My Friend About Season Four
My friend has just started watching Season 4, and he wrote to me "I hate this season. I love this season." Today he sent me his reasons why.
SEASON FOUR INTRO, part 1
I hate this season because it is all brand new-I have been evicted from my comfort zone! House doesn’t even pop a pill until the middle of the second ep! Wilson actually seems to be enjoying himself for the first time, toying with House like a cat with a mouse! Who was formerly jerked about like a puppet now controls him by sleight-of-hand; filling in innocuous bits of info and letting his doubts do the rest.
With the old crew gone, there are no one-liners of finely-tuned invective to evoke long-suffering sighs and eyerolls, as refined and gestural as a Marcel Marceau routine; his remarks are abrasive, out-&-out vile, and-a big gripe-people inserted seemingly just to be used and abused like facial tissues. There’s too many faces! Worse, his opinions have no revelations, don’t engender any verbal sparring, and are all shrouded in glib slashes, smart-asssmackdowns and-another big GRRRR- no few based in the use of mass cult TV refs of the time. And it’s all too fucking fast! I’m getting as stressed out as Cuddy, who has lost all of her sex appeal and is starting to be as harried as Harriet the House-wife! And I have to watch everything twice just to get that much!
SEASON FOUR INTRO, part 2
I love this season because it is Day One, Ground Zero. If you ever wondered at how these competent doctors, certainly past their baptism-of-fire duties and well on their way to establishing practices and careers ended up cowed into ducklings, chasing this hobbling maniac down the halls of PPTH-now you get it. All we ever knew from the first ep was that both Foreman and CamBot were hired not on their CV but a personal resume that indicated character traits that House would enjoy exploiting at every opportunity. (One thing I don’t recall was if House ever told Chase why he hired him.)
What makes this delicious is seeing both CamBot and Chase now matured into self-possessed, confident individuals who now view House fondly as both mentor and cranky senior-delinquent-every encounter with them is like the perfect revenge, with buttercream frosting.
And speaking of mentoring, this brings it back to the “Three Stories” session. You don’t get the elaborate origami-like folding; you do get House taking the role of the Supreme Diadact, which is to say-reluctant teacher. He even holds court in a lecture theater! And it is all based in case theory and a dozen responses to the former trio of diags on the diag. Now we see him attempting to rebuild the JLA or the X-Men or the Avengers or the Fantastic Four out of raw recruits. What’s more stunning is, however we MAY have viewed our relationship/identification/character-bonding with one of them in the past, we now see we wouldn’t have lasted a day with this monster-from-the-Id! (You get the “Forbidden Planet” ref, right? Don’t disappoint me.) But that what makes it better is this is raw House-no time for nuances, make ‘em AND break ‘em.
SEASON FOUR INTRO, part 1
I hate this season because it is all brand new-I have been evicted from my comfort zone! House doesn’t even pop a pill until the middle of the second ep! Wilson actually seems to be enjoying himself for the first time, toying with House like a cat with a mouse! Who was formerly jerked about like a puppet now controls him by sleight-of-hand; filling in innocuous bits of info and letting his doubts do the rest.
With the old crew gone, there are no one-liners of finely-tuned invective to evoke long-suffering sighs and eyerolls, as refined and gestural as a Marcel Marceau routine; his remarks are abrasive, out-&-out vile, and-a big gripe-people inserted seemingly just to be used and abused like facial tissues. There’s too many faces! Worse, his opinions have no revelations, don’t engender any verbal sparring, and are all shrouded in glib slashes, smart-asssmackdowns and-another big GRRRR- no few based in the use of mass cult TV refs of the time. And it’s all too fucking fast! I’m getting as stressed out as Cuddy, who has lost all of her sex appeal and is starting to be as harried as Harriet the House-wife! And I have to watch everything twice just to get that much!
SEASON FOUR INTRO, part 2
I love this season because it is Day One, Ground Zero. If you ever wondered at how these competent doctors, certainly past their baptism-of-fire duties and well on their way to establishing practices and careers ended up cowed into ducklings, chasing this hobbling maniac down the halls of PPTH-now you get it. All we ever knew from the first ep was that both Foreman and CamBot were hired not on their CV but a personal resume that indicated character traits that House would enjoy exploiting at every opportunity. (One thing I don’t recall was if House ever told Chase why he hired him.)
What makes this delicious is seeing both CamBot and Chase now matured into self-possessed, confident individuals who now view House fondly as both mentor and cranky senior-delinquent-every encounter with them is like the perfect revenge, with buttercream frosting.
And speaking of mentoring, this brings it back to the “Three Stories” session. You don’t get the elaborate origami-like folding; you do get House taking the role of the Supreme Diadact, which is to say-reluctant teacher. He even holds court in a lecture theater! And it is all based in case theory and a dozen responses to the former trio of diags on the diag. Now we see him attempting to rebuild the JLA or the X-Men or the Avengers or the Fantastic Four out of raw recruits. What’s more stunning is, however we MAY have viewed our relationship/identification/character-bonding with one of them in the past, we now see we wouldn’t have lasted a day with this monster-from-the-Id! (You get the “Forbidden Planet” ref, right? Don’t disappoint me.) But that what makes it better is this is raw House-no time for nuances, make ‘em AND break ‘em.