Re: HOUSE, M.D.: 38. "Safe"


Micky DuPree wrote:
Spoilers for "Safe," 4/4/06. (And before someone states the obvious,
yes, I'm a week behind.)

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Elapsed time numbers refer to a videotape copy of the original broadcast
with the commercials left in.



PROLOGUE


I faked myself out looking for the A-plot patient. I figured the person
in the clean room couldn't be it -- too obvious -- so I guessed it was
going to be the boyfriend.


PPTH seems to be the place for _Buffy_ alums looking for a quick
paycheck.


Maybe it's just me, but if I were constantly at risk for anaphylaxis, I
think I'd make a holster for my epi-pen and always wear it on my belt.


ACT I
6:00


House and Wilson don't leave their dishes for the maid?


HOUSE: You knew that I was interested. That gives you a
valuable bargaining chip.

Why on earth was House interested at that point? He didn't have
anywhere near enough information to tell that Wilson was pitching him a
zebra yet. In the old days, he would have waved everyone off, saying,
"Boring, boring, boring," and countering that the symptoms given to him
(so far) could be explained by any number of easy diagnoses, until
finally, the pitcher gave him a symptom he couldn't explain away. Now
it's like that was a completely different guy. Wilson was different
too, since he used to be suspicious when it was too easy to get House to
take a case.


I had an insurmountable medical/characterization problem with this
episode.

WILSON: The allergic reaction happened while she was in a clean
room.

The medical equivalent of the locked-room mystery.

HOUSE: How do you get an allergic reaction in a clean room?

Unfortunately, House's line immediately above was not from "Safe," but
from "Damned If You Do," the last time this situation happened, and in
which House finally came to the conclusion that the patient had the
allergen inside her. He ordered a full-body CAT scan (resulting in the
discovery of the allergenic copper IUD inside the sick nun). I could
not believe that at no time in "Safe" did a single one of the regular
doctors at least *suggest* they try the same thing that worked the last
time they were faced with the exact same dilemma in the presentation of
symptoms, especially considering that if they can find tiny tumors with
CAT scans and MRIs, they could have surely found a tick with one. The
writers are not only repeating themselves before the second season is
even done, they're repeating themselves badly.

Now, I realize that the medicine on this show has always taken a
backseat to the story, so they simplify here, take shortcuts there, and
look the other way on occasion. But this season I've gotten the feeling
that this show might as well be set in a _Star Trek_ sort of universe
where the medical aspects have all the reality of dilithium crystals
that act one way in one episode and another way in another episode.
They founded the title character in _House_ on his belief in rationality
and his insistence on the science underlying his work, and yet there has
been little rationality to the way he's been written this season, not
even in his work, in which the writers have continued to insist, based
on thin air and empty promises, that he is unceasingly brilliant.
Neither he nor his cohorts, also represented as having superior
intelligence, seem to be capable of learning from past cases. (Even if
House were having an inexplicably bad week, the whole point of his
subordinates' fellowships is to learn while they're at PPTH, and their
cases have certainly been memorable.)

In short, mediocre intellects cannot write a credible genius character,
not when they've made his genius an integral part of the story, and
that's at the core of the problem this season.


CUDDY: These are your big ideas? Somebody's lying?
HOUSE: Hasn't let me down yet.

The cheating cyclist in "Spin" was lying to the rest of the world, but
he didn't lie to House.


A heart transplant from a chocolate chip cookie? In the mother's place,
I wouldn't feel I could trust the daughter either, nor the boyfriend,
since he wouldn't deny the daughter anything even if it was dangerous.
At the same time, though, if there was no medical reason the daughter
couldn't go back to school, literally locking her up in the castle tower
("They won't even tell me the alarm code") was going to warp her mind.
Mom and daughter were a real couple of prizes.

Looking at it from the doctors' point of view, and for the second week
in a row, I wondered why House didn't even bother to consider
Munchausen's by proxy in the mix, since his reaction to extreme devotion
is usually to cynically check for something suspicious going on with the
devotee.


