House T minus 1, "Frozen"
Right, so everyone has already seen and/or reviewed last night's episode, but I only just saw it (stupid late airing; you'd think our state's team won the Superbowl or something), and I am adding my two cents to the fandom piggy bank.
First of all, I wish I hadn't been spoiled for like ten things in this episode. Two ill-fated Internet sessions in the last few days, without clicking on any links or cut-tags, and suddenly I knew about things like Wilson/Amber and Wilson having fallen down the stairs drunk and the topless oncology line. It was like that time the FOX website summarized "Clueless" with, "House thinks his patient's wife is poisoning him with gold," where I thought, okay, I didn't want to know that, but maybe it'll just be an incidental or early point, and then it turned out to be a last-minute revelation that had zero suspense. I really hate spoilers. :( It's not a comment on you guys; obviously, going online after an episode, I was going to find out something; and the big one, the Wilson/Amber, was totally my own fault for trying to find RSL news last week.
But anyway.
Overall I thought this episode was better than the preview had made it look and not as good as people had made it sound. There were some good lines and good supporting character moments, and I was never bored, but mostly I felt that the show is continuing to cover the same ground as it has in the past million seasons, down to the same words, and the difference wasn't enough to make things interesting.
I feel a vicious satisfaction because now all the Amber-haters are going to have to like her because she's dating the fandom's darling. Ha! Heh, no, seriously, I like her, and I'm glad she's back, and I'll be doubly glad if the show actually does something with her this time before her last 30 seconds on screen. And I love that Wilson picked her of all people to go out with (because, c'mon, he would be an awesome catch on J-Date; he could have lots of people if he wanted). Or maybe she picked him. Whichever. It's great; we got that glimpse when she was fired that she has deep-seated confidence and competitiveness problems, and we all know Wilson specializes in restoring broken women. The cool thing about it is that she isn't some soft-spoken, frail girl like Bonnie must have been when they met; she's brash and big and smart, and she knows House and knows how Wilson is unhealthily dedicated to him, which means House won't have as easy a time stealing Wilson away from her as he usually does.
And how cute was their kiss? Oh, I am so thrilled that Wilson got to kiss someone on screen. *thrills* And the odd camera angle and awkwardness on Wilson's part (which I am choosing not to read as RSL's discomfort kissing someone when he has a fiancee) may have been done to highlight the fact that House was right there, watching. Mm, voyeurism. See also: House's earlier line about Wilson analyzing House's jerking.
And next week tomorrow, Amber's wearing Wilson's beloved sweatshirt! They're totally doing each other; no need to rely on Wilson's claim that they already did (not that I really doubted him, the way he said it). Mm. Are there any Wilson fans out there who don't hate Amber who are working on the fic yet?
Has it always been this way and I'm just noticing, or is it a recent development or degrading of the scripts that the hook for House is also the hook for the episode? "She's stranded at the South Pole." Who said that line, Cuddy or the FOX announcer?
This is an example of a meta comment that throws me out of the episode: House saying it's okay to only get network channels on Tuesdays. HOUSE CANNOT WATCH HOUSE WHEN I AM TRYING TO WATCH THIS SHOW AS AN INTERNALLY COHERENT WORLD, OMG MY BRAIN. House calling Wilson "Bob" was better, because it made sense within the show as well as without.
A meta touch that did work was the grainy filming of House and Foreman in the diagnostics office and Kate in Antarctica, simulating the video connection between them and indicating whose POV we were in and also reminding us that we're watching House on TV. TV within TV.
The "this is House's version of courtship" / "he's been wooing me for years" exchange over microscopes was cute. Generally, I am just pleased to see different combinations of characters interact, and Wilson and Foreman is a favorite because they're together so infrequently-perhaps only beaten by Wilson and Chase. (I know, Chase who? Why can't this show handle nine characters at once? Star Trek did that many and more with ease. And if it can't, why is everyone still there? I mean, aside from the same questions we asked earlier in the season, like how Chase could be a surgeon and how Cameron got to be in such a position of authority and why Foreman can't get hired anywhere else...)
