House s6 ep 5
Manipulative TV is a bad thing, of course. But what if it’s done well? This episode of House was a shameless exercise in viewer-button-pushing, and I loved it like the cheap ho I clearly am.
Patient of the Week is Donny (yet another ‘Homicide’ alumnus, Jon Seda), who is about to turn 40 and therefore convinced that he’s going to die imminently, as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather dropped dead at that age with cardiac problems. Unfortunately there’s nothing wrong with his heart. House wants to kick him out. Everyone else wants to keep him. So convinced of his fate is Donny that he’s always made it clear to partners that he doesn’t want to have children, and as it turns out he doesn’t want to know the one he does have.
Meantime House is sleeping in Wilson’s rather disturbing shrine to Amber, and seems to be hallucinating again – he can hear whispers. And Chase is still being haunted by the ghost of President Jones.
The PotW issue resolves itself in the normal way, although there’s a pretty dramatic detour. The whispering I wasn’t expecting to play out as it did, and both the cause, and House’s reaction, were surprisingly moving, as was House’s sudden confrontation with Cuddy. At the moment it looks as if House is torn between being House and being something better, and Hugh Laurie is right on top of it.
And an episode which spent a lot of time examining various responses to loss ended on a few hopeful notes, although not for poor old Chase; not only does he have President Jones’s blood on his hands, he’s having to take that particular open pay packet home to Cameron. You get the feeling that things are going to get a lot worse for him. But for the rest of us, ‘House’ is going pretty well this season.
I don’t know, Jed – to borrow the word of the week, I was a bit underwhelmed by the episode. The opening sequence with the chase went on for ages, like it was some cop drama or the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”, and I was just really bored. The “I’m going to die at 40 because that’s what happens in my family” thing is a storyline I’ve come across before in a novel, and it was handled in a better way in that novel than it was here, I think. Again I was a bit bored.
The whispering thing was fine and the Chase story was fine but I just thought they could have been much better than fine – both those stories could have been great, really moving and gut-wrenching, and I don’t think they really hit the bullseye with either. The acting on House is great, but the writing just does not match up to the same standard.
Oddly enough, I kind of agree with a lot of what you say. For some reason, it just worked for me this week.