House 5.21, 5.22, 5.23 and 5.24: “Saviors,” “House Divided,” “Under the Skin,” and “Both Sides Now”

The Wife:

The final four episodes of this season of House almost made up for Kutner’s random-ass suicide in their inventiveness. Almost. I thoroughly enjoyed the return of Amber as House’s ghostly hallucination and his three-episode quest to discern exactly what’s wrong with him, either way knowing that if he’s crazy, he can’t practice medicine, and if he’s experiencing side effects from his Vicodin addiction, he can’t practice medicine because once he’s clean he’ll be in too much pain. Anne Dudek was delightful has his subconscious manifestation throughout this arc, especially the moment in which she reappears after House thinks he has staved her off by OD’ing on insulin, singing old jazz standards over the microphone at his bar, echoing her first appearance beside his piano. But nothing, really, was more chilling than the final episode, when House realizes he’d hallucinated the entire night he spend kicking Vicodin with Cuddy, ending in the two of them sleeping together. Reliving all of the moments we saw of him flipping coins or examining a tube of lipstick are replayed with Vicodin bottles replacing those objects, suggesting a very powerful drug addiction that has completely taken over House’s life, was pretty brilliant. Frankly, I’d prefer more arcs like this, rather than so many one-off episodes. But what else are you going to do with a 24-episode season? So while everyone else attends Cameron and Chase’s wedding (they spent these past few episodes almost not getting married because a. Cameron kind of got cold feet b. House nearly killed Chase with a stripper covered in strawberry body butter . . . that apparently was made with actual strawberry extract and c. Chase was being a dick to Cameron about keeping her dead husband’s sperm on ice because he took it to mean that she thought they weren’t going to work out, rather than, you know, being the last thing she has to hold on to of her fucking husband), House checks himself in to a mental institution . . . which he will inevitably check himself out of at the beginning of next season because you can do that kind of thing with you are voluntarily committed.

I should have known this was too good to be true . . .

As far as the patients were concerned, I’m often irritated by how precious the conceits are in which every patient is a metaphor for someone on the team, etc. So I totally get why the guy with split brain whose hand was not his hand was necessary for the metaphor of the finale, it was also perhaps added just a tad too much levity, despite how much Thirteen et all tried to tell me it was creepy. The only patient that really got to me out of this bunch was the ballerina who lost her skin. A lot of my research deals with holes in the surface of the body, mitigations of that surface or the abjecta beneath the surface, but I found her skinlessness to actually be quite frightening. Perhaps its because I’ve had skin cancer that I find the idea of losing that much skin so terrifying (which, for the record, makes no sense, because the removal of skin cancers just leaves some awesome scars), but its more likely the fact that, without the mitigation of the surface, the inside is all that much more frightening. We forget that our skin is the largest organ on our bodies, and so it is vital that we take care of it. Losing a little bit when you scrape your elbow or knee is fine, and hardly horrifying, but losing so much that we are exposed so wholly to the world is truly unsettling. And deadly. I shuddered for that poor girl. She’s just damn lucky that Princeton-Plainsboro has so many fresh cadavers from which to harvest grafts. I know the episode wanted us to sympathize more with the possibility that she, a dancer, would have to have her gangrenous hands and feet removed in order to live (Taub managed to revive the tissue, somehow), but the loss of her flesh was something I couldn’t get out of my head. And I doubt I will.

So, damn you, House, you actually got me. Good for you.

Considering how poorly I did at keeping up with House this year, I don’t think I’ll write about it next year. I’ll still be watching, though, storing up dozens of episodes on my DVR to marathon whenever I get a break from my book learnin’.

The Husband:

And so the month of season finales involving hallucinations continue, and between this, Bones, and Grey’s Anatomy, I wonder what else have I not come across? I know how the US version of Life on Mars ends (but since neither my wife nor I have finished watching the second half of the season, I’ll refrain from saying what it is), but what about the shows I’m behind on?

Smallville, of course, always has at least a couple hallucination episodes a season – and more now that they’ve been struggling to find stories in Metropolis, a task that doesn’t actually sound very hard – but will Prison Break get all wonky during its final five-episode run that’s sitting on my DVR? (Michael does have major brain shenanigans last time I checked, so this has potential.)

Does Lie to Me, which we’ve DVRed but haven’t touched yet, turn everything on its head by revealing that Tim Roth is just a figment of our imagination? (Considering he’s been both a futuristic ape and Abomination in The Incredible Hulk, this could be a possibility.)

Is Reaper going to turn out to be an extremely vivid dream concocted by Sock during a very long nap at the Work Bench? Will that explain Andi losing her personality this season?

Is that missing episode of Sit Down, Shut Up an apology to the idiots who didn’t find it funny and complained about the intentionally awkward animation-on-top-of-real-backgrounds?

Motherfucker! Ugly Betty ended in a hallucination, too! What happened here? Is this a veiled backlash against Obama? Did all the showrunners stop taking their medication?

The only time I can remember even the slightest bit of consistency across certain shows during season finales was May, 1996 (I had to check Wikipedia for the year, but remember everything else about the following without any aid.) For some reason, three major shows in my life decided to kind of lose their minds and go way too dark for my young teenage brain. With Seinfeld, it was Susan, George’s fiancée, dying as a result of toxic envelope glue, and when the main cast stopped by the hospital, they pretty much felt nothing and went to go get some coffee. On Roseanne, Dan breaks his diet and he and Roseanne get into one of the foulest shouting matches I’ve ever seen on a family sitcom, devolving into back-and-forth screams of “Fatty! Fatty! Fatty!” (Let’s not even mention the final season, which was all a dream.) And, finally, Mad About You challenged Paul and Jamie’s marriage when she kissed the man she was campaigning for and Paul lusted after another woman but didn’t do anything, leading to a quiet, disturbing fight.

It just seemed like, for no discernable reason, sitcoms ended that year wanting us to feel like absolute shit. So I ask, does anybody have an explanation for this madness in dear old 2009?

Don’t get me wrong, I thought everything with Dudek was some of the most compelling minutes House has ever had, and even without her, the final mindfuck, while hard to avoid in the press after the fact, was still eerily effective, thanks in no small part to Hugh Laurie’s continued brilliance on this show. Does he still not have an Emmy? (Now that Boston Legal is gone, Spader’s absence in the category will help considerably. That is, if Jon Hamm’s John Ham doesn’t take it, which would not be a bad thing per se.)

On another note, do any of you out there seriously care about Chase and Cameron? At all? Boooooooring. How about hiring another intern. I’m fine with that. Anything to get away from the dour blondes.

 

Dollhouse 1.12: “Omega”

The Wife:

The Dollhouse season/series finale (and I’m betting it’s the latter) was certainly some of the series’ finest work, confirming my Dr. Saunders-is-a-doll theory and engaging in some interesting cyberpunk conceits. As a finale, I think this episode admirably wrapped up the season and, since the central arc was essentially completed, could serve to wrap up the series, as well. But, as any good season finale-that-might-be-a-series-finale should be, there are open doors through which to proceed should FOX get Dollhouse a greenlight for 12 more episodes. (Or 13. Depending.)

When Alpha abducted Echo from the Dollhouse, he stole all of her former imprints, and destroyed the backup copy of her original “Caroline” personality. Topher struggles to find out which of her imprints he would have uploaded into her before absconding, and discovers that it was never one of Echo’s imprints at all, but one of Whiskey’s.

A tall glass of Whiskey.

Three or so years ago, Whiskey and Alpha were sent out on a paired engagement, basically playing Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers in some dude’s totally weird torture/porn fantasy. Alpha, programmed with a personality prone to paranoid delusions, started to take things too far, which in turn called in the handlers to break things up, but not, of course, until after the reveal that the silhouetted woman he was working with wasn’t Echo at all, but Whiskey . . . and after Whiskey and Alpha proceeded to have some totally hot foreplay with their captive. (This is, I guess, the only reason one should ever want to be kidnapped by Mickey and Mallory, because otherwise that’s a pretty fucking terrible idea!)

And here’s where I take a moment to thank Joss Whedon for giving us Amy Acker in stripper clothes. She’s so much more beautiful and has so much more range than Eliza Dushku that I’d rather watch a spin-off prequel about her character. I mean, really, Dushku has basically only been Faith for most of this series, whereas Acker has been someone completely different than Fred. And we already know she’s a great actress. Let’s all take a moment to shudder in remembrance of the Ilyria arc on Angel.

But as to the Mickey-and-Mallory imprints, it seems Alpha chose them in part because his Mickey personality was dominant at the time, and in part because it was the most convenient way to go on a kidnapping spree. He and Echo-as-Mallory, only minutes out of the Dollhouse, kidnap a young girl named Wendy and drag her back to Alpha’s lair. He was astute enough to call in a bomb threat to the building and lock everyone else inside the Dollhouse so they’d have greater difficulty finding him, and Paul Ballard (who also doesn’t have a whole lot of range or characterization, thanks to Tahmoh Penikett) puts himself in charge of reconstructing what happened on the day Alpha went rogue.

It seems Alpha was obsessed with Echo from the day Caroline strode into the Dollhouse for her pre-Activation tour. Caroline makes a comment about how the Dolls all seem like zombies waiting for tasty brains, which I thought was a pretty cute, sly nod to her Hulu commercial, as well as an accurate assessment of living without a personality. Per the Mickey-and-Mallory flashback, it seems Alpha was routinely paired with Whiskey on engagements, as she was, at the time, the Dollhouse’s most requested Active. And because of his fascination with Echo, he one day took a pair of scissors to Whiskey’s face during art class, eerily demanding, “Whiskey, let Echo be number one.” And so Whiskey was broken, and Alpha was to be given a full diagnostic, wiped and then sent to the Attic (despite his protestations that “I was making art”). During the diagnostic, though, he resists, creating that famous composite event where all of his former imprints uploaded into his brain, causing him to not have multiple personalities, but to be multiple personalities, as other brains shifted, randomly, into his own consciousness at any given moment. And so that killing spree occurred, in which he preserved the one person he thought was different and special: Echo.

At his power plant lair, Alpha uploads Caroline’s brain into poor unsuspecting Wendy with his own version of Topher’s chair, and forces “Caroline” to confront her own body. This was absolutely my favorite part of the series so far, as I felt it finally engaged in some commentary on theories of consciousness and embodiment rather than just bringing something up through a moral lense (such as the show’s constant dialogue about slavery and freedom, which also is brought up in the most eye-rolling way possible during this otherwise great scene). Alpha shows “Caroline” her body and chastises her for abandoning it, making a strange bid to privilege the corporeal and temporal over permanent, ethereal cyber-consciousness. I found this bid to punish Caroline’s mind for abandoning her body especially strange in light of Alpha’s next assertion that, if he makes Echo like him, they can be supreme beings, gods or supermen (or, literally, the Alpha and Omega), because they are not one person with multiple personalities, but one body comprised of many people, able to shift in and out of consciousnesses at any minute.

