The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 30. "The Mistake" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 01:55:32 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 599 Spoilers for "The Mistake," 11/29/05. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I assume there won't be any complaints about "the formula" this week. Nonlinear storytelling is one of their stylistic strengths. I wonder why they don't do it more often. Not that I think they should tell every episode in unreliably narrated flashbacks every week, but I don't see why they can't throw in the occasional flashback reference point on a more routine basis since they seem to be so very damned good at it. The pace wasn't so much incessant this week as it felt like a playful ping-pong match between the past and the present. I admired the way they used an almost comedic structure without undercutting the tragic subject matter, all of which, of course, was reminiscent of "Three Stories" (though not as complex). KAYLA: [To daughters] Sally Ayersman? [....] If Sally's mean to you again, I'm just going to have to key her daddy's new convertible. At first, I thought this threatened act was what I was seeing later in the episode, but no, that was presumably Mrs. Ayersman. I went back and checked, and sure enough, the surgeon's name was the one Kayla mentioned in the prologue. I'm not sure why they did that, though. It was mildly amusing, but only very mildly. If there was a greater significance here in tying Kayla's dislike of her future surgeon's daughter with the surgeon's wife's future marital retribution, I missed it. They faked me out by not trying to fake me out. When Kayla first took ibuprofen in the school auditorium, I figured she couldn't be the A-plot patient, because she had to be the red herring instead. I don't think I was completely convinced she was the A-plot patient until I saw that they were willing to spend CGI money on her. Wow, John Rubenstein, another guest actor from yesteryear whose name I recognized a lot more easily than I recognized his face. STACY: Why not use another lawyer? CUDDY: Because forty percent of our lawsuits last year were about House. If you can't work with him, you can't work here. ROTFL. In that case, they could do a courtroom episode or disciplinary committee episode every season without straining credulity at all. The desktop quarter game was cute. It reminded me of House flicking paper projectiles at people instead of charting in "Damned If You Do." I didn't imagine it. There is a small mounted fish on House's desk. HOUSE: That file got me on the floor of her attic with her pouring out her soul. The only thing I did wrong was get caught. Except that House already knew what the file told him, apart from the concrete details about the unwashed dishes and the toilet seat. We saw him sit in the cafeteria and tell Wilson exactly what the file would later tell him, even though Wilson dismissed everything House said, and used good arguments to do so. STACY: This one says you're O.K. with moving the disciplinary hearing to tomorrow. This one says I've advised you of your legal rights. HOUSE: Uh-huh. Any legal rights I should know about? STACY: Nope. Whoa. In Stacy's shoes I would have been pissed with House too, but she started off giving him shoddy legal advice because of their personal acrimony? STACY: Don't care about the Vicodin. I laughed my ass off when the Vicodin bottle disappeared. >pop< Backed up twice and laughed all three times. But then I wondered if maybe Stacy wasn't right after all about House and Chase needing separate counsel. If the point was to lay blame for a mistake, then Chase's case might have looked better if House's case looked worse, in which event, it would have been reasonable to suppose that Chase might have been better off mentioning House's Vicodin use. Not that Chase would have wanted to implicate House, but still. CHASE: Vasculitis. With stomach pains. So Behcet's. And here I was hoping the writers would save a patient who actually had vasculitis for the last episode of the series. Nice shot up through the glass table as the pills went flying. CHASE: She died of DTs, your mom? Bottles stashed around the house, mood swings, that whole deal? KAYLA: You've been there? CHASE: My mom. Dad left. Mom crawled inside a bottle. Made for a great year twelve of high school. I had previously gotten the impression that Chase's mother started drinking first and that was part of why Chase's father left. (Rowan: "She was falling apart long before -- ") But here causality was reversed. KAYLA: You O.K. with your dad now? CHASE: No. STACY: [Present time] Does your dad have anything to do with this story? CHASE: No, it's just -- I suppose that after the Vicodin bottle turned out to affect the story after all, that should have been my clue that whenever Stacy would interrupt to ask about the relevance or credibility of something, it would turn out to be relevant or fishy after all. But I didn't pick up on this as I watched it. CHASE: I gave her some prednisone, an antacid, and I ran a pathogy test on her arm. The closed captions said "pathology test," but I'm sure he said "pathogy" here and elsewhere. Is that an Aussie variation or just a slip of the tongue? WILSON: She's only advising Chase? Not you? HOUSE: Well, what's the committee gonna do to me? I never even met this patient. WILSON: Your disdain for human interaction doesn't exculpate you; it inculpates you. Once again confirming Wilson's observation that office politics are not House's strong suit, especially considering that what House saw as his excuse was precisely what the committee would end up using to damn him. HOUSE: She protects Chase, she