsuit, but there was no indication that anyone squealed. We saw her broach the subject to Foreman, not the other way around. The writing used to be so much more clever about the pretexts it employed to involve this or that character in this or that scene. (Well, except for Wilson, who sometimes seemed to have no caseload of his own, so he hung out in House's office for the company. It was easy to forgive, though. "Paging Doctor Greek Chorus. Report to the Department of Diagnostic Medicine to dispense some common wisdom, stat.") So the treatment for the pesticides that weren't there nevertheless gave temporary relief from radiation sickness, which was part of what threw the team off? I'm unclear on this point, and they uncharacteristically didn't give exposition to connect those dots. CAMERON: You guys gonna join us for dinner Thursday? CHASE: Mmm, gotta do my laundry. A busy single guy with money does his own laundry? :) CAMERON: You're not curious? CHASE: I'm curious about crocs, but I don't stick my head in their mouths. FOREMAN: I'm out too. [Off Cameron's look.] Look, House is a freak. There's no virus that causes that, no DNA mutation. You're gonna have one dinner with two people, sixty minutes, most of it spent chewing, talking about the weather. Unless they say something like, "Do you prefer the Chardonnay or the Merlot? And oh, we kept Greg locked in a closet for seventeen years," you're not gonna learn anything. Good point and funny. HOUSE: I don't hate her. I hate him. Well, we were told. But we weren't shown. Unless you want to get caught, you always lock the door before you drop your pants. Anyone fresh out of college would remember that rule. But then maybe Taddy didn't mind getting caught. They took out the main floor stairwell to make room for the cafeteria entrance. CAMERON: So, it's O.K. to lie to House, but not to a patient? CUDDY: Yep. In terms of legal liability, that was a no-brainer. Once upon a time I would have checked to see if they recycled the CGI oozing intestine shot from "Acceptance," but my level of obsession has eased up an iota. PPTH can finally afford a modest emergency room entrance set. HOUSE: If you wanted to be a doctor, maybe you should have buckled down a little more in high school. EMT: Bite me. Cool! They've moved the pathology lab. Hell, they've moved almost everything. Around the 40-minute mark it occurred to me that we weren't going to get to see a real dinner with Wilson, etc. There wasn't enough time to do both it and the medical case justice. Why do they use a piece of radioactive metal to test wells? House and Foreman obviously knew, but they uncharacteristically didn't explain it for the benefit of the folks at home. Why didn't any of the previous MRIs detect the tumor? Greg's mom didn't look much older than Greg. Then again, Laurie looks 52 instead of 46 and Diane Baker (Blythe House) looks about 59 rather than the 67 listed for her in the IMDb. (She was in a lot of episodic TV when I was a kid.) R. Lee Ermey (John House) is listed as being 61, but looks older. I've tried to be open-minded about Cameron, but she's just flat out tiresome. As someone on the official Fox _House_ board once said, who died and made her the feelings sheriff of PPTH? About her only saving grace this episode was declining Mrs. House's invitation. Just because House diagnosed her last season ("You live under the delusion that you can fix everything that isn't perfect") doesn't mean she's cured, but the other characters seem to have stopped calling her on it just because the writers find it convenient to make her the one to move the plot along (that or they find her a lot more irresistible than I do). It was more interesting seeing others' reactions to the imminent arrival of House's parents than seeing the parents themselves. Greg and his mother actually get along well. O.K., that's sweet. Greg wasn't hatched from an egg after all. But the father was anticlimactic, contradictory, and what I suspect was an unintended open question. I didn't see why we were supposed to view the father as worthy of hatred. Nor, on the other hand, did I see where we were supposed to view Greg as being unreasonable in his hatred. The father was a bit annoying and judgmental. Fine. So had this been going on for 46 years and Greg just finally got sick of it? I could buy that, but I didn't actually see it. A lot of people don't get along with one or both parents, but 'hate' is a really big four-letter word. Did Nintendo stop paying for product placement? HOUSE: Thank you ... for not eating. CAMERON: It was none of my business. HOUSE: They seem perfectly pleasant, don't they? They are. He was a Marine pilot. She was a housewife. Married forty-seven years. They had one child. My mom was just like everyone else. She's nice enough, no(?) great sense of humor, hates confrontation. My dad's just like you. Not the caring-till-your-eyes-pop-out part. Just the insane moral compass that won't let you lie to anybody about anything. Huh??? Practically the first words out of House Sr.'s mouth in this episode were a lie to Cameron about how Greg had told them all about her. This characterization-by-fiat business is running wild. They can't keep consistent even within the same episode. Bullshit on both counts, in fact. Cameron's entirely capable of deceit and dissembling when it comes to giving patients really bad news. And