To make her into Omega, Alpha uploads all of Echo’s imprints into her, hoping that she will do as he did when he emerged from his composite event and destroy her original consciousness. In this case, to kill “Caroline.” But Echo as Omega seems to have a slightly better grip on reality and juggling multiple consciousnesses than Alpha does, and realizes it’s pretty insane to destroy one’s primary consciousness, so she instead swings at him. She disagrees with his theories on the übermensch, because even though they may be everybody, in the sense that they are many people, they still aren’t someone without their original personalities.

That notion of being “someone,” I think, is what Alpha’s addled brain is rallying against by destroying his own original brain and asking Echo to destroy hers. To Alpha, a body with just one brain in it, one consciousness, is to be “someone,” which is to be less than “everyone,” privileging a multiple consciousness, an ever-shifting collective over the singular, individual consciousness. I really like this conceit as it subverts the notion of what it means to be an “everyman” in narratives. This whole time, we’ve looked at the Dolls as “everymen,” capable of having attributes projected onto them, but now we’re asked to read Alpha and Omega’s composite personalities as “everymen” in a literal sense, which renders them godlike, in Alpha’s conception, and, therefore, utterly singular. Uniqueness here is achieved by subverting the traditional notion of an “everyman,” and that’s pretty clever.

Barring that reading, I would find it very odd for Alpha to spend time punishing Caroline’s brain for abandoning her body, when he went on to destroy his own. Especially when he utters the most cyperpunk line in the entire series as he uploads Caroline into Wendy: “A body’s just a body. They’re all pretty much the same.” And he’s right: bodies aren’t special, but consciousness is. This show’s entire conceit has privileged the consciousness over the corporeal, uploading new people into blanked out bodies and sending them off to do the extraordinary or the ordinary. A body is only meat and flesh and organs, something that can be marked, scarred, broken or destroyed while the consciousness, especially the kind that is downloaded or uploaded at will, that lives on. And I couldn’t be happier that Dollhouse finally made it to a point where it engaged in its own conceits. (Props to you, Tim Minear!)

Thus ends our brief, poorly-executed literary theory section of this post. I promise only summary/brief commentary from now on.

While Alpha, Wendy/Caroline and Echo/Omega are having theoretical fun in his lair of doom, Ballard manages to get the bomb threat called off so he and others can go hunt down Alpha and their missing Doll. Sierra and November are imprinted as thieves, for some reason, in the one plot thread that never actually goes anywhere, which I think was added just to make Ballard uncomfortable at seeing the woman he kind of cared for uploaded with a new personality. He also discovers that Alpha and some of the other original dolls were taken from a prison population, and that, as a convict, Carl Craft (later known as Alpha) was also prone to carving up people’s faces and kidnapping. (So perhaps one never leaves one’s original consciousness behind, even when erased?)

Meanwhile Dr. Saunders tends to Victor, whose lovely face will now be scarred worse than her own. She’s actually not very kind to him, reminding him that he will never, ever be able to be his best again, that he’ll basically suffer the fate she suffered: being uploaded with a new personality for the remainder of his contract with the Dollhouse and working on the inside, as a Doll with scars is a broken Doll. (I’ll spare you more theory/analysis on bodily marking, abjecta and the horrific powers of scars, even though I assure you I really, really, really want to say something about it.) You see, once Whiskey was broken by Alpha, and he killed the original Dr. Saunders (who was an old dude who liked lollipops), they made her useful by uploading his skillset and temperament into her body. I feel so badly for Victor, whose life will never be normal again. He won’t notice it now, but when his contract is up, he will. Maybe Topher can make one of the Dolls into a plastic surgeon and fix most of Victor’s scars. He’s almost too valuable to lose as a Doll.

Why couldn't she climb to the top of the ratings? She can do practically everything else.

Back in the power plant, Echo agrees that she won’t kill her own consciousness (after the world’s most eye-rollingly on-the-nose speech about how she has 37 different brains in her head and not a one of them thinks you can sign a contract to be a slave, especially when there’s a black president), Alpha threatens to break Wendy’s personality so that she can never have it back, revealing his plan to basically live out his days kidnapping people, and putting Echo’s consciousness into them so that she can repeatedly kill herself (and yet never kill herself . . . which is where his argument descends into crazyville). She chases him outside to save Wendy’s consciousness and literally goes out on a limb for the girl, crawling on a construction beam to get to the wedge. Conveniently, Boyd and Ballard have figured out where Alpha’s lair is by this point and Ballard manages to position himself right under Echo, catching the wedge as it falls and saving the girl. Alpha escapes (thus setting up the chase to continue should there be a next season).

Back at the Dollhouse, Ballard agrees to contract for DeWitt to help track down Alpha, but only if November’s contract is voided and she gets to return to her own life, which was pretty sweet and unexpected of Ballard to do, and proves that, in some small way, he did care about Mellie, even though she was never real. And Echo? She gets wiped clean, at least for the foreseeable future.

I’d be surprised if Fox gives Dollhouse a second season, but with such a strong sweep (save for “Haunted”) heading into the finale, they’d be remiss not to. It’s not the smartest show on TV, but it tries hard enough to be. And I’d rather watch something with which I can engage than something that doesn’t ask me to at all.

The Husband:

Hell, I can ignore about half of the Dollhouse episodes and still be confident enough with the other half, especially the last two and the Rashomon episode, to demand a second season. Just like Buffy and Angel, it took its time to get its intelligence and cleverness past the network and finally become a true Whedon show, one of big ideas, big laughs and big action. While I felt the first handful of episodes really talked down to its viewers (something that FOX surprisingly does not do very often with its dramas, and far less so than the #1 network, CBS), it finally started asking us to put the pieces together, and play along with the show as it progressed through its actual mytharc.

As I didn’t really give a crap about this show for a few weeks, I was surprised at how emotional I felt during this finale, especially during the Alpha flashbacks. This may have a great deal to do with how much I have grown to love Amy Acker over the last nine months while I watched Angel, but also my extreme amount of respect for Alan Tudyk as an actor ever since I saw him in A Knight’s Tale. (It took me another three years to discover that he wasn’t British.) The moment he slashed up Whiskey’s face was probably the series’ best moment, one of both great despair and, in a really fucked up way, love. I’m so glad I called the fact that Whiskey only became Dr. Saunders after she was slashed up, and that she wasn’t necessarily the second Doll, and that it in turn gave me a reason as to why Dr. Saunders would be afraid of Alpha, even if she wouldn’t have remembered him as an activated active and not as Whiskey.

While my wife geeks out on cyberpunk, I’m more interested in the broader concept of a soul, or in this case, how despite being a superpersonality, Alpha original form, Carl Craft, tends to dominate and thus fucks up the rest of the Dollhouse by basically being Jack the Ripper. It explains away some of the contradictions in Alpha’s “quest” versus his own killer instinct, the highbrow and lowbrow of what’s going down in that fried brizzain.

Ballard still sucks, though, but now that he’s in cahoots with the Dollhouse, maybe he can redeem himself as a character if the show gets renewed.

Which brings me to the renewal question. I wholeheartedly think that had FOX not dumped it on Friday nights, pairing it with the sinking second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, it would have definitely earned a second season. Can you imagine how Fringe would do on such a shitty night with such a shitty pairing? Why not put Dollhouse on Mondays after either House or Bones (the ever-shifting hits of different proportions)? I think going up against Heroes, which some might consider stupid, would actually be a great concept. Heroes is hemorrhaging viewers each week, viewers who’d do better with the similar-but-better Dollhouse, so FOX could easily snag those viewers away, viewers who’d perhaps prefer something a bit more rewarding. And at 9, it could basically take all of those viewers who love Chuck at 8 but ignore Heroes (…as I raise my hand…), because Chuck was designed for Whedonites, the smart nerdy crowd who’d follow Adam Baldwin anywhere. It’s a dirty tactic, sure, but it’s not a new concept.

Come on. Even if many great shows have failed ratings-wise this season, at least they were given a second chance after the WGA strike. Money is money, so wouldn’t you love to capture the intelligent 18-34 bracket who are smart enough to have a disposable income? Because those people are called Whedonites.

 

ABC Sunday Night Chardonnay and Chocolate Fest (4.19.09): Desperate Housewives 5.19 “Look Into Their Eyes and You See What They Know” and Brothers & Sisters 3.21 “S3X”

The Husband:

Ding dong, Edie is finally fucking dead. Thank whatever lord you have, because her constant story repetitions that serve no purpose other than to act as a cheap plot device for other, better plots have finally come to a close. No longer do we have to put her in all the promos as if she were one of the “housewives” despite contributing nothing to the series other than a plastic shell. Hell, she didn’t even feel like a housewife when she was, in all actuality, a wife this season to Creepy Dave.

Clearly, no one is all that moved by Edie's death.

But the show isn’t done with her yet, at least not in this week’s episode, because for the first (and hopefully last) time, she takes over the Mary Alice role and became the narrator. As long as her mannish voice is gone next week, then I accept that this, an episode based solely on the housewives (plus Mrs. McClusky) reminiscing about Edie Britt. But if she sticks around in the ether, then I’ll be fucking pissed.

As the rest of the stories have been put completely on hold for the long van ride to Edie’s son’s boarding school, there isn’t really a whole lot to talk about. (Nope, no mention of Creepy Dave’s story, which directly caused Edie’s death.) Basically, Gaby and Edie had a very special night on the town that turned into a tender moment fueled by jealousy that Gaby got more free drinks at a bar than Edie did, Susan called out the new-to-the-neighborhood Edie for sleeping with a married man until Edie turned around and informed Susan of the terrible truth of Susan’s husband’s infidelity with another woman, Lynnette learned to battle cancer when Edie takes her to a biker bar (huh?), and Mrs. McClusky had a drink-fueled heart-to-heart with Edie about what it means to lose a child as opposed to giving one up.

The only memory I really and truly appreciated was Bree’s, which dealt with the years between last season and this season as it pertained to Orson’s incarceration. After being basically forced out of Wisteria Lane, Edie had taken to visiting Orson every so often in prison, not for sex but just because the prison was nearby and she needed a friend, and Bree was certainly not coming as often as she should…being Orson’s wife and all. The story filled in a couple emotional holes that seemed to positively gape when this flash-forward season started, so I’m glad that the writers took the time to at least address some Van De Kamp/Hodge drama.

There only five episodes left, so they’d better be nice and juicy.

…I can’t believe I just wrote “nice and juicy.” This is not good.

Over on Brothers & Sisters, everybody has sex on the brain (look at the episode’s title if you need help with that one), save for most of the children (thankfully offscreen) and the on-the-lam Tommy. (Although, technically, he is stranded in Mexico, so who’s to say Balthazar Getty is not getting some south-of-the-border va-hi-na or participating in a Double Indemnity-inspired murder plot concocted by Patricia Arquette twins.)

Let’s split this up into two sections.