protects me. WILSON: Unless her advice to Chase is to make a deal and give you up. I heard an echo here of Wilson advising House to keep his head down back when Vogler was around, though they didn't make it explicit this time that House might have been in trouble just by virtue of being House. HOUSE: Chase loves me. And isn't Turkish. I wonder if that was the best Aussie accent Leonard could do, or if that was just the best that Wilson could do. WILSON: Cameron loves you. Chase loves his job. HOUSE: You really think Stacy hates me that much? WILSON: I think right now she hates you more than enough. You think emotion only affects doctors' judgments? Ah, House took a Vicodin after Wilson warned him about Stacy's hate for him possibly putting him in the stew. Nice to see the old inappropriate pill-popping again. STACY: [To Cameron] You're colleagues. You worked together for over a year. Establishing that Cameron has been there more than a year but less than two years. STACY: [To Cameron] And everyone says you slept together. Only four people knew about Cameron sleeping with Chase: the members of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. How did it get all over the hospital? Did the locker room walls have ears when Chase gave Cameron the Ativan and the new boundaries? CAMERON: House has worked with [Chase] longer than I have. You should talk to House. Establishing that Chase has been there the longest of the three fellows. I liked how they depicted Stacy as being good at getting to the bottom of "Everybody lies" in a formal setting once she settled down to business, not just taking Chase's word for things, but questioning everyone, even House finally. Not only did it make her the midwife of the episode's A plot rather than just the ex-love interest in the B plot, but it even suggested a reason why House originally got interested in her in the first place. HOUSE: Just heard about the free clinic. I hadn't realized before that the clinic is completely free. I think this was the first we were told that. HOUSE: If I'd thought [Chase] was a reasonable doctor, I wouldn't have hired him. Heh. HOUSE: [Reads chart.] Uh ... Chuck. I'm going to break from the parable of the wicked doctor and tell a little story about a patient. Let's call him Buck. The mini-plot with Chuck the clinic patient really didn't gel at all. House used to have sympathy for the uninsured (like Jodi, who was about to become uninsured in "Occam's Razor"). Now just because of a couple of baubles (a wristwatch and an MP3 player), which could have been gifts or could have been bought before the patient got laid off and lost his health insurance, House was determined to scare a relatively healthy young man with a mere cold into buying expensive individual health insurance that he might not need as much as whatever he would be doing without in order to buy the insurance? That really didn't sound like House. And what would be the ultimate point? Would the patient really continue to pay approximately $500 a month for individual coverage once he found out he wasn't really sick? Since when does House suddenly want to throw a little pointless business in the direction of insurance companies? STACY: What are you hiding? HOUSE: I'm gay. And the slash fans go wild. HOUSE: Oh, that's not what you meant. It does explain a lot, though. No girlfriend. Always with Wilson. Obsession with sneakers. I guess I don't get out enough, because I didn't get the line about the sneakers. Are sneakers the big gay fashion statement? CUDDY: We can't give a liver to a woman this sick. HOUSE: Do you listen to what you're saying? Heh. Wow. Even I noticed Cuddy's cleavage this week when she leaned over. Oh, right. Sweeps. I knew House's first meeting with the transplant surgeon was bogus when House sat there looking all humbly supplicant. STACY: [To House] Anything you say is attorney-client. So you can get advice about the bad, bad thing you did, knowing I'll be tortured because I can't tell a soul. I can see where as long as the hearing remained entirely an internal affair, Stacy could say this with confidence, but given her suspicions that both Chase and House were lying about something, and the fact that Cuddy colluded in a dodgy transplant listing, she should have been listening to her original misgivings about being able to continue to represent all their interests as synonymous with the interests of the hospital. HOUSE: [To Ayersman] Five grand. And that's just ante money. After the surgery, you get another fifteen. I hadn't previously considered the possibility that House uses some of his income on bribe money. AYERSMAN: For the record, I hope the department takes you and Chase and drop kicks both your asses out the back door. The lack of love for House in the hospital has been apparent for some time, but I'm wondering how Chase came in for the same animosity, unless it was just because he was one of House's proteges. Or maybe it's the fact that the entire Diagnostics Department is run like an independent fiefdom, doing all their own tests and procedures without regard for turf boundaries or consequences. HOUSE: Last Christmas party, Nurse Cutler handed you one of those little hotdogs, and you didn't thank her. House goes to hospital Christmas parties? Well, I guess he does, if for no other reason than to pick up blackmail material. The scene with the surgeon -- the real scene with the surgeon -- and the scene with the disciplinary committee later illustrated why I had had so much trouble with the "big musical number" in "Autopsy" even though it was clever and well played in isolation. Outside of Wilson, House has no friends at the hospital. Outside of the other regulars (and Stacy, depending), he