The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 29. "Hunting" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 17:06:44 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 367 Spoilers for "Hunting," 11/22/05. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Hunting" ... wabbits. No, fox, rat, and ex-girlfriend. Busy episode. The writers even made time for a C plot this week (and a little D plot if you count diagnosing and treating the rat). But they also made time for a slower scene (waiting for Steve). To coin a phrase, it didn't suck, but the relative success of the ongoing B plot rests on the as yet still deferred resolution. How that plays out will determine how much sense the overarching Stacy plot line has made. Taken in isolation, though, the execution of Operation Target Stacy played out very well. WILSON: My offer's withdrawn. You can walk to work. Both the Corvette and the motorcycle were out of commission? In fact, this would have been a genuinely good episode to show the motorcycle in, to drive home the identification with Steve McQueen. Strange that they didn't use it. For someone who didn't want to hear any more, Wilson was awfully interested in hearing more. House read him right and didn't need to fear that his relationship with Wilson would suffer as a result of his Machiavellian scheming. At the same time, I had to wonder just how much Wilson counted himself as Stacy's friend. There would come a point where, in his shoes, I'd have to leave the room with my fingers jammed in my ears if I wanted to stay friends with both House and Stacy. "221B"? Cute. The number in Sherlock Holmes' street address. This is the third different exterior they've shown us for House's residence (fourth if you count the glimpse through the front door in "Role Model"). I'm pretty sure it was the same fireplace in the interior, though. They just keep building new buildings around it. (Different refrigerator from "Love Hurts," though). And is this new facade on the Fox back lot? Or the Universal back lot? (Academic curiosity.) You know, I can understand the impulse for a production designer to try to improve on everything when money becomes available, and the push is for supposedly more naturalistic sets, but when hallways in the hospital just magically appear and disappear, when characters' homes just morph at will, that's not naturalistic, that's Twilight Zone-ish. P.S. I miss the atrium in the hospital. An awful lot of the A-plot patients seem to be minors or young adults. I guess it seems more tragic if it's young people who are on the brink of death. Or maybe they're just more photogenic. I wonder how Kalvin heard that House was the go-to guy for esoteric diagnoses. If Wilson drove House to work, how did House get out to the Warners' place when Cuddy told him to go see Stacy the first time? STACY: Mark's at physio. Did the Warners rent a house near the hospital? Or did Stacy drive the two hours from Short Hills to drop Mark off for physio, then drive two hours back for the exterminator? And who picked up Mark? Or did the writers just forget that it was established that the Warners lived two hours away from the hospital? Um, except that Mark wasn't at physio. He rolled right into the kitchen. I think there was a small mounted fish on House's desk. That's just weird. FOREMAN: [To House] Face it. This might be an interesting case. I loved the smug look on Foreman's face when he said that. House seemed to be shoveling unopened mail into his trash basket. Was that his way of dealing with Stacy's instruction not to make his only female employee do his clerical work? HOUSE: I don't want her back. I just want her to admit her feelings for me. Hm. Stacy had already done this twice now, both times at House's insistence. HOUSE: I go to Cuddy. Cuddy fires her or reassigns her. Either way, I'm happy. Whether House wanted Stacy back or not, the whole get-Cuddy-to-fire-her motive was bogus. So why lie to Wilson? Was he afraid that Wilson would blab about his scheme to Stacy? Or would it not matter if Wilson did? House went to the hospital, then visited the Warner residence, then returned to the hospital, then went back out to the Warner place. If the Warners haven't moved since last season, then House spent eight hours out of the first day of story time (since he and Stacy were still wearing the same clothes during the second visit as in the first) simply commuting to Short Hills and back. For the first time since "Honeymoon," House and Stacy seemed to have that old longing for each other again. But now I have other questions about House's motives. Weird. When the rat tilted its head, House tilted his to the other side. I'm not sure the director and editor realized this. I think House was supposed