Getting Laid

• The newly reappointed-to-Ojai-Foods Sarah, who shares a quick office tryst with Cal the accountant/volunteer firefighter (Christián de la Fuente from Dancing with the Stars and…other stuff I don’t watch), only to find out the next day that he was a temp and she bought and wore that too-tight red dress for nothing.
• …actually, she was the only one getting laid.

Not Getting Laid But Certainly Thinking About It

• Kevin and Scotty, who are propositioned by Kevin’s closeted former lover Chad (Jason Lewis) to have a threesome with him, only to reject his very forward suggestion but still be hot-and-bothered enough to have a shirtless make-out session, only to be interrupted by the just-banged-by-a-temp Sarah. (Jason Lewis, after playing a model/actor on Sex and the City and a soap opera actor on House, stretches his performance abilities to play…an actor.)
• Ryan The Missing Walker continuing to lust after Rebecca, despite making it so obvious in mixed company that Rebecca’s estranged father warns her of this creepy boy’s total creep factor.
• Nora, who is suddenly revisited by architect Roger Grant, who has informed her that his open relationship with his London-based wife (a set-up that turned Nora off) has turned into no marriage at all, so now he only has eyes for her.
• Kitty, who is watching her marriage completely fall apart (despite Robert’s affidavit, signed by his doctor, that his heart is finally okay enough to survive a bout of passionate lurrrrrvin’), is starting to really feel fondness for Alec the single father, who brings her treats at the playground their children use every day. Watch out, Kitty – his brother is a lawyer who can see the future via musical numbers (or however one is to describe Eli Stone’s “powers”).
• Justin, who is trying to either find a way to restart his relationship with Rebecca or at least find closure, neither or which really happens.

Other than the knowledge that Tommy, despite having all charges dropped against him, still doesn’t want to come back to his family and relatives in the United States, not a whole lot of story progress was made this week, but it was definitely an entertaining way to come back to the Walker clan after several weeks off the air.

The Wife:

Hey, people who watch Desperate Housewives and stuff! Question! Is “Look Into Their Eyes and You’ll See What They Know” the first DH episode that draws it’s title from Sondheim lyrics rather than song titles? Because that song is “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company. Here! Watch the brilliant Anna Kendrick perform it in Camp!

 

House 5.17, 5.18, 5.19 and 5.20: “The Social Contract,” “Here, Kitty,” “Locked In” and “Simple Explanation”

The Wife:

So, apparently, Kal Penn asked to leave House because he’s taking a position in the Obama administration.

Okay.

That’s cool.

However, how does that explain why the writers never figured out how to use Kutner at all in any episode this season? There were several opportunities where they could have explored his background (chiefly, an episode with an adopted patient, like himself), but they chose not to. Thirteen got a beefy story about her Huntington’s and her relationship with Foreman and the drug trials and all that. Taub’s divorce and the reasons he left plastic surgery are constantly brought up, but all we really know of Lawrence Kutner is that his parents were shot to death in front of him, he’s kind of a manchild and is now dead. I’m sorry, House writers, but even knowing that Kal Penn wanted out, this doesn’t excuse your laziness. I mean, shit, at least the folks on Grey’s are giving Katherine Heigl a worthwhile exit.

I guess, at the very least, I no longer have to gripe about how the show has neglected to find ways in which to use Kutner well. I like Kal Penn a lot, and I hope the Obama administration can make better use of him than the folks on House ever did.

I just thought I’d get that out of the way first so you all don’t have to wait for my reaction.

Three random POW storylines lead up to Kutner’s exit: a patient who lacks a social-appropriateness filter that makes him say all kind of things normal humans wouldn’t, a ripped-from-the-headlines story about Judy Greer and that cat that predicts death, and Mos Def starring in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I have the least to say about the funniest of the three, “The Social Contract,” because other than presenting us with a person who is like House because he says what other people won’t, which is inherently amusing, the episode doesn’t have much substance to it other than that, save to set up a Taub arc for the next episode. It seems that the POW’s constant harping on Taub’s giant schnoz is enough to remind Taub of his insecurities and failures, including those in his stock portfolio, which lead him to get swindled by a guy who pretends to be a high school classmate, currently under investigation for defrauding doctors of investment money in new surgical tools. (I mean, really, it was a very well put together scheme.) Thinking he’d reclaim some of the former glory he had in his days as a plastic surgeon, Taub goes full-in on the investment and quits his job with House.

For the last time, I refuse to audition for bloody Cats!

Other than that, the DeathCat episode wasn’t all that awesome, either, probing further into House Hates God territory by pitting him against a patient who at first fakes her symptoms because the DeathCat sat next to her, just as it does to old folks who are headed off to the great beyond in the nursing home where she works. On DeathCat’s advice, though, it’s good that Judy Greer came in because she did actually have a cancer in her appendix. By fearing the DeathCat, she managed to thwart her demise. But, of course, having faith in a cat that “predicts” death simply by following up on its natural instincts is absurd to House. When people are about to die, they’re either cold because their bodies are slowing down, thus they are covered in blankets, or are feverish. Either way, they’re warm. And cats like things that are warm. Maybe there’s something to House’s chastising Kutner in this episode for giving the DeathCat the benefit of the doubt that might have lead to Kutner’s demise. But, then again, you’d think peeing on a chair would be enough to cure a guy of any ill feelings toward mean things their boss has said.

I do like cats, though, so one great thing about the DeathCat episode was how pretty that cat was. She’s way more attractive than the real DeathCat, Oscar. How very Hollywood. (Oscar is cute in his own fluffy buttkins kind of way, though.)

As for “Locked In,” I found this episode to be rather excruciating. I think they chose an appropriate way to tell the story, i.e. the Mos Def voiceover and the Mos Def eye camera, however, that doesn’t mean I liked it. The episode got significantly better for me when Taub, trying to earn a spot on the team again, hooked Mos Def’s brain up to a computer after he loses the ability to blink so that he could move a cursor with his mind to answer yes/no questions. That stuff was way awesome, but the rest of it I just couldn’t get into. Not the voiceover, not the eye camera, not the mindscapes where House, Mos Def and Mos Def’s children all chat together. I did like the shot where the team goes over the place Mos Def had been hiding from his wife when he said he was out of town, though, and the scene transfers all Michel Gondry-like to the factory where he took work as a janitor to make ends meet. That was pretty cool. I will, however, try to avoid getting rat-urine-infected paper cuts, though, because I would prefer to not experience this episode in actuality.

Stupid . . . fucking . . . rat pee . . .

And then there’s Kutner’s suicide, which totally overshadowed the POW and shouldn’t have, because the POW is fucking MEAT LOAF! First of all, I loved that Mr. Aday’s character in this episode was Eddie. Although, sadly, my favorite (s)ex-delivery boy was not riding Harleys and wondering whatever happened to Saturday night, but bed-ridden and dying of a weakened heart. Only, when his wife suddenly falls ill, he starts getting better. Taub is in change of tending to the couple, as House and the others are busy grieving/trying to find answers as to why Kutner would kill himself. While at first Eddie’s wife was faking her illness so that she could hang on to her husband for just a few more days, it turns out that she’s actually sicker than he is and needs a new liver. Because he’s only got a few days left, House asks Cameron to convince Eddie to give his wife his liver and die on the table. Even when Cameron discovers that Eddie can be saved (he has a lung infection that weakened his heart, not cancer, as doctor’s previously surmised), Eddie is ready to die; he’s already grown accustomed to the idea and would rather that his wife survive. I mean, it’s Meat Loaf, all. That dude would do anything for love. But Taub instead reveals the plan to Eddie’s wife, who won’t let her husband die for her, even though he wants to. And it’s for the best, really, because when he got sick, he couldn’t take her to Rio like he’d always promised he would, so she went with another man and developed the tropical infection that’s now killing her because it went undiagnosed for too long. Still, I am a little haunted by the imagine of Eddie, reaching out his left hand to hold his wife as she dies, knowing that he loves her enough to forgive her for seeking comfort when he couldn’t give her any.

I completely understand the decision to pair this set of POWs with Kutner’s death, coloring the entire episode in a very particular noirish shade of grey, and presenting two different ways of dealing with death (Eddie’s acceptance vs. House’s need for answers), but I wish the loveliness of Meat Loaf’s story could have been allowed to stand on its own. It reminded me very much of Baccus and Philemon, a myth about a couple who strove so hard to please the gods that Zeus allowed them to remain together forever, entwined as trees. As Mary Zimmerman summarizes it in her breathtaking theatre piece Metamorphoses, as the two began to change, you could hear them say, “Let me die at the moment my love dies. Let me not outlive my own capacity to love.”

It wouldn’t wholly surprise me if Eddie, after his wife died, willed himself to stop living, too. It would be a fitting end to their conjoined-twin like symbiosis, and woefully romantic.

Like I said, that Meat Loaf, dude will do anything for love.

But I won't do that.

The Husband:

Curses, woman! I had to correct your reference to Meat Loaf at least five times! His name isn’t “Meatloaf,” it’s “Meat Loaf,” a nickname (origins debatable) he got because of his first and middle name, “Marvin Lee” (which he randomly changed to “Michael Lee” for no discernable reason.) And she’s not the only one. He just happens to be one of the highest-grossing rock and roll artists of all time!

Nehhhhhh…

As far as the other episodes are concerned (I have nothing to say about Kal Penn’s exit other than it was pretty hasty), I only really had the following thoughts in mind over the run of these middle-of-the-road episodes:

1. It’s good that The Shield veteran Jay Karnes (who played the POW without the politeness filter) wasn’t in the DeathCat episode, or he would have strangled the DeathCat just to get inside the mind of a serial killer.

2. During “Locked In,” my mind wandered for a bit, only to come back into focus minutes later, prompting me to mutter one of the stranger things I’ve said in a good long while: “I’m sorry. What just happened? I was thinking about Sam Shepard.” I have a valid explanation for this train of thought, though, but it would take too long to explain and I have work to do here in the office. But it comes down to the relationship between the Mos Def mindscapes and the second act of Shepard’s play The Late Henry Moss.

3. I wonder what Olivia Wilde is going to look like with her Light Suit on in the upcoming sequel to Tron called Tr2n. (Or as I pronounce it, “Tra-too-en.”)

 

Catching Up with . . . Bones!

The Wife:

Oh my . . . so many Bones posts to write . . . why do I do this to myself where I let a procedural pile up and promise myself I’ll do a double post, only to end up with a stack of four of them? With Criminal Minds, I know it s because there are a whole bunch of other great things on Wednesday, so I’ll usually save CM for the weekends, but with Bones, FOX never seems to keep it on consistently enough for me to make a date to watch it. And thus I wind up doing this:

4.13 “The Hero in the Hold”

The Gravedigger returns and captures Booth, locking him inside a submarine that’s about to be demolished. He fights his way out with the help of a spectral form of a cadet who died in his arms back when he was in the military. You know, I recently watched an episode of Angel where the military borrowed Angel to rescue a crew that had captured a Jerry sub, which was filled with vampires because the Germans wanted to engineer an army of them. Between these two episodes, I have decided that the one place I do not like David Boreanaz is on a submarine. Both episodes were terrible. Please, never put David Boreanaz on or around a submarine ever again. I would much rather see him in ladies’ underwear, tied up in Christmas lights being tortured by Alan Cumming.