doesn't even have any allies at the hospital. I can think of three surgeons and an oncologist that House has made enemies of on camera, and who knows how many others he's needled off camera, including the entire obstetrics dept. in the months following "Maternity"? And yet he was the unquestioned, unprotested conductor of the orchestra during the live autopsy. Cute, flashback-House walking right past House and Stacy in the present day, but it did look green-screened. STACY: You blackmailed Ayersman, he performed the surgery, and you ratted him out anyway? HOUSE: Doesn't seem fair, does it? I've always gotten the idea that House had a particular thing against marital infidelity, but never before to the extent of ratting out cheaters. In this case especially, I would have expected him to hang onto that particular piece of information in case he needed another last-minute transplant in the future. There's also the problem that once you've exposed your blackmail material, there's nothing stopping the blackmail victim from revealing to the world that you blackmailed him, as illustrated at the disciplinary hearing. House ratting out Ayersman after Ayersman had done what House wanted felt really contrived for plot purposes to me, to give the committee an excuse to discipline House. HOUSE: You're not mad because I broke into your psychiatrist's office. STACY: Yeah, I was thrilled about that. HOUSE: O.K., it was a lousy thing to do, but if what I'd found was that everything was all kittens and moonbeams in Markville, you'd be over it. STACY: No, I wouldn't. HOUSE: You're mad at me for letting you know what I did, because you liked where things were going. And for that, I actually am sorry. It was stupid. The A plot of unraveling the mystery of Chase's mistake was mostly great. The B plot, the ongoing House/Stacy story, was back to confused, and it doesn't look as good for the he-did-it-on-purpose theory now. If House was trying to drive Stacy away, then why apologize for anything (even if he was sincere), since that would mitigate the effect? Why make overtures of niceness near the end of the episode? Out of sheer misery at having hurt her? Was House really just trying to get Stacy fired or reassigned as he claimed? If so, then the master manipulator wasn't even in the right ball park with his scheme (not only misreading Stacy, but badly misreading Cuddy as well). Neither did House seem to want Stacy back as Wilson had originally theorized. The only times when House recaptured that old longing were in Stacy's attic, not later, when she twigged. House's demeanor when he was egging Stacy on before she caught him out was more like *he* was catching *her* out than like he was about to invite her back. Though none of the characters has expressed this theory, his eagerness to hear her confess was more consistent with someone who wanted above all to make her admit she had been wrong to leave him in the first place. And yet if that was what this has all been about -- that House wanted vindication rather than Stacy herself -- that would mean that he didn't accept her explanation in "Honeymoon" that there were things wrong between them that went beyond just his leg. And if he doesn't accept that, then why wouldn't he want Stacy back, since she left him, not the other way around? I feel like that old joke about the German ambassador speaking at the United Nations. The other delegates start tapping their earpieces because the simultaneous translation has gone silent. Finally in a hushed voice, the translator says, "I'm waiting for the verb ... I'm waiting for the verb ... " and then bang, he's off in a rush to catch up with the speaker. I don't feel like I can size up the continuing B plot properly until it's finished, just speculate on the merits and defects of multiple theories in parallel. HOUSE: Let me tell you a story about a patient, a patient we'll call Fusan. Is individual health insurance House's new crusade? That so doesn't sound like House. CHASE: Honestly -- STACY: "Honestly"? So you've been lying up until now? CHASE: Let's make a deal. I won't use the word 'honestly' and you'll quit stopping by to see House so you don't take it out on me afterwards. How about that? While I was a little impressed that Chase was cheeky enough to tell his counsel off about her dealings with House, I didn't see where Stacy overstepped with Chase. It was valid advice that using the word 'honestly' in front of the committee wouldn't win him any points. Stacy really did vent most of her anger on House, not on Chase. Now I'm starting to wonder if they're trying to sneak implied Vicodin use past somebody's eyes. While Chase was going on about a suspected strep infection, House seemed to have something in his mouth that he proceeded to wash down with water, but at no point was there a pill or a pill bottle in sight. They don't do any imaging of a live-donor organ before removing it? Sam didn't know he had cancer, and I'm assuming you can't see hepatitis on an MRI scan, so that couldn't have been part of the study that Sam had bribed the tech to fake. (Besides, House usually doesn't trust outside labs' test results anyway. Did he take Sam's on faith because time was tight and Kayla didn't have any other chances open to her?) STACY: How could House have known? Stacy seemed to be impressed in spite of herself at House's correct diagnosis of cancer. HOUSE: And I'm not the one being sued. I feel funny. Heh. CAMERON: She's dying either way. It would be nice to think that this was an indication that Cameron could deal with the terminally ill now, but I couldn't help but suspect it was just temporarily convenient for this one plot that everyone gang up on Chase. FOREMAN: Chase. How