Here is what I like about the line about Wilson having fallen down the stairs: it implies that House and Wilson have known each other for a long time (well, unless you think this happened recently), and they've shared some crazy times, whether happy or maudlin (because why would they [or just Wilson, in his company] be that drunk? Celebrating something? Wilson's marriage[s]? Drowning their sorrows in something? Wilson's divorce[s]? Just boys being boys? Doesn't matter; I like that we got the anecdote.). I don't even mind if we don't get fic about it, because there have been many already since the show started, and now I feel like they've been confirmed in part.
Hee. Wilson running away was priceless. Yet more proof that he's not afraid to throw House's disability in his face.
When did PPTH become a Macbook haven? If the hospital admin is trying to save money, maybe it should stop replacing everyone's computers every six months and stop buying huge HDTV's.
I think it's interesting that House's sexual encounters with women on the show are persistently, overwhelmingly medical or clinical in nature. There was Cuddy with her infertility injections and alcohol swabs; Cameron with the robotic surgery equipment; now Kate with lymph node palpation. And Cameron and Kate were both over a distance, with no physical connection between them and House. Plus clinic patients, like last week's nun/prostitute, and others I'm forgetting. Add another item to the list of ways in which House is dysfunctional and/or hurt, depending on your preferred interpretation. After Stacy, he is not comfortable getting close to women; was probably not entirely comfortable before her either; probably was just as crude then as he is now to cover for it.
So, okay, retreaded ground, like Wilson walking backwards through his own footsteps in the snow: a patient psychoanalyzing House, deciding he's miserable and in pain and blaming it on his leg, seeing that he's brilliant at his job but has no meaningful personal attachments, commenting on his friendship with Wilson, etc. The explanation worked wonderfully, for a change; having the patient actually be a psychologist meant that she could more realistically come to the conclusions she came to in the short time she'd known him. But did we really need more of this? Did she say anything we didn't already know? Four seasons of House, and the best revelations they could give us were that Wilson isn't as nice as he seems and House would rather bare his soul than bare his scar? (Also, what? If this had been "Son of Coma Guy," I'd bet that House would have shown Gabe and Wilson his scar before he'd have answered some of Gabe's incisive questions, if given the choice.)
What I'm wondering is: Did Kate in fact give us anything new?
The best I can answer on first viewing is that she said that yes, House is screwed up, but that he doesn't need to be fixed. That's the difference between her and everyone else House knows; they all want to fix him. Well, what they want is for him to be happy, and I don't think that's a bad thing, but they tend not to go about it in the right ways, and perhaps we can count Wilson's lines like "You are... as God made you" as him accepting House year by year, and this is not the point I was starting to make. Kate's a psychologist, and she knows how to read people and what to say to them. House fell harder for her because she saw him and didn't want to change him; that has always been his sticking point with Cameron as a love interest and Wilson as a friend. Probably Cuddy nowadays, too; in college, it was fine, but now he knows she can't look at him without feeling guilt for what happened with his leg.
I also liked her comment, "Fiction is a waste of time unless you can laugh at it." We haven't seen House watch or read any fiction seriously: BayWatch, General Hospital, The O.C., SpongeBob, that lesbian porn book he had at the airport with Stacy. He saves his thinking for the "important" things, the real things, the Truth: medicine, puzzles and answers. Fiction is for letting his mind wander when he wants to solve something.
Also new-ish, aside from House caring about a patient (Wilson's and Foreman's "Who is this pod person?" faces at various points were fantastic), was House manipulating someone by being nice. You'd think he'd have learned before now that playing on people's softer sides might work better than bullying and insulting them into obeying. And I don't think that had anything to do with his inability to physically coerce the guy to do the drilling or even with his maybe-feelings for Kate. Was that... Was that... growth?