4.14 “The Princess and the Pear”

How fortunate were the squibs to have Intern-of-the-Week Mr. Colin Fischer when a dead Booth Babe from a sci-fi/fantasy convention turns up? Oh, they were very, very lucky, for, you see, Mr. Colin Fischer loves all kinds of sci-fi fantasy stuff. “I even watch Fringe,” he states, marking the notable exception that he never watched Angel. You wanna know why that’s funny? Because actor Joel David Moore was actually on Angel once, and even though he was in vampire makeup, I spotted him. That vamp had one line before Angel dusted him, and I instantly knew that the long, bony face under all that makeup belong to Moore. One of my chief joys in watching Angel at the moment is finding other actors that Borenaz has worked with turning up on the show. TJ Thyne has a small recurring role during Angel‘s 5th season, and you can’t imagine how cool that is to someone who only knows Thyne as Hodgins.

I really enjoyed this episode, perhaps because I am greatly amused by the kind of fandom that occurs at conventions (in fact, this episode aired during SF’s Wondercon, which I was too lazy to attend, even though the last event was a sing-a-long of “Once More, With Feeling”), and also because, like many great sci-fi/fantasy narratives, the murder of this poor Booth Babe had everything to do with a priceless weapon, an original prop sword used in one of the first fantasy epics to grace the silver screen, Mort D’Arthur. She had it, and someone killed her for it. The first suspect is Miss Valerie Daniels, a dominatrix, who makes Sweets delightfully uncomfortable when he questions her. After which, he realizes that it might be best to set a trap at the auction of said priceless sword to force the killer into revealing himself. Sweets takes up the mantle of the bidder and brings Fischer along as a camera man. Most excellent part of the auction, other than Miss Daniels hooking up with Mr. Colin Fischer? Spotting one of my favorite Amazing Race teams, Goths Kynt and Vyxen, as extras in the auction crowd! (Hi Kynt and Vyxen! I miss you guys!)

Sweets’ plan fails, though, and the highest bid goes to the Arthuria Consortium, the largest collection of Arthurian memorabilia in the world, but he does not go unnoticed by The Black Knight, who eventually runs Sweets and Bones off the road and tries to steal Excalibur from them. Bones bests him with her strong anthropological knowledge of swordplay, although I had hoped she would cut his legs off:

Fischer discovers the murder weapon, the Pear of Anguish, during a discussion of medieval torture implements he has with Miss Daniels post-coitus. The Pear, typically used on heretics and inserted into the organ that caused the sin (vagina, mouth, anus), was placed in the victim’s mouth and cranked open, crushing her jaw from the inside out. Although pleased he has found the murder weapon, Cam is ready to fire Fischer for sleeping with a suspect until Hodgins saves his ass. Judging by the way her assailant used his sword, Bones postulates that the only person who would have had as a thorough a knowledge of swordplay and know how to make authentic chain mail would be the blacksmith. He gave the dead Booth Babe the sword as a gift, but she wanted to sell it for rent money, not realizing its true value as a gift, which, to him, was a betrayal. He killed her, he claims, because he loved her so much.

In retrospect, that psychology doesn’t make any sense, but otherwise, this was a totally delightful, geeky episode.

4.15 “The Bones That Foam”

The hallucination-plagued David Boreanaz-helmed episode of Angel was weird and somewhat unsettling, but certainly filled with odd comedy, and I think with this episode, I’m starting to see a trend in terms of what Boreanaz likes to direct. This was one of Bones‘ lighter mysteries, involving a dead car salesman who works at gimmicky Jungle Jim’s, where all of the sales personnel have to wear safari uniforms and the shop has its own monkey mascot. While back at the lab, they’ve got their own share of comic scenarios when the bones start to foam and the lab gets put on lockdown. The team ends up racing against the clock when they realize that the bones are foaming because they are breaking down and they’ll need to solve the murder before they lose their evidence.

This is how Borenanaz looks when he directs.

Once the bones are no longer under lockdown, Hodgins declares King of the Lab when he finds some strawberry lust dust on the victim’s body, indicating that he had been at a strip club before he died, which leads Booth and Bones to visit Miss Strawberry Lust and Bones buys Booth a lap dance so that they can talk to the girl, who, by the way, is a criminology major at Georgetown. Anthropologically speaking, Bones is so impressed with her seduction skills that she asserts that Miss Lust will surely be able to pay off her student loans very quickly. This is all part of Bones’ continued attempt to become better at interrogation and reading people, but she still can’t seem to shake her extremely logical side, completely failing at understanding humor in a later interrogation of one of the victim’s coworkers from the car dealership, who tells them that the victim gave all of his sales to his sick brother two months before he quit to work at another dealership, which brought her up to number one seller by default.

Meanwhile, not all goes well with the bones when Mr. Nigel-Murray finds out that they’re secreting hydrogen after accidentally setting them on fire. The hydrogen reaction is a byproduct of the bones breaking down their own calcium, so Hodgins tries to stop the process by coating them in an antacid, which works . . . until they petrify. From there, it’s up to Angela to digitally recreate the bones, which leads them to the murder weapon: tailor’s shears and, thus, the murderer, Chet’s wife, the seamstress, who killed her husband’s brother so that he wouldn’t blab about her affair with Jungle Jim – her way of helping Chet keep his job.

Funny lines from this one:

• “I’m secreting adrenaline!” – Mr. Nigel-Murray
• “You should stop using cartoons as a scientific reference.” – Bones
• “What’s a sensitive way to say ‘murdered?’” – Bones
• “I think it shows an innate lack of humanity, to push a monkey.” — Jungle Jim

4.16 “The Salt in the Wounds”

Desiccation, teenage pregnancy pacts, rehydrating flesh? This episode was all kinds of uncomfortable, and I once again have to point to this show’s amazing ability to pass very little judgment on controversial matters. While I look at a group of teenage girls who intentionally decided to get pregnant and raise their children together, I see crazy. But Bones? Bones sees a long-standing cultural tradition based in our hunter-gatherer roots where women of about that age often did the same thing. And while, from that perspective she’s correct, she also realizes that in a society where birth control is made very easy, there is something going against the cultural norm when a teenage girl gets pregnant. The most uncomfortable thing, though? Booth’s conversation with the loser stud-muffin who impregnated three of the teenage mothers, as well as the victim. I jumped out of my skin a little bit as Booth drove home a message about paternal responsibility by telling this poor boy that he has three children that he should want to be responsible for, because at any moment, their mothers could take them away from him. And worse? That his son died along with its mother. Fuck, dude, Booth lays it on thick! Which, in retrospect, is exactly the advice I would expect him to give, considering how much he lives for Parker. (This message brought to you by fatherhood.org.)

Not much mystery in this one, but it was cool to watch Cam et al rehydrate the corpse to work with the living tissue, and to see the new Intern-of-the-Week get around Bones need to see the bones without compromising the flesh by making a giant digital X-ray. Also, Roxy breaks up with Angela because, even though Angela wants to get a dog, Roxy thinks she lives too in the moment and can’t sustain a real, long-lasting relationship. Although Bones accuses the new intern, a devout Muslim, of not understanding Angela’s relationship because it’s probably forbidden by his religion (I never expected her to hate religion quite as much as Dr. Gregory House, so that was odd to hear), he actually does something incredibly sweet by making her a break-up mix CD, filled with songs he listens to when he feels heart-broken. I like new intern. He’s very kind.

4.17 “The Doctor in the Den”

As Angela begins her foray into celibacy — a suggestion from Sweets about how to find alternative things to value in her relationships – Cam’s former fiancé turns up dead in a tiger enclosure in the zoo. She goes on a journey I never quite got into as she spends the episode trying to solve the murder and reconnect with the victim’s daughter, who Cam helped raise. Beautiful Dana Davis plays Michelle, but as good of an actress as she is, she doesn’t get much to do in this episode except shun Cam’s attempts to love her, which is perhaps why I found this plot so bland. Monique Coleman had more to do in her brief role in “Salt in the Wounds” as the pregnant best friend of the dead girl, so it was especially disappointing to see Dana Davis so underwritten. Pity. And because I wasn’t invested in Cam’s quest, I wasn’t invested in the mystery, either. In the end, though, Michelle does decide to live with Cam, only after Cam brings her half of the set of antique salt and pepper shakers she gave the girl when she left her father (because he could never love a woman as much as Michelle’s mother and was a habitual cheater, offed by a nurse who couldn’t handle that he saw other women besides her, the fate that always befalls cheaters). I hope to see more Dana Davis in the future on this show, possibly growing interested in forensic science and getting a Jr. Internship at the Jeffersonian? Surely, they’ll write her better then.

 

Checking in on House (2.23.09)

The Wife:

I’ve been saving up these House posts for a number of reasons, primarily because there’s so much awesomeness on Monday nights now that House falls by the wayside for us, so there’s no sense posting something within a few days of a new episode. I know this will greatly disappoint Mary, our friend and massive Hugh Laurie lover, but on Mondays, I’ve got Chuck, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Big Bang Theory, Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Mother. I can’t even watch all five of those shows on a good day, so House gets pushed back, resulting in this clusterfuck of a post.

House aired its 100th episode with “The Greater Good,” in which a formerly brilliant cancer researcher (she’s still brilliant, just not researching the ol’ cancer anymore) falls ill during a cooking class. As she lays dying under House and his team’s care, they all wonder why she would give up cancer research – especially when she was so close to finding a cure for a certain cancer I can no longer remember – to live a selfish and self-fulfilling life. Shouldn’t she, as a doctor on the forefront of research in her field, be working towards the greater good? Meanwhile, Thirteen starts to get really sick because irresponsible asshole Foreman switched her onto the trial drug from the placebo. Bad shit goes down, like, losing her vision and developing small brain tumors. Side effects are fun, kids!

Ultimately, when the patient gets a final diagnosis of ectopic endometriosis (which she developed after some of her endometrial cells escaped into her body during her hysterectomy a few years back), everybody realizes that they probably shouldn’t do things for wholly selfish reasons, especially Foreman, who risked his girlfriend’s life because he wanted to keep her around. House and Thirteen, however, don’t get that upset at Foreman and won’t let him “torch his career” because he’ll do a lot more good for other people if he’s still a doctor, he just has to quit the clinical trial and throw out Thirteen’s study results. I get that this ending to the clinical trial mishap fits with the theme. Yes, one more doctor in the world saves the lives of however many people (and Foreman, though an idiot, is a good doctor), but it also doesn’t fairly punishing him for endangering Thirteen’s life, and the fate of that Huntington’s study. Because its TV, that study gets to continue and Tank Girl might have a chance of living for a few more years than she would have, but I think that in the real world, compromised results has a strong chance of removing that particular study from Princeton-Plainsboro altogether, and possibly put on hiatus for a long time, which isn’t helping anyone with Huntington’s.

