The entire thread can be read at Google Groups: Subject: HOUSE, M.D.: 35. "Skin Deep" From: MDuPree@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree) Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv,alt.tv.house-md Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:01:26 +0000 (UTC) Organization: The World : www.TheWorld.com : Since 1989 Message-ID: Lines: 306 Spoilers for "Skin Deep," 2/20/06. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Obviously, I don't keep up with the world of fashion modeling. I thought the patient looked a little weird in the prologue. When she was in the hospital, I was distracted wondering if she had ever been involved in facial reconstructive surgery. I don't mean plastic surgery designed to "improve" the looks of everyday people, but plastic surgery designed to repair damage after an injury. I was completely surprised to learn that the actress had done international modeling. I thought fashion models looked like Cameron, only taller and younger. But then, I'm not the target market. Fashions in people can go in and out of style just like fashions in clothes. Another reason to abjure fashion. Unfortunately, the actress looked her reported age of 25, not 15. I thought the preference in fashion models was to shoot for the just- under-18 look, but again, it's not my area of expertise. I thought the actress didn't do a bad acting job, but since she's a former model, I'm not sure how much of a stretch the role was. Though it's distasteful, I don't have any moral objection to adults sexually drooling over minors, *unless they do it in front of minors*, as House did with the patient. It's just out of line and is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Yeah, obviously she had experienced such inappropriate drooling and worse before, but that didn't make it all right for one more middle-aged guy to step up and do it. Just because a minor isn't a virgin doesn't mean you get in the queue. Though House's passing commentary about the cognitive dissonance of hyper-eroticizing minors, all the while making it illegal to have sex with them, was on point and well taken, that didn't mean House could just blame his own face-to-face leering on society or the media. In "Paternity," House was so concerned about the possibility of child sexual abuse that he immediately made haste to go see the patient, despite the fact that child sexual abuse is unfortunately not a "zebra" condition, and the fact that he had mightily resisted taking the case before the possibility of abuse arose. In "Skin Deep," though House didn't indicate he would physically participate in child sexual abuse, he just seemed to revel in the thought of it even in front of the patient herself. The patient's development of secondary sex characteristics in the last year without menarche made me think eating disorder, which was one of Cameron's differentials. The We-Know-It-But-He-Shouldn't Dept.: Foreman made a reference to House breaking up with Stacy. While the fellows may have suspected (Chase said as much in "Need to Know"), none of the fellows had hard evidence to prove that House and Stacy had had enough of a thing going again that it would have required a breakup to end it. It sounded wildly presumptuous to me for a subordinate to try to read between the lines of his boss' illicit love life. He should have just stuck with the generalized warning that personal matters shouldn't disturb professional conduct and not tried to go into specifics. It sounded like one of several times this season in which the characters were given instant and unexplained access to information that the audience knew, but the characters shouldn't have known; e.g., Cameron automatically knowing that Chase was an ex-seminarian in "Acceptance" when the only person we saw Chase divulging that information to was the sick nun. Yeah, it's easy to fanwank that the fellows talked about the subject off-camera, but it's still symptomatic of what looks for all the world like authorial inattentiveness (or, if it had occurred in a different context, bad fanfiction). No matter how you slice it, it's impossible for me to imagine House divulging to the fellows that he and Stacy had become an item again, but then they broke up again, especially considering that they were never both on the same page at the same time. Speaking of characters knowing things that the audience heard but the characters didn't, House told the fellows that Daddy said he was drunk when he had sex with his daughter. However, Daddy said no such thing. It was the daughter who later told Cameron that she had gotten Daddy drunk. I was highly amused by House's conversation with "God" in isolation. However, what did bother me in the grand scheme of things was that the theme seemed to have a heightened level of attention paid to it. They've conditioned me to be suspicious. Earlier they mentioned House's atheism for no reason again too, which made me think they're going to retcon that as well, as no longer a rational, moral examination of the existence of suffering ("Damned If You Do," "Three Stories"), but as just another way for House to make himself miserable. O.K., maybe I'm jumping the gun, but they seem to be systematically undoing everything else that was ever interesting about the character in season one. I could buy that Cameron