I think House was jealous of Wilson being happy. The green tie of season one was amusement, teasing, curiosity; the lavender shirt was curiosity and jealousy. Wilson's on antidepressants and he's feeling better and got a girlfriend; House is on bourbon and still miserable and alone.
I liked the restrictions on the case/patient this week, including the limited resources (dumping the box of "this is what they have" on the table reminded me of the SGA episode "38 Minutes") and personnel (were they at a remote base with just the two of them, or did the casting department just not have the budget for a full staff?) and, as moonlash_cc and Kate herself pointed out, House's inability to wield power over the patient-at least, not until she fell into the coma and he manipulated the weaker partner (because love is almost always weakness on this show).
I liked Kate's bravery, perceptiveness and competence, too. The opening scene with the femoral artery was not so believable (and also annoyingly shot, but that's just my preference for stable, high-quality shots without dropped frames for the sake of action), but afterwards, Kate was cool. She threw House for loops and stabbed herself in the chest (although, er, how could she expect to stab the right place when she started with the needle so far away from her?) and knew enough to counterargue and stood her ground and made jokes about marinating her blood cells during a test that might have told her she had cancer. I think that outweighed other unfortunate choices made, like how the camera ogled her as she lay back on the x-ray table, and how she had to undress, and how she became yet another female = House love interest (though, yes, different; I'm just saying), and how she ended up unconscious and utterly passive when her life hung in the balance.
Hm. All that's left on my notes page is, "It can't be Cuddy because you're straight." Funny, especially following the reference to everyone's favorite "tranny nurse," and also because, as deelaundry said, it means House is not straight because he's slept with her before. But in all seriousness, it's pretty much canon now that House thinks Wilson is straight. And that's how I've always seen it, no matter how much I love the slash and still believe Wilson is harboring a deep but unconscious crush on House. That is still something that needs to be worked around in fic.
Is that it? That might be it.
Re: tomorrow's episode: I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY TITLED AN EPISODE "DON'T EVER CHANGE." This is becoming ludicrous.
...Is there anyone left who wants to talk about it?
ETA: recrudescence, daasgrrl, usomitai
First of all, I wish I hadn't been spoiled for like ten things in this episode. Two ill-fated Internet sessions in the last few days, without clicking on any links or cut-tags, and suddenly I knew about things like Wilson/Amber and Wilson having fallen down the stairs drunk and the topless oncology line. It was like that time the FOX website summarized "Clueless" with, "House thinks his patient's wife is poisoning him with gold," where I thought, okay, I didn't want to know that, but maybe it'll just be an incidental or early point, and then it turned out to be a last-minute revelation that had zero suspense. I really hate spoilers. :( It's not a comment on you guys; obviously, going online after an episode, I was going to find out something; and the big one, the Wilson/Amber, was totally my own fault for trying to find RSL news last week.
But anyway.
Overall I thought this episode was better than the preview had made it look and not as good as people had made it sound. There were some good lines and good supporting character moments, and I was never bored, but mostly I felt that the show is continuing to cover the same ground as it has in the past million seasons, down to the same words, and the difference wasn't enough to make things interesting.
I feel a vicious satisfaction because now all the Amber-haters are going to have to like her because she's dating the fandom's darling. Ha! Heh, no, seriously, I like her, and I'm glad she's back, and I'll be doubly glad if the show actually does something with her this time before her last 30 seconds on screen. And I love that Wilson picked her of all people to go out with (because, c'mon, he would be an awesome catch on J-Date; he could have lots of people if he wanted). Or maybe she picked him. Whichever. It's great; we got that glimpse when she was fired that she has deep-seated confidence and competitiveness problems, and we all know Wilson specializes in restoring broken women. The cool thing about it is that she isn't some soft-spoken, frail girl like Bonnie must have been when they met; she's brash and big and smart, and she knows House and knows how Wilson is unhealthily dedicated to him, which means House won't have as easy a time stealing Wilson away from her as he usually does.