Frankly, I wasn’t that into “The Greater Good,” especially because the two episodes that followed “Unfaithful” and “The Softer Side” were so much better (although I find the latter to be a little problematic). In “Unfaithful,” House takes a case from Cameron involving a drunken priest who hallucinated a stigmatic Christ. House takes this, hoping to prove that anyone who would put their faith in something unseen has something wrong with them, but as the case continues and the ailing priest and House have a few bedside conversations about the nature of believe and what it’s like to lose one’s faith, House starts to think that the vision of Christ has nothing to do with the rest of the symptoms which, during the priest’s stay, involve loss of gangrenous digits, blindness and numbness to pain.

Where the hell is Meryl Streep when you need her?

While House has never had any faith at all in a higher power, the priest began to lose his joy in the priesthood after an accusation of molestation moved him from parish to parish, making him a black sheep amongst the members of his various flocks. Though he denies molesting the child, Taub feels he should believe the claim of the victim, especially when the team diagnoses the priest with AIDS, and sets out to find the boy the priest allegedly molested. The boy, Ryan, visits the priest on his deathbed and asks him for forgiveness, which to me says that the allegations made against the priest were false. But that’s just me. Much like Doubt, it’s a situation where you aren’t given the whole truth and should decide for yourself. (In Doubt, by the way, I’ve decided that since we know the little boy had some homosexual tendencies, Father Flynn, who joined the priesthood because he also has homosexual tendencies, merely befriended the boy, without any other ulterior motive.)

Once House rules out the hallucinations, he realizes that the priest doesn’t have AIDS at all, but Wuska-Aldridge, an auto-immune deficiency that acts a lot like AIDS, but his hereditary, non-communicable and non-life threatening.

This episode also added a third element to the theme with the organization of Cuddy’s daughter’s naming ceremony, which House refuses to attend based on the principle that anyone who doesn’t practice their religion to the letter is a hypocrite. Thus, because Cuddy doesn’t keep the Sabbath, pretending she’s more religious than she actually is by having a naming ceremony for Rachael is hypocritical. Cuddy doesn’t really want House to go, though, but Wilson fucks it all up by convincing House to at least put in an appearance. In the end, everyone attends the service but House, who stays at home, playing traditional Jewish music on his piano instead. (Know what I love? Hugh Laurie playing piano.)

And then there’s “The Softer Side,” the patient of which my husband noted is like an alternate version of last week’s Private Practice, but fast forwarded 13 years. Much like Anyanka and Sgt. Scream’s baby, the patient of the week is a 13-year-old “boy” with genetic mosaicism. “He” has both male and female DNA, but his parents chose to raise him as boy even though we learned on Private Practice that 70% of genetic mosaics end up identifying as female. Jacksons parents have lied to him for years, socializing him as a boy and pushing him to do masculine things like playing hockey and basketball, even though, like one Billy Elliot, all he’s ever really wanted to do is to dance. He collapses at one of his basketball games with pelvic pain, and his parents immediately demand that House and his team give Jackson an MRI to look for a blind uterus. Strangely, House concedes to this procedure, even though when Thirteen suggests it, Foreman (continuing the lie they established in the last episode that they had broken up) mocks her for the suggestion, because surely every single one of the kids previous doctors had thought of that.

Consenting to the MRI, as well as asking to eat his bagel before doing so, alerts Wilson that something is wrong with House. He thinks maybe Cuddy slept with him, which Cuddy denies, but when both of them go to check up on House, they find him sleeping in his office . . .  and not breathing. Foreman gives House a bitching titty twister to wake him up, and House insists that he just passed out because he took one too many Vicodan.

Shhhh! He's sleeping!

Jackson only gets sicker after the team takes him off his “vitamins,” which are testosterone shots, fearing the T might be causing some of his problems, so House sends Foreman and Thirteen to investigate the kid’s house for environmental factors. In his room, which has posters for So You Think You Can Dance, Godspell, Rent, A Chorus Line and The Wizard of Oz, Thirteen finds a poem that she believes is a confession of Jackson’s state of mind, potentially indicating suicide. She brings it to his parents, suggesting that he knows he’s different than other kids and may have developed some suicidal feelings because of it. She tells Jackson that his vitamins aren’t vitamins, and that he should ask his parents about them. This causes the parents to finally tell their son that he’s intersex, and Jackson gets so upset with his parents lies that he refuses to talk to them. Jackson’s mom is furious at Thirteen and wants her off Jackson’s case, but Cuddy intervenes and tells Thirteen that she has to be the person Jackson trusts now.

The bisexual doctor and the intersex boy have a nice heart-to-heart about Jackson’s feelings about his gender identity, wondering if his homosexual feelings towards a friend on his basketball team and his predilection toward dance exist simply because he was meant to be a girl. And that’s where I find this episode to be a little bit problematic. Granted, this is an hour-long show that’s barely skimming the surface of the complexities of gender identity, especially for intersex children, but Jackson’s words here and Thirteen’s lack of correction lead me to question the rigid construction of gender that seems to frame this argument. Knowing what I know about genetic mosaicism, I would argue that Jackson’s parents made the wrong choice in aggressively gendering him as male, but other than not liking basketball, Jackson doesn’t seem to exhibit any other issues with having a male gender identity. No one ever scolded him for wearing his mother’s clothing often because he didn’t do it. He doesn’t express feeling as though he should be developing breasts or otherwise show any signs of a gender identity disorder He feels male and constructs his identity as male. How much of that feeling comes from the fact that his parents aggressively gendered him as such, I don’t know, but he does seem to like being male. He just doesn’t like to play sports. And there’s nothing un-masculine about dance at all, and the fact that his parents assert otherwise just tells me that they’ve a.) never watched So You Think You Can Dance with their son and b.) they need to be punched in the face, repeatedly.

What I’m getting at here is that this entire argument constructs gender identity based on very antiquated terms, and I think Thirteen kind of points to this when she tells Jackson that she was a point guard on her basketball team. No one in their right mind would think their daughter wanted to be a man if she started playing sports, so why on earth would someone think their son wanted to be a girl if he wanted to dance? Baryshnikov gets all the bitches, that’s what I’m saying. The boy, though, is confused at this point, and who can blame him, as he wonders if he actually should have been a girl or if, perhaps, he is meant to be a gay man. (I vote gay man.)

So maybe, Jackson might be alright with the gender identity his parents chose for him, but should they have chosen at all? People have very different feelings about gender identity, and I’m really not for aggressively gendering children. I find that when children begin to socialize with other children, they pick out a gender identity for themselves and the degree to which they want to express that. I have a friend with a two-year-old daughter. My friend tried really hard not to engender her child in anyway, but this little girl, at only two, has expressed a great interest in wearing dresses and trying on mommy’s make-up and dance clothes. Without even encouraging her to do so, her daughter has begun to express a very feminine version of a female gender identity. This example points to the fact that society – the images about our gender that we receive from our peers and from the culture at large – will gender us unconsciously, so that even if we are not aggressively gendered by our parents, we may still choose to exhibit a more normalized gender identity. Of course, we may not. But isn’t it better to let a child choose than to saddle them with something they might not feel suits them, forcing a child to be like Tireseas, first one thing and then the other?

Just . . . I dunno . . . read Middlesex. It’s great. It won the Pulitzer. And it’s far more eloquent about these thoughts than I am, as well as a far better examination of an intersex individual than this episode of House does.

Private Practice-style lesson: You can't lie to your kid about giving him testosterone injections.

Back to House, the strangely complacent doctor begins to do more strange things, and now both Wilson and Foreman suspect him of being on heroin, so Wilson invites House to dinner and offers him a shot, knowing full well that if House drinks it, he could stop breathing again. House knows what Wilson’s up to, and defiantly takes the shot and walks out, only to vomit in the parking lot and bark at Wilson for knowingly nearly killing him. Wilson rails at his friend for being on heroin, and House admits that he’s actually on prescription methadone, which makes him feel no pain at all, but could kill him at any moment. Cuddy refuses to let House practice at her hospital under methadone, so he quits, choosing a pain-free existence over his job, only to return when Cuddy agrees to let him come back as long as she can supervise his methadone use.

When he does, he realizes that Jackson is sick because of the MRI contrast dye, which never got filtered out of his system when they took him off his T (something Thirteen figured out in his absence, after another fight with the boy’s mother when she realized his “suicide poem” was just a classroom assignment to write in the style of Sylvia Plath – what the fuck kind of English teacher assigns Plath to 8th graders?). When he first came into House’s care, he was just dehydrated, but House’s allowance of the MRI only made Jackson worse because he kindly gave in to the requests of Jackson’s family. Realizing that being pain-free clouds his judgment, House refuses to accept methadone treatment and returns to being the curmudgeonly Vicodin addict we’ve come to know and love, an end to the softer side of House.

I really liked “The Softer Side,” but I really dislike the implication that exhibiting a female gender identity is somehow soft.

The Husband:

Just as with the end of s2 – at least, I think it was s2 when House started feeling no pain and started skateboarding – I wish that Dr. Gregory House hadn’t been so willing to drop the methadone and go back onto the Vicodin, continuing to live in pain but being a “better doctor.” It was an interesting examination of his personality, and I could have used at least three more episodes on this subject. It’s what made the last episode so great – me, the one who hasn’t really been into any of the personal stories this season, thinks this to be so – and gave me the second episode in a row to actually captivate me and not just spark a small amount of medical curiosity.

But man, did I like “Unfaithful” like crazy. Not only was the priest played by the always-cast-as-a-creep Jimmi Simpson (Liam McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), who I think is pretty underrated as an actor, but I was actually invested in the mystery for once, eager to reach the conclusion of the episode just to know what the hell was going on with his disease and his past. Yes, it was like Doubt 2.0, and I was itching for some answers. The fact that we didn’t get all of them is fine, because for once the P.O.W. was a fully fleshed character and not just a pin cushion with a mouth and an attitude problem.

 

Shonda Rhimes Wants to Hurt You Extravaganza (2.19.09)

The Husband:

So, here’s what went down: last Thursday, at some point during the work day, our power went out at our home briefly, coming back on some time during the afternoon. Our living room DVR handled the power failure admirably, getting back up to speed with all of our season passes and the TV grid. Our lower model bedroom DVR, however, I suppose needed to be actually turned on again (even though technically it can record when off), so it really screwed the pooch (oh noes! Pooch-screwing!) when it came to all those shows my wife does not watch. This would include Survivor, as well as ABC’s female-driven block of Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice. So that’s why these reviews are going to come late, and perhaps in briefer form.

Sigh…the woes of technology.

But what’s been going down at Seattle Grace?