CHASE: We're gonna need a semen sample. You can use the
bathroom over there.
DAN: Wait, uh ... how do I --
CAMERON: Aim and shoot.

That was more than a little brusque. Sometimes even 16-year-olds get
embarrassed and freeze up. If I were House, the fact that Cameron is
still letting her personal issues interfere with her professional
behavior would be cause for intervention.

CHASE: No thinking about Doctor Cameron. We'll know.

Oh, way to help out there, bro.


CAMERON: [To Chase] Too bad it's not you giving the sample.
We'd be done by now.

Geez! What a bitchy thing to say when Cameron instigated the encounter
with Chase. Just don't go back for seconds if you didn't like the first
helping (although some things last longer the second time around). I
never thought I would find myself saying that I preferred the old
Cameron, but here I am. If the writers were going for postcoital
workplace repercussions, that would have made sense a few months ago,
but it seemed totally out of the blue here.


CAMERON: No semen allergy.

At this point I thought that the girl was pregnant and was allergic to
the embryo or otherwise having a rare bad reaction to the pregnancy
hormones. I was really surprised they didn't use that as part of the
differential, even if only to rule it out. They were hyper-concerned
about possible allergic reactions to everything else.


CAMERON: He loves her. He did everything he could to make sure
she wouldn't get sick.
HOUSE: What does that mean?
CAMERON: Love is an emotion certain people experience, similar
to happiness. No, maybe I should give a more relatable
example.
HOUSE: Oh, SNAP.

I liked House vastly better when he just looked at Cameron like she was
an alien for presuming to critique his emotional life unbidden in
"Honeymoon." House had infinitely more cool when you couldn't get a
rise out of him with personal digs, apart from a calm, "Nice." I even
liked Cameron better when she acknowledged that House could love, and
stopped blaming him for not loving her in "Honeymoon" (although it
should be noted that 'better' is only relative to what she was turning
into here). All that character development, either ditched or ignored
now.

They were also making Cameron into an almost mindless cheerleader for
twu wuv in this episode, considering that she saw a devoted wife try to
murder her husband last week, lost $100 betting on their happy marriage,
and yet here didn't have the slightest reservation that there could be
anything emotionally amiss between two 16-year-olds that she knew only
through a medical history that already had one big lie in it.


They haven't been nearly as picky about depicting clean room procedure
this season as they were last season. The attitude has seemed to be,
"Eh. Clean enough."


I'm thinking that the coma patient is going to have to revive at some
point, or else they wouldn't keep showing him. Still, I'd have expected
them to move him to some kind of long-term care facility by now.
Hospitals cost too much and they need the beds too much.


HOUSE: You almost killed your girlfriend. She's allergic to
penicillin.

But some people misuse the specific term 'penicillin' as if it were
equivalent to the general term 'antibiotics.' Considering that the
episode was still young and Dan was already demonstrably unreliable on
multiple counts, it was strange to me that House didn't ask to see the
bottle of antibiotics that Dan was taking. Sure, Dan could have said
that he threw it away, but House didn't even bother to ask, not because
it wasn't something House would ask, but mainly because that would have
sent up a red flag to the audience too early in the hour.


The guy in the role of the boyfriend was good. It couldn't have been
easy playing that much of a friendly doofus.


ACT II
19:34


HOUSE: What's the good news? What's the bad news?
CHASE: Congestive heart failure.
HOUSE: Is which?
CHASE: Good news?
HOUSE: Why?
CHASE: I don't know. It just sounded like you.

Not laugh-out-loud funny, but it was an amusingly reasonable thing to
say, and even maintained a character continuity for Chase. It's like
that anecdote House once told about how the Inuit find fish by looking
for the birds that find the fish. Unfortunately for the fellows, the
best way to find the medical problem is to look at what House is looking
at instead of independently looking on their own, but that's not the
best way to challenge themselves.


CAMERON: What if her anaphylaxis wasn't anaphylaxis? Toxicity
from the antirejection meds could cause a seizure and
then heart failure.
HOUSE: And get cured by a mommy-wielded epi-pen? It's
anaphylaxis.