And how cute was their kiss? Oh, I am so thrilled that Wilson got to kiss someone on screen. *thrills* And the odd camera angle and awkwardness on Wilson's part (which I am choosing not to read as RSL's discomfort kissing someone when he has a fiancee) may have been done to highlight the fact that House was right there, watching. Mm, voyeurism. See also: House's earlier line about Wilson analyzing House's jerking.
And next week tomorrow, Amber's wearing Wilson's beloved sweatshirt! They're totally doing each other; no need to rely on Wilson's claim that they already did (not that I really doubted him, the way he said it). Mm. Are there any Wilson fans out there who don't hate Amber who are working on the fic yet?
Has it always been this way and I'm just noticing, or is it a recent development or degrading of the scripts that the hook for House is also the hook for the episode? "She's stranded at the South Pole." Who said that line, Cuddy or the FOX announcer?
This is an example of a meta comment that throws me out of the episode: House saying it's okay to only get network channels on Tuesdays. HOUSE CANNOT WATCH HOUSE WHEN I AM TRYING TO WATCH THIS SHOW AS AN INTERNALLY COHERENT WORLD, OMG MY BRAIN. House calling Wilson "Bob" was better, because it made sense within the show as well as without.
A meta touch that did work was the grainy filming of House and Foreman in the diagnostics office and Kate in Antarctica, simulating the video connection between them and indicating whose POV we were in and also reminding us that we're watching House on TV. TV within TV.
The "this is House's version of courtship" / "he's been wooing me for years" exchange over microscopes was cute. Generally, I am just pleased to see different combinations of characters interact, and Wilson and Foreman is a favorite because they're together so infrequently-perhaps only beaten by Wilson and Chase. (I know, Chase who? Why can't this show handle nine characters at once? Star Trek did that many and more with ease. And if it can't, why is everyone still there? I mean, aside from the same questions we asked earlier in the season, like how Chase could be a surgeon and how Cameron got to be in such a position of authority and why Foreman can't get hired anywhere else...)
Here is what I like about the line about Wilson having fallen down the stairs: it implies that House and Wilson have known each other for a long time (well, unless you think this happened recently), and they've shared some crazy times, whether happy or maudlin (because why would they [or just Wilson, in his company] be that drunk? Celebrating something? Wilson's marriage[s]? Drowning their sorrows in something? Wilson's divorce[s]? Just boys being boys? Doesn't matter; I like that we got the anecdote.). I don't even mind if we don't get fic about it, because there have been many already since the show started, and now I feel like they've been confirmed in part.
Hee. Wilson running away was priceless. Yet more proof that he's not afraid to throw House's disability in his face.
When did PPTH become a Macbook haven? If the hospital admin is trying to save money, maybe it should stop replacing everyone's computers every six months and stop buying huge HDTV's.
I think it's interesting that House's sexual encounters with women on the show are persistently, overwhelmingly medical or clinical in nature. There was Cuddy with her infertility injections and alcohol swabs; Cameron with the robotic surgery equipment; now Kate with lymph node palpation. And Cameron and Kate were both over a distance, with no physical connection between them and House. Plus clinic patients, like last week's nun/prostitute, and others I'm forgetting. Add another item to the list of ways in which House is dysfunctional and/or hurt, depending on your preferred interpretation. After Stacy, he is not comfortable getting close to women; was probably not entirely comfortable before her either; probably was just as crude then as he is now to cover for it.
So, okay, retreaded ground, like Wilson walking backwards through his own footsteps in the snow: a patient psychoanalyzing House, deciding he's miserable and in pain and blaming it on his leg, seeing that he's brilliant at his job but has no meaningful personal attachments, commenting on his friendship with Wilson, etc. The explanation worked wonderfully, for a change; having the patient actually be a psychologist meant that she could more realistically come to the conclusions she came to in the short time she'd known him. But did we really need more of this? Did she say anything we didn't already know? Four seasons of House, and the best revelations they could give us were that Wilson isn't as nice as he seems and House would rather bare his soul than bare his scar? (Also, what? If this had been "Son of Coma Guy," I'd bet that House would have shown Gabe and Wilson his scar before he'd have answered some of Gabe's incisive questions, if given the choice.)