had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse. In "Paternity," House gave us every reason to believe that he did too, but I could go with his explanation here that he wanted to keep the dad around to pump him for more information. What I didn't buy was that neither Cameron nor Foreman could realize the practical implications of what House was saying. Even more difficult to buy was not only Cameron and Foreman, but also the far more seasoned Cuddy being naive enough to believe that all they needed to do was report the abuse in order for the dad to be hauled away. I also didn't understand why House didn't point out ahead of time that they couldn't make the abuse charge stick. Every other cop or medical show on TV has been through the denial-of-abuse plot line. Cameron ratted out House to Cuddy for dropping acid just last week in "Distractions." Yeah, I'm sure she was just all concerned about his health 'n' stuff, but why would Cameron worriedly assume she was in trouble for trying to conscientiously protect a minor this week (which Cuddy would shield Cameron for if necessary), but not show any worry that she was in trouble for tattling on House's personal behavior last week? So many plot points sound superficially passable in the second season, but when taken as a whole, do not lead to coherent characterization. One of the many things that didn't jibe for me was that it occurred to House to ask if sexual abuse could have made Andie the cancer kid so prematurely sexualized in "Autopsy," but when we found out that the supermodel in "Skin Deep" had been sleeping with everyone in sight (with enough guys that it had to have been going on since before her quasi- puberty last summer) and that Dad was only the last on the list, it screamed to me that someone besides her dad had seduced her long before to make her prematurely sexualized. But the story just made out like it was the girl's fault after all and it was all her idea from the beginning. I guess that fits in well with the idea that everyone's misery is just their own fault. This was the first time I could remember House getting gratuitously violent, when he whacked Wilson with his cane. He needed to be reported to Cuddy, but since I'm sure Wilson wouldn't do that, he should have thwacked House on the head since pain was obviously the only thing House would listen to and, "Ma! He hit me first!" That was just beyond the pale, and I don't think it does anyone any favors to let him get away with that shit. I was talking back to the screen (second-season _House_ has turned me into one of those people) during House's squeeze-the-tube test. Everyone knows that in order to eliminate the placebo effect (and outright faking), you can't let the patient know when you're giving them real medicine and when you've stopped the real medicine. The medical aspects of this show used to be way over my head. Now it's sometimes embarrassingly easy to outdo the doctors, which creates a suspension-of- disbelief problem when all of the doctors are supposed to be smart-on- toast and in particular, House's only excuse for breathing these days is his fiatted brilliance. I was also dubious and even confused that the twitching started immediately when House pinched off the flow of IVIg. I thought his later idea of hanging saline and telling her it was just a fresh bag of medicine was a lot better. When Chase did exactly that, he explicitly said that it would take a little while for the remaining IVIg in her system to clear before the symptoms might return, which made sense to me. So how come the symptoms returned immediately when House cut off the flow before? The PTSD "getting away from it all" theory looked like it was completely barking up the wrong tree when the patient turned out to be cool with all of her sexual encounters, and it turned out she really did have cancer, so the instantaneous return of the twitching when House pinched the tube seemed like pure bullshit staged for a dramatic visual. I also called hermaphroditism when Wilson said the ovaries were undersized. It really shouldn't be easier for me to get on the right track than it is for House. Considering what House went through in extremis to deny to Cuddy that he was an addict in "Detox," I didn't buy for a second that he would prefer to let her -- his *boss* -- know that he wanted to significantly ratchet up his reliance on opiates, rather than turn to Wilson even if it meant enduring the psychoanalytic nagging that would accompany Wilson's compliance with such a request. Cuddy could *fire* his ass or make rehab a condition of continued employment. Wilson was just a nudzh. Wilson was the only one House admitted his addiction to in "Detox." Cuddy had to hear about the admission from Wilson, and in confidence. The begging-for-morphine scenes in "Skin Deep," though touchingly played by Laurie and especially Edelstein, completely undercut the dynamics between House and his senior colleagues as depicted in "Detox." The only consolation was that Cuddy retained control of their exchanges and didn't manifest any guilt, which was more in keeping with season one than season two. Great believable leg mutilation shot. CGI? I still don't know how they did the shots of the withered polio legs on Kenneth Branagh when he played FDR, but I couldn't see any "seams" there or here. Another thing that didn't follow for me. They said that it's