to be trying to look the rat in the eye, but they forgot that he'd be doing it in mirror image. What was House doing his Steve McQueen imitation with? A squash ball? Cameron went to see the infection counselor first and showered only afterwards? I think she had her priorities screwed up, but it wouldn't be the first time. HOUSE: Concerned enough about his health to stalk me, while indulging in deadly street drugs. A study in contradictions. [Takes Vicodin.] Cute, and the only Vicodin I noticed this week. House seems to be dry- swallowing them less. Is it supposed to make him a more civilized addict if he washes them down with water? When House gestured to Foreman to give him change for the vending machine, Foreman should have told him, "You make three times what I do and your med school loans are paid off." I'm having a hard time buying House as actively milking the humor-the- cripple routine this season. I have no trouble believing that people would let a cripple get away with things, but last season I was definitely under the impression that House deliberately provoked people partly to keep the pity at bay. I'm reminded of something Bill Raisch, the guy who played the infamous one-armed man in _The Fugitive_, once said in an interview in _The TV Collector_. There was some worry in the planning stages of the series as to whether making the villain a cripple would make people feel sorry for him instead of hating him. Raisch told the producers to make the character a really mean one-armed guy. That way people would recoil from him instead of pitying him. And he was right. Cameron and Chase have picked up House's bad habit of breaking and entering first, and only afterwards asking the patient what they wanted to know. Does House regularly send forth compulsive burglars into the world when they've completed their fellowships? CHASE: My father co-authored a paper on acute berylliosis. HOUSE: Phew! For a moment there, I thought you were smart. Chase should have said, "I was smart enough to read it." HOUSE: O.K., stuff these. If he doesn't get better, then it's a tumor. STACY: Then what? Chemo? HOUSE: Steve McQueen without hair? It's a blessing he died young. House and Stacy were good together in this scene. They were even dressed a lot alike, I guess to signify they were on the same wavelength or something. CAMERON: I wanna do the Kveim Siltzbach test. HOUSE: Huh. Do you have any idea how much paperwork Cuddy's going to need signed? Eh? Anyone know why? HOUSE: On the other hand, his dad tossed him out. So what's our guy want to apologize for? People feel guilty and apologize for things that aren't their fault all the time. Or, as Cameron said, they say, "I'm sorry," to express regret, but not necessarily guilt. House and Wilson appeared to leave House's office for the evening without locking the door or even closing it. Doesn't House have anything in that office that he would miss if it were stolen? House and Stacy were downright poignant lying in wait in the ratblind. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I saw no artifice in House in that exchange. It was a shame he had to undo it all in Stacy's mind at the end. I guess that sad little piano bit was the Greg-&-Stacy theme. They reintroduced it last episode, and they played it again in the waiting- for-Steve scene. It's the only piece of incidental music that I've recognized this season from last season. Not that I've been listening with bated breath, but I think they've mostly moved away from the simpler piano-based musical cues this season. I'm not convinced that's been a good thing, though. STACY: O.K., I blow my smoke into the vent so Mark doesn't know. HOUSE: I always knew. STACY: You're bluffing. Unless House and Stacy weren't even kissing, then how could House not have known? The taste and smell linger, lady. STACY: You could have asked me how I was. HOUSE: I already knew. Yeah. Just like House already knew when he asked Stacy how she felt about him. Just like he already knew before he read her psychiatric file. He is defined as almost always knowing, sometimes even when there's no obvious reason why he should. That rat has even better timing than the elevator doors. Everybody's moved since last season. Or at least, Cameron's building's hallway was remodeled. Geez, they seem to have made Cameron the second lead character after House, but all the other characters are more interesting than she is. I predicted they'd get House's shirt off of him during a sweeps period, but I didn't foresee Chase going first (twice). Cameron not only wanted to get high and have sex, but wanted to do both at the same time, and Chase was cool with that? All through that scene I kept thinking, "Children shouldn't be left unsupervised that long." Aren't