Cristina gets all responsible-like, even going against the wishes of some of her elders, when she learns of a patient that would have been getting out of the hospital just fine had the hospital’s oldest attending surgeon not made a careless mistake. But who is this surgeon? Why, it’s Faye Dunaway. Where the hell has she been all this time? Judging from her appearance, underground amidst the rock creatures in The Descent. Now, I’m not normally the type of person to really call out somebody’s appearance, but oh man has Faye Dunaway fallen, looking like whatever reanimated zombie the world has been trying to pass off as Peter O’Toole for the last decade. Going back into surgery, Cristina mouths off at Faye and gets tossed, but Cristina is able to present the case to the Chief that Faye is just too old-fashioned, unwilling and unable to use the newest medical technology, to continue working at Seattle Grace, and she’s right. A weird guest appearance that at least gave Cristina less whininess and more chutzpah.

Izzie finds out that the newly fired Sadie may have accidentally mixed up Izzie’s medical reports, giving her the anemia diagnosis and a poor woman a death note of cancer. And so the Izzie mystery continues. Until some real news comes through about Katherine Heigl and whether or not she’s actually leaving the show, I’m going to ignore all that hubbub and just say that while this is-Izzie-sick storyline has been going on for a very long time, I don’t consider it boring by any means. What happens when a talented doctor becomes ill herself, and how does it affect her work? This are good questions to ask, and spending a season dealing with the answers is definitely compelling.

Dr. Bailey continues her interest in pediatrics, and so she spends the entire episode obsessing about letters of recommendation, becoming quite pissed that, when pressed for time, the Chief merely gives Dr. Bailey a form letter, describing her as a “fine doctor.”

“I am Dr. Bailey. I am better than ‘fine.’” — Bailey

When she finally goes head-to-head with the Chief, who is already embroiled with both the Faye Dunaway situation and the scalpel Mexican standoff (more on that later), he admonishes her for not going along with his plans for Dr. Bailey to replace him as Chief somewhere down the line, and asking for his help for her to get a job in a field he does not want for her. Every single bit of Bailey’s story is wonderful and wonderfully acted, and it’s still the biggest crime ever that Katherine Heigl has an Emmy over the outstanding Chandra Wilson.

Seriously, ya'll, where's my damn Emmy?

Derek and Sloan get into a fistfight about Lexie-banging.

Okay, so the big three-episode story finishes here, as Jennifer Westfeldt went into seizures last we saw her, mixed with mirror syndrome and her unborn baby’s health and all the stuff that was going wrong in her brain. (I’m just going to say this now. I think losing one’s ability to make sense as far as language is concerned may be the most terrifying thing I can think of to happen to a brain. It may not be the worst, but goddamn is it scary for somebody like me who relies on words.) (The Wife seconds this opinion.) As she is to go into surgery once again, her husband Ben Shenkman gives them very specific instructions to save his wife over his baby.

“We can make another baby. We can’t make another her.”

During the surgery, Westfeldt keeps having small strokes, so Derek has to make the harrowing decision to take out her temporal lobe to keep her alive. When this doesn’t work, he decides that he wants to take out the frontal lobe, too, but Addison (yes, she’s still up in Seattle) says that would be creating a monster and not a human, and that she needs to do an emergency C-section and take out the premature baby right now. Doing this surgery, however, would take away the blood in the body needed to power the brain, which would kill Westfeldt. As Addy and Derek both stand over the body holding scalpels and telling each other to stand down, Karev has to bring the Chief in, who of course goes with Addy’s plan. Westfeldt dead, Shenkman takes his grief out on Derek, calling him a murderer for all he had done, and for the entire staff choosing the baby over his wife. At least the baby is alive, douche.

[catching breath] This show has been getting wilder and more complicated by the week (I didn’t even mention much about Lexie, or Callie’s continued lesbo-confusion), but I will agree that this was one of the best episodes in a long time. Previously I’ve complained that the show hasn’t been honest with us about their three-episode arcs, but that does not mean I don’t like them. I’d just prefer to know when they are happening, so I can prepare by brain for them. It’s frustrating when you think you’re at the end of the story, only to have something drastic happen and the episode ending with a “to be continued…” so I can understand people’s problems with these arcs, but I’ll be damned if they weren’t quite good.

Lesson: Never trust Melissa George.

After all that madness, nothing on Private Practice could even come close to something as gripping down at Oceanside Wellness, so let’s just get through them quickly.

• Sam accidentally calls his new girlfriend Naomi.
• Archer, now recovered from his brain parasites, goes back to being a complete man-whore and cheats on Naomi, who is technically his girlfriend. Addison finds out and tells Naomi, and it’s sadness abound.
• Violet and Sheldon decide to co-run a group therapy session of married couples, and in dealing with all the lunacy of the various couples (with varied success), they grow closer while also learning of some of their major differences, information that will be useful when she gives birth to her own child. No word on whose baby it is yet. Or I missed something. I didn’t, did I?
• Charlotte is still angry about boyfriend Cooper moving in with Violet to help her take her of her unborn child, and Cooper is still right to support his friend. No progress is made.
• Anyanka from Buffy and Sgt. Scream from Over There give birth to a baby who is genetically both male and female, and although they are informed that in these cases, only 30% of the children affected by this end up identifying as male, Sgt. Scream’s machismo gets in the way, and he is certain that the baby must become his beloved Matthew that he has been dreaming about for so long. Addy and Naomi argue over this, but Addy makes the final decision, in the OR, to not make the baby male, for it would just be wrong to make the decision so early. Sgt. Scream leaves Oceanside Wellness in a huff, not wanting to deal with a “freak baby,” but Naomi, now pissed and on the warpath after hearing that Archer is cheating on her, goes to his workplace (he’s a cook) and chews him out for being so myopic. Sgt. Scream comes back and loves on the baby as much as he can, for he knows that had he not, he would suffer at the hands of the vengeance demon Anyanka. Had they gone with assigning the child to being a male, just fast-forward 13 years and you have this week’s episode of House.
• Continuing my plea for ABC to be honest with us viewers, I can’t help but point out that this Private Practice episode was not a crossover, but just a regular episode. So we had more like a 2.5-week crossover, and I can’t help but think that people who were watching PP over the last couple weeks may have been very let down by this episode.

Lesson: All babies need love, even if your stupid male pride is telling you otherwise.

 

House 5.12 and 5.13: “Painless” and “Big Baby”

The Wife:

How often is it that you get two House episodes in a row that deal with an identical medical conundrum? Sure, in “Painless,” Martin Henderson is suicidal because he’s in constant pain and in “Big Baby” special ed teacher Sarah has a whole host of issues, but the thing that links the two is this: in neither case can the team agree on whether the problems stem from the patient’s brain or from the patient’s body?

Suicidal Martin Henderson was intended to bring us back from the break by introducing us to a character who is, more or less, in the same situation as House. In case we forgot, the writers decided to remind us just how much pain House is in by showing us Hugh Laurie in a bath, struggling to fully bend his knee. That, or they’ve apparently been reading Hugh Laurie fan sites. But the difference between Suicidal Martin Henderson and House is much more significant than their similar states of pain: House manages his pain through his painkiller addiction; for Martin Henderson, the painkillers aren’t working anymore, driving him to suck on a tailpipe and try to commit suicide at least twice more during his hospital stay.

At first, House suspects that some air may have leaked into Suicidal Martin Henderson’s body, causing him to be in chronic pain and suffer sporadic cramps, making the pain not psychosomatic, as Taub continually suggests. Because Taub had a “colleague” who tried to commit suicide (but failed), he immediately hates the patient and finds him incredibly selfish, refusing to accept any possibilities that Suicidal Martin Henderson is depressed because he’s in pain, not the other way around. (Kutner suspects that Taub’s “colleague” was actually Taub himself. Though Taub denies this, I think his story about his colleague is a way to mask the guilt he feels for doing something he finds so despicable.) Taub ends up being kind of right in this instance, because Suicidal Martin Henderson brought on the air-induced cramps by chewing a hole in his IV so air would get in, presumably trying to achieve one of the quickest ways to die – shooting an air bubble directly into the bloodstream.

House wants to solve the brain vs. body conundrum in this case by injecting lydocane into the patient’s brainstem to essentially paralyze the body, thus getting them closer to a solution. In doing so, he realizes that the answer lies in both places. After healing from the injury that initially caused Suicidal Martin Henderson’s pain, his addiction to painkillers rewired his brain chemistry so that it reads painkillers themselves as causal pain agents. But taking him off painkillers doesn’t solve anything. House then begins to think about the initial source of Suicidal Martin Henderson’s pain, which he would describe as an abdominal pain, similar to being kicked in the balls. He realizes that the POW has epilepsy in the region of his brain that controls testosterone production, causing the abdominal pain. The numerous small, untreated seizures caused the brain rewiring House had suspected, making Suicidal Martin Henderson’s nervous system constantly feel pain. Thanks to epilepsy treatments, Martin Henderson goes home to his wife and son, suicidal no more.

This area of the brain shows that you like me.

Suicidal Martin Henderson’s struggle for death is reiterated in Thirteen’s story this week. After their kiss, she tells Foreman she’s not interested in a relationship with him. He assumes this is because she’s once again resigning from life, but she assures him that:

“I’m not giving up on life. I’m giving up on you.”

After some deliberation and further participating in the Huntington’s trials, Thirteen decides that, since Foreman and the new medications have been such a good influence on her, she will give their relationship a try. And then Foreman finds out that Thirteen isn’t on the actual medication at all but is actually taking a placebo, filling him with all kinds of doubt.

Meanwhile, Cuddy makes the decision to spend a little more time at home bonding with baby Rachael, appointing Cameron to assist as Dean of Medicine in her absence. Cameron’s first trial is in “Big Baby,” when House gets Sarah the special ed teacher who suddenly collapsed and started vomiting blood in the middle of class. House wants to perform a radiation treatment on the woman, which might help diagnose her, but is also ridiculous and risky. He wants Cameron to say no, and she knows it, so she approves it, forcing the team to do some quick thinking about how to “radiate” without radiating. Thirteen decides that they should keep up the ruse by going through with the procedure, but not flipping the switch. Foreman agrees, something he does a lot of during this episode, which House immediately assumes is because he wants to be in harmony with his partner, Thirteen, rather than the possibility that she’s actually right.

While Taub and Thirteen administer the “radiation” procedure, the patient asks if she can get up to pee, and then immediately collapses. Thirteen and Taub get her heart working again, the team runs another test that puts the patient in an ice bath, hoping to slow down her heart again to confirm a diagnosis. After three minutes in the ice, the test fails. But the patient’s discussion of how she wound up teaching special ed (transposing the numbers of the classroom she was supposed to go to) makes House think that she might have early stage MS. The number confusion and forgetting to do preemptive tasks like peeing before a medical test point to a problem, he claims, in her left hemisphere. If she does have it, the next problem will occur in the lungs. To confirm, House wants to open up the patient’s skull and poke around. Cameron knows this is the fastest way to heal the patient because she knows House, but she insists on asking him to do an MRI first to confirm the need for the test. The MRI turns up negative, but then the patient’s lungs start to fail and Kutner realizes that House might be right, even though he is loath to allow House to cut into the patient’s skull.

I have head explodey!