What I'm wondering is: Did Kate in fact give us anything new?
The best I can answer on first viewing is that she said that yes, House is screwed up, but that he doesn't need to be fixed. That's the difference between her and everyone else House knows; they all want to fix him. Well, what they want is for him to be happy, and I don't think that's a bad thing, but they tend not to go about it in the right ways, and perhaps we can count Wilson's lines like "You are... as God made you" as him accepting House year by year, and this is not the point I was starting to make. Kate's a psychologist, and she knows how to read people and what to say to them. House fell harder for her because she saw him and didn't want to change him; that has always been his sticking point with Cameron as a love interest and Wilson as a friend. Probably Cuddy nowadays, too; in college, it was fine, but now he knows she can't look at him without feeling guilt for what happened with his leg.
I also liked her comment, "Fiction is a waste of time unless you can laugh at it." We haven't seen House watch or read any fiction seriously: BayWatch, General Hospital, The O.C., SpongeBob, that lesbian porn book he had at the airport with Stacy. He saves his thinking for the "important" things, the real things, the Truth: medicine, puzzles and answers. Fiction is for letting his mind wander when he wants to solve something.
Also new-ish, aside from House caring about a patient (Wilson's and Foreman's "Who is this pod person?" faces at various points were fantastic), was House manipulating someone by being nice. You'd think he'd have learned before now that playing on people's softer sides might work better than bullying and insulting them into obeying. And I don't think that had anything to do with his inability to physically coerce the guy to do the drilling or even with his maybe-feelings for Kate. Was that... Was that... growth?
I think House was jealous of Wilson being happy. The green tie of season one was amusement, teasing, curiosity; the lavender shirt was curiosity and jealousy. Wilson's on antidepressants and he's feeling better and got a girlfriend; House is on bourbon and still miserable and alone.
I liked the restrictions on the case/patient this week, including the limited resources (dumping the box of "this is what they have" on the table reminded me of the SGA episode "38 Minutes") and personnel (were they at a remote base with just the two of them, or did the casting department just not have the budget for a full staff?) and, as moonlash_cc and Kate herself pointed out, House's inability to wield power over the patient-at least, not until she fell into the coma and he manipulated the weaker partner (because love is almost always weakness on this show).
I liked Kate's bravery, perceptiveness and competence, too. The opening scene with the femoral artery was not so believable (and also annoyingly shot, but that's just my preference for stable, high-quality shots without dropped frames for the sake of action), but afterwards, Kate was cool. She threw House for loops and stabbed herself in the chest (although, er, how could she expect to stab the right place when she started with the needle so far away from her?) and knew enough to counterargue and stood her ground and made jokes about marinating her blood cells during a test that might have told her she had cancer. I think that outweighed other unfortunate choices made, like how the camera ogled her as she lay back on the x-ray table, and how she had to undress, and how she became yet another female = House love interest (though, yes, different; I'm just saying), and how she ended up unconscious and utterly passive when her life hung in the balance.
Hm. All that's left on my notes page is, "It can't be Cuddy because you're straight." Funny, especially following the reference to everyone's favorite "tranny nurse," and also because, as deelaundry said, it means House is not straight because he's slept with her before. But in all seriousness, it's pretty much canon now that House thinks Wilson is straight. And that's how I've always seen it, no matter how much I love the slash and still believe Wilson is harboring a deep but unconscious crush on House. That is still something that needs to be worked around in fic.
Is that it? That might be it.
Re: tomorrow's episode: I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY TITLED AN EPISODE "DON'T EVER CHANGE." This is becoming ludicrous.
...Is there anyone left who wants to talk about it?
ETA: recrudescence, daasgrrl, usomitai