you supposed to get that kind of stupidity out of your system in college? Plus, I don't know about New Jersey, but I think that in California, Chase would have been guilty of a statutory version of rape. CHASE: I'm not an idiot. HOUSE: Obviously not. Who doesn't sleep with a drugged-out colleague when they have a chance? At least for once, House could lead by example, since he didn't sleep with Cameron when she was clean and sober and twisting his arm. After the big-brotherly talks Foreman gave Chase and Cameron in "Occam's Razor" (most notably the words, "Bad idea. You work with her"), I would have expected him to look exasperated with his fellow fellows, not look at Chase like, "She was high? You da man!" Or was he supposed to be leaning back and looking past Chase at House with a "Damn, you nailed that one" look? CHASE: Last night probably shouldn't happen again. Well, at least Chase had some sense after the fact. CAMERON: Do you think I want it to? Kinda cold under the circumstances. Cameron could have just agreed with the sensible approach and let it go. And if the guy's nice enough to say you're good in bed instead of a wacko who's messing with his head and jeopardizing his professional life, you might could summon up some kind words. Shouldn't Chase go on the anti-HIV protocol now? Yeah, the chances are virtually nil with a condom, but "virtually" isn't "absolutely." I suppose it was a twist that the A plot wasn't so much about homophobic parents after all, but I was still getting tired of Kalvin preaching the high life and his dad haranguing him. (I count six widow(er)-and-son pairs in the A plots of this series.) I liked House getting disgusted with a man who would rather be angry than save his son's life, though. We did see House do this with Harvey's parents in "Love Hurts," but it's a perennial. Cameron went off on Kalvin because she had been stupid enough to copy his live-fast-die-young-leave-a-beautiful-corpse moves? Yeah, maybe he needed to hear it, but she didn't bother to share with him until she was pissed off about crashing and burning herself. She's in the neighborhood of 30 years old for heaven's sake. She should stop dumping her damage on her patients. I'm leaning more towards the "House drove Stacy away on purpose to save her marriage" theory now, not because of anything specific they did in that plot line, but because nothing about him looked the least bit out of control. He knows almost everything (in both the A plots and the B plots) almost the instant it happens. He knows what people are feeling and why, if not immediately, then at least in the course of time. Despite the triviality of the evidence the writers showed us, they've written him as being 100% correct about Stacy being obsessed with him, about her current sex life with Mark being nil, and that therefore just by the fact of his existence, House was driving them apart. In fact, he knew all that before he read Stacy's psychiatric file. Therefore he didn't need to read it. Moreover, if he hadn't read it, Stacy wouldn't have caught him out about the dishwashing. Therefore he read it for another purpose. He needed her to catch him out. It's the theory that leaves the fewest problems in the setup (though, admittedly, none of the theories are problem-free), and if they go this route, it will probably be Wilson that twigs in order to cue in the audience. The one detail that gave me pause about this theory was House deliberately flipping the toilet seat up at the Warners'. There'd be no point in House making Stacy more frustrated with Mark if he was trying to drive her into Mark's arms. Still, I suppose there was a nonzero chance she'd figure out who did it and why. Or the writers put it in as generic male annoyance at females for complaining about the toilet seat (but that would be poorly placed after the issue had been previously given marital significance). Or the writers just couldn't resist the joke, or the misdirection. The only month in 2005 in which the 20th falls on a Friday is May. Unless Moira gave Cuddy a really post-dated check last week, the props dept. didn't care much that day when they gave Cameron a calendar. So, lemme see if I got this straight. There was a rat causing disruption in the Warner household. House thought it might be suffering from some contaminant that could adversely affect the Warners as well. He removed the rat and cured it, which also brought calm to the Warners, but the upshot was that it ended up in a cage. Not perfect, but not bad as parallel stories go. I'm amused that after all the fan longing for the writers to give House a dog, his pet turned out to be a feral rat. I wonder if he couldn't bring himself to kill it because it had been his patient and he identified with it.