Why not an allergy to the antirejection meds? From what I understand,
it's possible to get an allergy to almost anything. It also led me to
wonder if anything besides anaphylaxis becomes quiescent upon
administration of epinephrine (which House didn't get around to asking
until he was home with Wilson later).


FOREMAN: What if they really are two puzzles?

It was nice to see Foreman achieving a comfort level with the concept of
multiple diagnoses when he once protested House's abuse of Occam's
Razor, but the events of the second season have driven me to wonder if
this will last from one episode to the next or if Foreman's attitude
will change to meet the convenience of each's week's plot.

It also made me wonder why no one invoked House's version of "Occam's
Razor": "The simplest explanation is almost always that somebody screwed
up."


HOUSE: [To Foreman] There's a reason why they call it the
whiteboard.

When House told the senator in "Role Model," "They don't call it the
White House because of the paint job," it was funny in a bitterly
amusing, I'm-not-laughing kind of way. But this line from "Safe" was
just a stupid non sequitur, since even House the race-baiter has let
Foreman write on the whiteboard before. It looked exactly like the
writers couldn't tell the difference between House making a cynical
observation about the racist behavior of others (the White House line)
and House being racist himself (the whiteboard line).


FOREMAN: [To House] You wanna give me that BLACK marker?

I liked the line. In fact, lines like that have been long overdue, but
it would have been better if House's line had made more sense, like the
"Role Model" line.


They really can't leave House's residence alone. The address out front
this time was "221," rather than "221B." The "B" was on House's
apartment door, which made more sense, but the constant changing hasn't.


According to the closed captions, the soundtrack was running Otis
Redding's "Pain in My Heart" while Wilson waited on House's front step
and Melinda underwent the heart biopsy. I could see how the title would
be applied to each case, the figurative one and the literal one
respectively, but intercutting between the two made it seem like we were
supposed to draw actual parallels between Wilson and Melinda, which
struck me as stretching the point. Melinda was trying to flee the nest
as her mother refused to let her go, whereas if we were to believe
House, Wilson was trying to cling to House's apartment as a haven even
though his wife had turned away from him.

God, I was telling Wilson out loud (which I liked to think was a measure
of my irritation rather than of my insanity) to go do something else for
a spell while he was waiting for the stethoscope to be removed from the
doorknob. There's denial, and then there's excruciating boredom. They
could have gotten the point across by having Wilson go away, come back,
go away, come back, etc., getting more and more exasperated each time,
until finally the stethoscope was gone.


Heh. As far as we know, they have only that one, dead-end flight of
stairs that Lisa Edelstein showed us in the set tour in the first-season
DVDs (although they've moved it since then). Usually when they want to
show a serious stairwell, they go shoot off-set somewhere, but this
time, they seemed to be showing Foreman racing up the same incomplete
flight of stairs over and over and over again. Not that it was badly
done, but since they showed us the trick of it on the DVDs, it amused
me.


So much for Foreman attempting to tell disarming anecdotes about his own
medical history a la Chase. Two tries but no one was buying. (I'd
listen, but they didn't ask me.)


BARBARA: She was under anaesthesia for the biopsy. If she lost
oxygen --
FOREMAN: CT ruled out brain damage.

They showed Melinda getting the CT first, then the biopsy (unless they
were trying to say that they did another CT before Foreman did the
physical exam of her leg, which would strike me as backwards).


ACT III
32:25


HOUSE: Foreman's right. We gotta find out why she's paralyzed.

It would have killed them to do this line when Foreman was in charge?
Not every time, but just once? The fellows *have* to be right more and
more often as time goes by, or else it will look like House is a crummy
teacher. They also had Cameron come up with the right diagnosis, but
she didn't fight for it.


WILSON: You're miserable and you're lonely, and you're, you're
gonna trap me here to keep me every bit as miserable and
lonely too.

Lest we forget in an episode where the B plot is all about Wilson's
misery, the season's theme is actually House's misery.