she lied to House in this episode about not making dinner plans with anyone. You know, I wasn't having such a bad time with this episode until this myopically revisionist revelation. HOUSE: It's a great quality for boy scouts and police witnesses. Crappy quality for a dad. There's a difference between never lying about facts when asked and volunteering unwanted opinions all the time, but I think we're meant to believe that no distinction was being made with respect to House Sr. I didn't buy that the man whose personal motto is a scornful, cynical, "Everybody lies," was somehow traumatized by his father's unwillingness to lie. The big thematic payoff to the episode turned out to be a huge, "Huh?" So are we supposed to think that House has at least partly turned into his father in spite of himself, in that he often tells unpleasant truths (or shares unwanted opinions) as well? But that seems all too self-consciously House. This point, like so much of this season, seems like a hopelessly, badly thought-out muddle to me. I REALLY didn't buy House spilling his guts unbidden to Cameron. If it had been Wilson, yes. Maybe even Stacy out of old habit. Cuddy in a pinch. But not any of his subordinates. The thank-you I bought. It was heartfelt. But everything else that came tumbling out afterwards, that just didn't sound like House (and the clunky expository part shouldn't have had to come from House at all), especially not since he had withheld any reaction whatsoever in response to Cameron's presumed custodianship of his emotional well-being near the end of "Honeymoon." Anyway, unless Greg was born out of wedlock, then it's canonical that he's 47 years old at most. They dropped the issue of the bone marrow transplant completely. Another "huh?" moment. They didn't even bother testing Carnell's father to see if he was a match or have the father ask about it. Usually they explain such decisions for the audience. Carnell wasn't in the clean room? They were expecting an infection to take him down and yet Dad wasn't wearing a mask or gloves? This was a severely underexplained episode in terms of both the A plot and the B plot. House was morally disgusted by Carnell's father for lying but hated his own father for telling the truth? I could have understood it if House had bothered to make some kind of subtle distinction between types of lies, but none was forthcoming. And none of the other characters have felt the least bit moved to comment on the self-contradiction coming off of House in waves this season. The shot of House's reflection as he watched Carnell and his father was visually reminiscent of last season, but whether House was supposed to be disapproving of that family's lying, which would be consistent with last season, or approving, which would be partially consistent and partly inconsistent with this episode, was unclear to me. CAMERON: Why does he hate seeing his parents? So his dad tells the truth. He can't handle that? WILSON: He hates being a disappointment. CAMERON: He's a doctor. World famous. How disappointed can they be? WILSON: You know what I figure is worse than watching your son become crippled? Watching him be miserable. So are we supposed to infer that House Sr. has been disappointed only since the leg infarction, or that House Jr. has been miserable all his life? I also didn't buy Wilson dishing about House to Cameron. She's not House's girlfriend. She's not even House's friend. She's his employee. Nothing entitles her to personal information about her boss like that. Part of the problem (part of one of many problems) is that they are really not selling House's misery to me. Last season I could easily believe at innumerable points that House was in physical and psychic pain. This season Wilson has been telling him and us that House is oh- so-miserable, but most of the time House actually seems to be energized and engaged with his life to me. He's not cruising along in happiness mode, but he's wide awake, aware, alive, and frequently satisfied with his own actions even if he doesn't like the actions of others or the outcome that life gives him, which is more than a lot of people manage. If that's not what the writers want to depict, they need to catch a clue that they've created a powerful dissonance between what they're saying and what they're showing. Maybe the attempt to sex up the character and the series is working against their desired character arc. It would take a lot of guts to really show a main character spiraling down into depression, because he wouldn't look sexy or dynamic in the process. So the moral of the story is tell a lie in a good cause today because your motives are good. I'm underwhelmed, both with the message itself and with its inconsistency with other episodes. It was bad when Cameron lied to her patient about her terminal illness, but it was O.K. for a father to tell his adult son the same lie? Andie the nine-year-old was allowed to face her last days with her eyes wide open, but Carnell the 21-year-old wasn't? Seeing as how Carnell was legally an adult, the doctors were obligated to tell him his prognosis, not rely on his father to lie to him. A strange artifact in the editing: some of the apparently hard cuts actually overlap slightly for about three to six frames. It was there sometimes last week too. Is this relatively new or have I only just started noticing it?