At home with baby Rachael, Cuddy is barely keeping it together. In “Painless,” she was frazzled by an upcoming review from child protective services who were dropping by to evaluate her abilities to be a foster mother. While Cuddy thought her messy home would reflect poorly upon her, the social worker assured her that caring what her home looked like was the surest sign that she was the right person to foster baby Rachael. (A bad parent, I guess, wouldn’t be phased at all by the mess?) He tells her that he’ll see her in a year, if Cuddy hasn’t adopted Rachael by then. But after a week at home alone with the baby, Cuddy’s no longer sure she’s cut out for this whole mom thing. She’s worried that she hasn’t bonded with Rachael, exhibiting all the signs of post-partum depression, except without that whole “partum” bit. She drags herself out of the house with Rachael to yell at House and Cameron about the radiation treatment that wasn’t, and House hits the nail on the head by honing into Cuddy’s fears that she might not be a good enough mother and might be better off giving Rachael back. Cuddy goes crying to Wilson about this, and I really wanted to shake her and tell her that no one else should define her experience of motherhood. Wilson tries to reassure her of this by pretending to get a photo of Rachael enhanced to age 18 (when really it’s just the girl who came with the frame) and he begs Cuddy to remember that while she can’t communicate with Rachael now, its not worth giving up reading her bedtime stories and teaching her to ride a bike and giving her advice and consoling her future broken hearts and seeing her off to college.

Kutner interrupts Cuddy’s tearful brooding to tell her that Cameron has signed off on House testing the patient’s brain function by slicing her head open and placing electrodes on it. She calls in the middle of the test, in which the patient was demonstrating increased function in the left hemisphere, and demands over a screaming Rachael that they stop immediately. Cuddy’s yelling plus baby screaming make the patient react, for the first time in this episode, with any sign of strain or annoyance. Prior to this, she had simply gone to her “happy place,” prompting Kutner and Thirteen to remark, “We cannot let this woman anywhere near House.” I was glad to see Kutner featured so prominently as a contrarian force in this episode, as I’ve often remarked that the writers don’t quite know how to make use of Kal Penn. We might finally be getting somewhere with that.

While the interruption from Cuddy causes House and Cameron to puzzle over exactly what it means to their patient that the one thing she doesn’t handle calmly is the sound of a mother trying to calm down her child, Cuddy realizes, finally, that talking to Rachael like a human (because, you know, she is a tiny hooman) makes the baby calm down. After getting so caught up with putting on the appearance of a good mother, Cuddy forgot that the one thing that’s most important in any human relationship is communication. Babies like to hear voices. They want a verbal response to their verbal cries for attention. It’s as simple as that.

In discussing the fact that the baby/Cuddy interruption upset the POW, House realizes that the patient’s symptoms are all caused by a ductus in the heart, something all humans have in utero, but are supposed to heal over shortly after birth. When the patient gets stressed, the ductus causes her body to act as though it is unstressed, increasing left brain activity. This blissful, zen-like calm made her able to deal well with high stress situations like working with special needs children, especially a non-verbal autist that blossomed into verbal expression under her care. Her heart ductus can be closed, but I think the hug between her and her favorite special needs kid at the end of this episode indicates that she won’t be doing that, sacrificing her health in order to help take care of her children. I admit that in the cold open, I found this kid, this non-verbal autistic kid, really creepy, especially with his pointed elvin ears, but he became less creepy with each of her appearances in this episode. I guess it was just the horror-movie filter they put over the classroom that made it so . . . The Omen-y.

Cuddy also makes the decision to remain with her baby, but Cameron complicates things by quitting the Assistant Dean post because she knows she will always say yes to House, due to the respect she garnered for the man while studying under him for three years. So Cuddy goes back to doing what most women do these days, struggling with making a living and raising a child. It’s got to be hard to leave your child to go to work each day, and though I don’t have children, I recognize that painful wince on Cuddy’s face as she hesitates to walk out the door with Rachael crying for her. I’m sure I did that to my mom enough when I was little, before she, like Cuddy, went off to the hospital to save lives.

As for Fourteen, a visit to the classroom to collect potential environmental evidence leads Thirteen to declare that she’d like to have children. Now that she’s on the Huntington’s treatments and she’s feeling better, she realizes that she does, indeed, have the option to lead a full life. I hope that this is the motivation for Foreman deciding to switch Thirteen’s off of the placebo and onto the trial drug, because any motivation he might have because he “loves her” or whatever is not worth risking his license over. And even then, as heartbreaking as it might be to see someone experiencing the placebo effect thinking that she’s getting better (when, although her test results show improvement, she’s still uncontrollably knocking over cups), I still believe that Foreman had no right to abuse his position in these trials to give Thirteen a “chance at life.” This is probably the stupidest decision I’ve ever seen on House, and I hope Foreman pays dearly for it. Like, I hope he loses his license and has to leave the show because he can’t practice medicine anymore. That’s how dearly I hope he pays for it. I don’t know much about how long clinical trials take, but I’m sure that if their study showed significant promise with few side effects, they would get a Huntington’s drug on the market within five years, perhaps sooner. It would be a lot less dumb and career damaging to keep her on the placebo through the conclusion of this particular study, and then manipulate the program to be sure she’s not on a placebo for the next study. That would still be wrong, but it would certainly ensure that the study would move into a second phase. With the data compromised thanks to Foreman, I doubt this study will even get a second phase. What he’s done, then, is basically ruined hope for every Huntington’s patient on this study. Thanks to Foreman, there is a very large chance that none of them will ever find a treatment for their disease because he’s ruined Princeton-Plainsboro’s chance of continuing this progressive research. You’re an idiot, Foreman. Have fun never practicing medicine again!

 

90210 1.14: “By Accident”

The Wife:

I almost don’t know what to say about this show anymore. I really don’t. Normally, I’d just launch into making fun of how lame this show is, but I actually found this episode really confusing. I actually have legitimate concerns about the way things are going around WestBev, so, this week, I have for you “10 Things That Frustrate and Concern Me About This Week’s 90210.”

1. I was happy to see some characters return to us this week, but I mostly found their presence after such a prolonged absence to be confusing. I mean, sometimes Gossip Girl leaves a character out, but even people who totally aren’t important or interesting like Nate and Vanessa will randomly show up in an episode they have nothing to do with just to keep the idea of the universe continuous. Ty, for instance, has been gone since Spring Awakening finished. Literally, kids, he’s been gone since episode five. I had just assumed that he’d gotten a real acting job doing porn or something because he’s such a fucking method actor jerkmeat, but no, he’s still there, chilling at WestBev. I wonder if the WestBev parking lot has the same magical character-dissolving properties that the Seattle Grace parking lot has. It sure took Ty a long-ass time to find his way back to the show. I mean, Ryan Matthews has been gone, too, but not for as long (only three episodes) and he actually had a legitimate reason to leave. (Seriously, you should probably not get caught having sex with a student who’s really an undercover cop. That’s fucking awkward any way you slice it.) You’ve really got to learn to manage your characters better, 90210 writers. Seriously. Why bring Ty back at all since we’d all but forgotten about him? Which leads me to the next thing on this list . . .

2. I guess the writers needed to find some way to legitimize Adriana’s pregnancy, and Ty Collins, the guy we thought she didn’t sleep with because she was just running the empty shower to trick Annie, seemed like the best choice for a dramatic baby daddy situation. Ya’ll remember that? Back in episodes four and five? Because I do. I will be incredibly surprised if the writers bother to explain to us – and to Annie! – why Adriana lied about lying about sleeping with Ty. This was supposed to come off as some shocking, dramatic revelation, but it just fell flat because Ty has been wandering around the WestBev parking lot for so long. That’s no way to build drama at all. Lame.

3. Hey, speaking of exactly how long Ty’s been gone, I should note that the last time we saw him was in September. Now, I know that television time and real life time are not the same (just ask the Losties!), but we do know that it is officially January in 9fneh, because someone mentioned it during the heat wave episode last week. So, it’s been four months since we last saw Ty. Adriana, then, is four months pregnant. I was immediately confused, then, when I heard that her doctor told her it was too late for her to abort. According to California law and the text of Roe v. Wade, abortions are legal unless the state determines that the fetus is viable to survive on its own outside the womb. Here’s a better summary from the folks at Planned Parenthood of California:

In Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113 (1973)), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.  Only after the fetus is viable, capable of sustained survival outside the woman’s body with or without artificial aid, may the states ban abortion altogether.  Abortions necessary to preserve the woman’s life or health must still be allowed, however, even after fetal viability.

Now, the youngest premature birth to survive was delivered at 24 weeks, or six months. Adriana is nowhere near that. So, um, what the fuck, 90210? Is there some kind of moral ambiguity you have that’s interfering with your ability to take actual facts into consideration? Granted, forcing Adriana to have the baby (and you are indeed forcing her into this, writers, so, you know, so much for choice) provides a better dramatic storyline that can be sustained longer than any other storyline on this show so far, I’m just really concerned about an alternative agenda here. I don’t know what kind of psycho tween would actually look up to this show, but I certainly don’t want anyone thinking that a fetus could be considered viable prior to 24 weeks. I’m uncomfortable with shows that have heretofore not promoted any kind of agenda at all seeming to slip one in, especially when that notion is presented though incorrect medical and legal data. I do not watch 90210 for lessons in morality; I watch it because it’s a trainwreck. When I want to watch something about values and minors carrying babies to term, I’ll tune into ABC Family and watch Secret Life of the American Teenager.

4. Adriana, by the way, is avoiding her pregnancy in the fucking weirdest way possible. I mean, she’s not exactly Peggy Olson-denying-the-whole-thing-until-the-moment-she-gives-birth-to-Pete Campbell’s-illegitimate-son (so not a chip-and-dip), but Adriana is definitely working hard to drink lots of coffee and focus on her career. My husband was really concerned about Adriana’s coffee addiction because television likes to purport that drinking coffee is bad for babies, but there are different schools of thought on that. Some people quit caffeine entirely when they’re pregnant. Some don’t. It’s considered okay to consume between 150 mg and 300 mg a day, so having one cup of coffee in the morning is fine unless a doctor tells you otherwise. You know what’s not advisable, though? Drinking cup after cup of coffee and pulling an all night drive to Solvang up the PCH, pregnant or not. This leads me to what was by far the fucking weirdest part of this episode. What the fuck is with that scene of Adriana driving on PCH? She drives all night and yet she’s still on the same part of the road? (Husband Note: Not only the same part of the road, but still in Malibu, which is nowhere near Solvang.) Only to decide to make a U-turn in the middle of the freeway, nearly crashing into someone? This was followed by another scene of her, driving up to a women’s clinic and sitting in her car. I guess this was 90210‘s way of trying to “show” not “tell,” but it just came off as fucking bizarre.

5. You know who shouldn’t stage an intervention? Kelly Taylor the Worst High School Guidance Counselor in the History of High School Guidance Counselors and Naomi Clark. These two have no business telling other people how to get their shit together, considering neither of them have their shit together at all.