WILSON: All right, I'm finding a new place tomorrow.
HOUSE: Right. But not tonight.
WILSON: Well, I figure you wanna shave my eyebrows while I'm
asleep. I wouldn't want to deprive you of that last
smile.
HOUSE: You're not going anywhere. You're going to sit on my
couch and depress us both because you just can't admit
that it's over with your wife.

Yeah, Wilson should follow House's recent example of how to conduct
oneself in the face of an untenable romantic relationship and its
aftermath. Oh, wait.

House's diagnosis of Wilson's problems was tainted by House's
inexplicable erasure of the phone messages from the prospective
landlord. What on earth were the writers thinking if Wilson's secret
desire to stay was what they were getting at all along? The way for
House to prove to Wilson that Wilson wouldn't move out was for House to
actually give Wilson the opportunity to grab that apartment, only for
Wilson to find some excuse not to take it (which wouldn't have been
difficult given that the landlord was upping the price). For House to
actively prevent Wilson from moving out was incredibly stupid plotting.
But then what else to expect when Wilson was the one begging to talk
about his problems, only for House to shut him down and then later claim
that Wilson was in denial? The writers have had a schizo approach to
these developments, which is annoyingly soap opera-like.

WILSON: That's right. I'm here on vacation.
HOUSE: You gotten a lawyer yet?
WILSON: That's, that's, that's not --
HOUSE: You even called one? As long as you're here, it's just
a fight. As soon as you get a place, then it's a
divorce.

This line presumed knowledge on House's part that the story has already
indicated House does not have. Not every marital fight ends in divorce.
Not even every extramarital affair ends in divorce. We've already been
shown that House had a rare bout of radical misdiagnosis and completely
missed Wilson's wife having an affair. (House was dead certain it was
Wilson who was having the affair, and had to be abruptly told otherwise.
That would have been a fantastic double meaning for the title "Clueless"
except that, oops, it took place in a different episode.) So, given
that we've been rather forcefully informed that in this season House
isn't "that kind of friend," therefore we know that he hasn't allowed
Wilson to fill him in on any details, that meant that House didn't
really know at all what was currently going on in the Wilson marriage,
and the writers making out like House was giving a perfect diagnostic
reading of the situation was just another case of them fiatting him as
being right.

HOUSE: Everything sucks. Might as well find something to smile
about.

Riiiight. 'Cause House has always been Mr. Look-on-the-Bright-Side and
Dr. Laughter-Is-the-Best-Medicine on this show. 'Cause smiling was the
therapy that House used when Stacy left. This is the lowest form of
fanfic.

Anyway, I assumed that House diagnosing Wilson's fear of divorce was
supposed to substitute for a clinic patient this week.


ACT IV
44:08


CHASE: Pesticides?
CAMERON: This time of the year they're not spraying.

They were seemingly spraying in January in "Poison" last year, and the
culprit turned out to be blue jeans that fell off the back of a crop
duster's truck. I was surprised the doctors would dismiss the idea of
pesticides so casually after running into a sneaky version of that
problem before. They should have insisted on searching the boyfriend's
home and clothes for consistency's sake.

Wow. The characters/writers not only couldn't remember back to "Poison"
or "Damned If You Do," they couldn't even remember back to last week,
since the talk of poison and lying didn't cause any of the doctors to
wonder if one of Melinda's devoted hangers-on was poisoning her, e.g.:

CHASE: Maybe the mother's devotion is just a cover?
CAMERON: What, murder is the new vasculitis?


Now that we know Steve McQueen is still with House, I want Wilson to
have a cow when he sees the rat wandering around the floor of House's
apartment in one of those clear plastic rodent balls.


CUDDY: O.K., magical tick hunt is over. Only real doctor stuff
now.

Having Cuddy give House a smackdown on medical matters, especially in
front of witnesses, was an instant giveaway that House had to be right.
Last season she more often deferred to his medical judgment and smacked
him down only on legal, procedural, and administrative matters (which
struck me as making an excellent distinction between the different
aspects of his behavior). This season they sometimes just have her wade
into him as if he has never been proved right in the past, and then have
both her medical objections AND her administrative objections dissolve
in the face of his greatness. I miss the nuanced touches, like when she
made him pay for the illegal DNA sequencing in "Paternity," or when they
were both medically wrong at first in "Damned If You Do."