the proto-ovaries that turn into testes and descend in utero in males. Based on what House said, the patient didn't have both ovaries AND testicles. He said it was actually pseudohermaphroditism. She should have had only one set of gonads. Cameron said that Wilson had already ultrasounded the patient's ovaries and pronounced them to be small, but tumor-free. Then they MRIed them, only this time, House pronounced them to be testicles with a tumor on the left one. How could the same organs produce both of those visual interpretations? Wouldn't the left "ovary," with a tumor, and the right "ovary," without a tumor, have looked suspiciously lopsided relative to each other, irrespective of their absolute size? And while I'm on the subject, if the doctors were as determined to rule out cancer as they sounded, wouldn't they have done a whole-body CAT scan? They did one on the senator last season when they were a lot less certain that cancer was what he had. I think that was a CAT scan Wilson was performing and looking at earlier in this episode, so why stop with the upper body? I really don't get why House insisted on calling the patient "he" to her face when she had lived her whole life as female, never developed male sex characteristics, self-identified as female, and would continue to self-identify as female in the future. That just seemed like a pointlessly callous thing to say to a minor who had already been through enough to warrant a serious hypothesis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Oh, right, this season House IS pointlessly callous, even to the underaged, apparently. The whole psychosomatic resolution to House's subplot was repeatedly telegraphed to the point where I felt like I was being hit over the head with it. House brought up the subject of psychosomaticism twice (for himself, which he rejected, and for the patient), Wilson brought it up, Cuddy concurred, and Foreman indirectly alluded to it. I tried to give them more credit than that, but by all means, let's be certain to leave no ambiguity that we're retconning House's pain to be all in his head and all his own fault now. I considered the possibility that Cuddy had given him a placebo shot, after House brought up the possibility of the placebo effect working with the IVIg on the model, but I rejected it because 1) I foolishly thought they still retained their old respect for chronic pain sufferers and weren't going to go the "it's all in your head" route, and besides, 2) the patient wasn't responding to a placebo effect after all, so I thought they were going to maintain the parallel when it got to House. More fool I. I thought that the great brave and compassionate feature of "Detox," especially for a broadcast network show in the current American climate of moralizing about other people's drug use, was that it showed chronic pain sufferers as being in a permanent bind of tradeoffs. On the one hand, chronic physical pain is debilitating and interferes with everyday functionality. Painkillers help with that. On the other hand, the painkillers exact their own price. There is no happily ever after for them, only tradeoffs. "Detox" seemed to be telling Americans to stop being so reflexively judgmental and intrusive about what other people do with their bodies, as long as those people continue to function and meet their contracted obligations. But now they've established scientific physical proof that House really is making himself miserable and he's got no one to blame for it but himself. He's not even taking the painkillers for physical pain. Maybe he never was. It's all in his head. I feel like they just retconned away everything that was bold and generous about "Detox," and I'm torqued off that they not only want to degrade both the show and the character in the second season, but they're determined to retroactively rewrite, drag down, and piss on everything that was good about the first season as well. They continued the second-season trend of painting House as the cause of everything bad in his life. This time we learned that House attended only one session of rehab and didn't even finish the session. For all we know, then, House might even be able to get around without a cane if he would only work at it. But rather than doing everything in his power to decrease his mobility problems, which was the impression I got off of first-season House, we can now see that revisionist House refuses any avenue that might let him get better because, as Wilson never tires of reminding us, House wants to be miserable. They've also continued to conventionalize House. He used to be a complex person who was off the beaten path and difficult for other people to read because he didn't want the same things in life that other people did. Other people insisted on misreading him as being just like everybody else except that he was willfully determined to make himself and others miserable. Now the surface misreading has been turned into the fiatted truth. I wish I could have enjoyed the piano playing more, but I was in a pretty sour mood by the end. They changed the piano, too. Maybe product placement for Sohmer fell through. They moved the windows in House's living room. I'm pretty sure he's had the exact same fireplace and wall lamps all along, so continuity on the rest of his residence, inside and out, has simply been nonexistent. --