many people you know walking around with a black-market organ from a third-world surgeon, huh? This isn't gonna be your salvation. It's just one more thing they'll pin on you. Go in there. Be the good guy. The voice of reason. I was impressed that Chase actually listened to Foreman. CHASE: My dad died. Lung cancer. I saw him a couple months before it happened. We never talked about it. Finally settling the fate of Chase Sr. CHASE: [To Sam] I was hung over when she came back to see me. Hm. Well, I can more easily buy into the idea that Chase is susceptible to guilt than that Cuddy is. And Spencer was good in his phony confession scene. CHASE: [Into phone.] This is Robert. [Pauses.] Um. What did he die of? [Pauses.] That's impossible. I saw him two months ago. If he had lung cancer, he would've -- [Pauses.] KAYLA: Doctor Chase? [Chase hangs up.] I guess I was just not alert, but I didn't see the significance of the phone call coming at all. On the other hand, since I had expected that if they did mention Chase Sr.'s death, it would be in a current story line, not in a flashback, I had given up hope of ever seeing him mentioned again, unless he had gone into a miraculous remission. CHASE: How did you know to look? HOUSE: [Sighs.] When he visited, he told me he only had two months left. And when you screwed up, I did the math. Chase Sr. told House three months. Not that anyone does the math or anything. CHASE: Why didn't you tell me he was dying? Mm, to quote that great sage Gregory House, mistakes are only as serious as the results they cause, which made House's omission look like a doozy in hindsight. HOUSE: He asked me not to. So, the biggest mistake of the episode was made all the way back in "Cursed," when Rowan walked out on Robert again. CHASE: So you just hung me out there to be blindsided. HOUSE: Yeah, Chase, it was all my fault. Laurie was typically good in this scene, but Spencer was great. I think that was the fourth time we've seen House wear a tie, first time inside the hospital. STACY: Is Chase telling the committee about his dad? HOUSE: I don't know. Well, if Stacy didn't already know, then that probably meant that House didn't keep his mouth completely shut. HOUSE: I thought you were going to get him to sell me out. STACY: I wouldn't do that. HOUSE: Why not? STACY: You're my client too. HOUSE: Yeah. And that's not gonna change unless you leave this job. Or I do. So, how do you deal with a coworker that you have feelings for -- positive or negative? I don't want to end up like Chase. I don't want to get emotionally caught up and kill ... you. STACY: It's not all negative. [Pauses.] Maybe you were right. Maybe ... maybe that is the problem. HOUSE: So what do we do? STACY: I don't know. Been here. Done that. The record's stuck. Isn't it long past time that Stacy or Wilson asked House how he feels about Stacy now? He's never actually said, and it is relevant to what's been going on. SCHISGAL: Now, as for Doctor House, there is no evidence of a failure to supervise that would lead to disciplinary action. And yet, there is enough in the record to be very troubled by your conduct, including certain allegations of blackmail from members of the transplant team and by your general refusal to meet with your patients. It should be noted that your patient's cancer was diagnosed as a result of a direct physical examination. HOUSE: Not of the patient. I met the brother. Never met her. You want me to go a family reunion every time I take on a patient? Based on what we were told, I didn't see where House would have more easily diagnosed Kayla's cancer if he had met with her (and uncharacteristically, he actually was physically present to diagnose her perforated ulcer). While I took the committee's point that there could be instances in which House might diagnose patients faster if he examined them himself straight off the bat (it's a proven fact that he sometimes notices things that other people don't), in this case they just seemed to be looking for an excuse to take a swat at him. CUDDY: Doctor House, meet your new boss. I just don't believe that someone working on a fellowship would be given official supervisory capacity over his own boss. Not only would Foreman's temporary authority be undercut by the possibility of House's retribution at the end of the month, but medical bureaucracy goes in for rank and seniority. Unless Cuddy was deliberately making a bizarre appointment for inscrutable reasons of her own, surely a department head would have to be supervised by someone of at least equal rank or higher. This part of the A plot was seriously off-key for me. Despite the unbelievability of the interim appointment, I liked House's tiny smile in response to the news. Since the fellows will have to fly solo soon enough in their careers, I can see House anticipating Foreman's taste of leadership as a valuable if humbling learning experience for Foreman. I can also see House anticipating massive entertainment for himself. As he said the last time Foreman was in charge, "Oh, this is fun." I liked the modulation in House between sarcasm and sincerity this week, continuing from last week, instead of him being a nonstop mugging sarcasm machine as in much of this season. In fact, Laurie got to hit a lot of different notes this week, and did so quite well. Far less expected, though, was how well Jesse Spencer and Sela Ward carried so many of the scenes this week (and an unlikely pairing they were, too). I was hoping to see House's rat wandering around the diagnostics offices in one of those little walker-balls for pet rodents. Oh well. I'll harvest all my timeline notes and post them in order later. The more complex episodes take more time to write about.