I had trouble believing that the girl would do a 180 on wanting her
freedom, but I could hand-wave it as her having one too many brushes
with death. However, I simply did not believe the mother doing a 180 on
giving the girl's freedom to her; flat did not believe it. Unreasonable
people don't just magically see reason after incidents that actually
bolster their world view. We didn't even need to see everything turn
out all right in the family. It was incongruous to me that the writers
would take extra, unbelievable pains not to reveal the motive of the
murderous wife in "Clueless," but they went out of their way to
artificially resolve all differences and make everything nicey-nice
between the mother and daughter in this episode when the medical story
and the regulars' characterization did not require it.


I didn't see why House couldn't just bug Wilson to get him to admit he
was still clinging to the marriage, the same way House simply persisted
until Wilson was willing to break down and tell him about his homeless
brother in "Histories." The physical harassment was weird. I tried to
remember any practical jokes that House pulled in the first season. I
could remember him setting up Cuddy a few times as payback for making
him do clinic duty, but that was about it (and in House's mind, Cuddy
started it). There was a playful and yet essentially harmless kind of
adolescence about House last season. Here Wilson's complaint that they
weren't in a college dorm seemed very apt (although I would have aimed
lower: summer camp for unimaginative 13-year-olds). I think we're
supposed to just melt and say, "Aw, guys will be guys," or something,
but these two guys were a lot more interesting last season, and part of
that was because House wasn't just a garden-variety ***.

As for Wilson, I could believe he was a frat rat in college, but it used
to seem integral to his sense of self that he wasn't that kind of person
now, or to be more precise, he wasn't that kind of *doctor*. By his
age, he's had to have seen horrible freakish accidents that started out
as nothing more sinister than a supposedly harmless practical joke that
caused someone to slip and fall. If House had managed to hit his head,
or more likely, to do permanent tendon or ligament damage in his hand or
arm while breaking his fall, suddenly all this slapstick wouldn't seem
so funny. Even if House had merely ended up putting too much weight on
his bad leg and experienced pain (which we've seen him voluntarily do
before), it wouldn't have seemed like Wilson. What we got was cartoon
violence. Wilson knew House would be largely unscathed, the same way
the Roadrunner knows that Wile E. Coyote will be largely unscathed. I'd
expect the old Wilson to sabotage House in more subtle ways than sawing
through his cane, like deliberately booby-trapping a refrigerator
container with something really foul buried inside something really
tasty.

Finally, given that Wilson's urine was on House's couch, House putting
Wilson's pillow on the spot was funny, but I couldn't believe the
underlying premise: that House would knowingly get someone to urinate on
his couch. Wilson will be gone one day, but that will still be House's
couch and it will still have Wilson's urine on it. I'm not even going
to crawl into the head space of what that might mean to the slashers.

There was certainly crude humor in the first season, but usually it was
to make a point (like House going on and on in front of the nurses about
the ancient physician Galen fumigating the vaginas of schizophrenics,
but it turned out House was indicating disapproval of the practice).
I'm getting a huge impression of crudeness just for the sake of
crudeness now, as if the current writers watched the first season, but
recognized only the crude bits, not the underlying point. But hey,
they've certainly read their _American Idol_ audience right.


Evidently, Wilson really is a _Vertigo_ fan and didn't just think the
poster in his office looked cool, since that was the movie he was
watching at the end of the episode, but I think it would have worked
better thematically if Wilson had been watching it last week when they
had a female character embroiled in murky motives.


Great analysis, as usual, Micky.

I have to admit though, that although I agree with you about the cane
prank, I still laughed my head off. Felt really guilty and stupid, but
laughed anyway.

Unless they can do a really great season ender, I have to say I'm
probably out for the third season. The very few relatively good
episodes just aren't enough to keep me hanging around.

So what do you think of "Lost"?

Kate

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