6. Case in Point: Way to make Ryan Matthews feel bad, Kelly! While kicking Silver out of his class was a little harsh, I get where Ryan is coming from. Silver wrote some mean and untrue things, and she didn’t retract them when she found out that her initial reports were wrong. That would definitely make it difficult for him to teach her objectively as the situation was unresolved. Technically, if he wanted to, he could slap her with a libel suit, but given that 90210 doesn’t understand Roe v. Wade, I can’t really expect that universe to understand how a libel suit would function. Furthermore, Kelly took this incident of concern for his sister and, naturally, made it all about her by blasting Ryan for banging Brenda, as though he did it just to hurt her or something. I really hate you, Kelly. You need to grow the fuck up before you can start telling people what to do with their lives. Seriously. Stop. Being. So. Lame.

7. Another Case in Point: How could nobody tell Naomi that her mom was MIA and her dad was planning on selling the house? Can adults not send a text? I mean, sure, she was upset about maybe losing her house earlier this season when her parents announced their divorce, but she seems to have gotten over that entirely and has, instead, grown back her bitchbone and is ready to blackmail her dad into paying for her to live in a hotel in exchange for her silence about his mistress. I’m glad Naomi has her bitchbone back, but she’s still really not in any position to tell anyone how to live their lives, considering that she has no friends and lives in a hotel because her parents don’t tell her they’re selling property out from under her feet.

8. Oh, Dixon. I’m sorry that, unlike Naomi, you have no bitchbone at all and can’t seem to bring yourself to be assertive and talk to your girlfriend about what’s bothering you. Yes, she’s dumb for not noticing that your thinly veiled suggestion about hurting Mr. Matthews’ feelings was really about how hurt you are that she was mean to you at the beach party and wouldn’t say she loved you, but Lori Loughlin’s right. You just got to tell people how you feel, because they’re not mindreaders. And while I did truly love Silver’s off-the-cuff response to Dixon telling her that he knows she’s not a mindreader (“Oof! You’re onto me!”), you do not grow your bitchbone by breaking up with someone at a fucking party. That’s super lame. Please get a personality. And some tact. Soon.

9. Annie, Annie, Annie and her petty drama club dramas. So, when you try out for a play, you should probably not convince your boyfriend, who has no interest in theatre at all, to try out with you. You should probably not assume that you should play Cleopatra just because your grandmother, the working actress, lost that role to that violet-eyed hussy Elizabeth Taylor. Oh, and if you want that part, you should probably learn to read Shakespeare as though you understand it and can act. Ty may have been a little harsh in his critique of Annie’s reading (you know, being a douche and saying that her poor reading made it impossible for him to do his job), but he’s right. Please don’t audition for Shakespeare if you are going to read it like that. And don’t mope around when you get beat for a part by someone better, even when that person showed up late for the audition and probably shouldn’t have been able to audition at all. That’s the breaks, Annie, dahling. Some people are better than you. Tough noogies. (In a related note, I do love this new drama teacher, who you all might recognize as Thirteen’s lesbian lover on House, but I know better as “Shawn,” the film version of Shane during Season 5 of The L Word. I see you, Angela Gots! Rock that bob like it’s nobody’s business!)

10. Remember when Adriana made an illegal U-turn in the middle of PCH that nearly got her killed? That was foreshadowing for what I assume Ethan did at the end of this episode! Kids, don’t make a U-turn in the middle of traffic! Just don’t do it! I really hope Ethan isn’t dead because I was actually really starting to enjoy him. I think Dustin Milligan has finally found a way to make Ethan interesting and somehow more alive than the other people at WestBev, a feat he has achieved by basically delivering most of his lines as though he is intentionally trying to sound like he has an alien controlling his brain. If you don’t know what I mean, think really hard about how he described Egyptian food as probably having a lot of couscous. How he became my favorite character on the show, I have no idea, so I am deeply concerned for his well-being. Who will play a eunuch half as well as he?

And One Awesome Thing About This Week’s 90210:

1. Lori Loughlin’s description of Silver’s food predilections: “Is Silver coming over? I hear she’s an artichoke fiend.” Damnit! Now they’re really on to her! The Artichoke Fiend is the greatest evil villain in all of Beverly Hills! I fear for her safety now that her secret is out!

The Husband:

Since my wife beat me to the mention of “artichoke fiends” as one of the awesome things about this episode, I’ll have to think of something else.

One Awesome Thing About This Week’s 9fneh:

The presence, both in the opening credits as well as actually in the episode – show’s like Lost and Grey’s Anatomy like to list certain guest stars even when they’re not even physically there sometimes – of one Lisa Tucker, better known as one of the finalists of American Idol, season 5. She was too young and too innocent for the competition, and she didn’t make it very far (10th place), but she did use some of her newfound fame to make some television appearances – I recall her playing herself in a very awkward scene on The O.C. – and apparently had a recurring character on Zoey 101. (Which, as we all know, is a show that is no longer on. Thanks, statutory rape.) I’ll always appreciate her for one of her Idol song choices during semifinals, which was “Here’s Where I Stand” from the awesome independent musical Camp from a few years ago. It’s a lovely (if sloppily filmed) movie and a kickass song. So amidst all the stupidity and confusion of this week’s 9fneh, it was nice to see her, basically in the background, in the scene where the cast list is posted. I assume she’s going to be in Antony & Cleopatra, so hopefully we’ll get to see more of her.

 

The Wife’s Top Ten TV Episodes of 2008

The Wife:

Happy Holidays, ya’ll! As I sit at home enjoying my well-preserved end-of-year vacation (watching A Muppet Christmas Carol), I started to look back on the year in TV. Even though the writer’s strike stalled a lot of shows, I think we still got a pretty good year of television in. Sure, there weren’t many pilots appearing this fall and, certainly, a number of good shows fell victim to low-post strike ratings and will soon be leaving us for good, but I’d like to take this time to praise some of my favorite moments of scripted television from 2008.

1. Mad Men 2.7: “The Gold Violin”

The other best of ’08 lists I’ve been reading have been heaping their praise on “Flight 1″ and “Meditations on an Emergency,” season two’s opening and closing episodes, respectively, but “The Gold Violin” is definitely my favorite episode from season two. This episode was the most magical, literary hour of television all year, utilizing the surprisingly talented Ken Cosgrove’s unpublished short story “The Gold Violin” as a framing device for all of the characters. The violin itself is “perfect in every way, except it can’t make music,” and I think that’s an apt metaphor for many of the things that happen in this episode. Kitty and Sal’s marriage is perfect in every way. They’re best friends. They get along grand, but Sal doesn’t love her romantically and he never will. (Because he is a gay man with a beard, in case you were confused.) Don Draper’s marriage appears perfect in every way, only it is absolutely not working. And every symbol of power and status he achieves somehow becomes imperfect, like the brand new Caddy Betty Draper throws up in when she finds out that Don had been cheating on her with Bobby Barrett. There’s Joan, who is beautiful, curvy, smart and powerful – the perfect woman for a rapidly changing world, except she doesn’t have love and sees the new model of the secretary as a threat to her power and status, especially when that girl endears herself to Joan’s ex.

This is one of Dyna Moe's Mad Men illustrations, spawned from a Christmas card she created for cast member Rich Somner. Click through this to visit her Flicker page where you can buy this and other nifty Mad Men prints.

Ken Cosgrove, to me, seems to be the opposite of this. He’s so imperfect. So unthinking, and yet, he’s the only person at Sterling Cooper who’s actually accepted for his artistic endeavors outside of S-C. (Sal’s not making any money as an artist. Paul Kinsey can’t get published and he’s actually a real writer, constantly being shown up by the office sales buffoon whose main job seems to be to get women for clients.) Ken gets what he wants by not actually wanting anything or being powerful at all. I love this episode; it’s about shattering the image of the American dream, and it shows us those shattered dreams beautifully. The writing here reminds me a bit of O. Henry and Fitzgerald, and I could watch it for its subtlety and intellect more than any other Mad Men episode. Watch it again and I think you’ll start to appreciate the perfection that is this episode.

2. Lost 4.5: “The Constant”

Best episode of Lost. Ever. Further playing off the show’s intense mythology built upon pre-existing literary and philosophical texts, this episode takes Desmond David Hume and turns him into Billy Pilgrim, making him unstuck in time. And what’s the only thing we have to hold onto when we come unstuck in time? Love. There is no greater Lost moment than when Des makes his call to Penny at the end of this episode, realizing that it is she who is his constant, the one thing that kept him alive on his Odyssean journey to find her that got him trapped on Lost island with the other castaways. That moment is revelatory, breathtaking and heartbreaking all at once.

3. How I Met Your Mother 4.7: “Not a Father’s Day”

Drunk Baby Lily. That’s all I have to say. This is Alyson Hannigan’s finest comedic work on this show to date in an episode that proves the almighty power of a tiny baby sock.

4. Gossip Girl 2.3: “The Dark Night”

I had to pick this one, because it’s the episode that turned me into a Gossip Girl fan. It’s rare to see a teen soap have such beautiful production design and so many well composed shots, but I have to give complete artistic props to the Gossip Girl team for creating the gorgeous lighting in Blair’s bedroom for the scene in which Chuck seduces her in the dark. The image of him kissing her neck in her yellow Phillip Lim dress reminds me of early 19th century portraiture, but I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than the way it’s achieved on GG. Blair and Chuck forevah.

To quote Paris Hilton, that's hot.

5. Pushing Daisies 2.3: “Bad Habits”

This episode certainly doesn’t have the whimsy and color and fun that so many episodes have. And Chuck was in a nun’s outfit the whole time, so there weren’t any fun costumes. But, this was the first episode where Olive got to be a part of the mystery and the location of the mystery forced alive again Chuck to have a small existential crisis about her post-existence. When she sits in the church next to Ned and quietly utters, “I am a person with no past and no future because of what I am,” my heart broke a little bit. Sometimes, Pushing Daisies makes me cry for sweetness, like how I can’t get through the popcorn tossing scene in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (or even think about it) without welling up in tears, but this episode, Pushing Daises made me cry because I realized how sad life must be to be alive again just at the moment Chuck did. This was a beautiful, thematic episode that belongs right next to the better episodes of Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me in the Bryan Fuller canon.

6. Lipstick Jungle 2.8: “Chapter 15: Sisterhood of the Traveling Prada”

Unlike Sex & the City, the ladies of LJ are best when they’re taken out of their element. At Christine Ebersole’s health spa in upstate New York, Wendy takes time to contemplate her recent devastating firing from Parador Pictures and figure out just how to get back in the movie-making saddle, Victory finds out the hard way about Joe’s almost-proposal and finally stands up to her friends about their overprotective nature before deciding that she needs to make amends with Joe and Nico wonders what it would be like to buy the spa and retire from big city publishing altogether. Being outside the city allows each of the ladies to realize something about themselves: Wendy finds her drive again; Victory realizes that she loves Joe, exclaiming to the stars the rallying cry that she would have said yes; and Nico realizes that she and Kirby really are at different places in their lives. For all the joy and self-discovery and female friendship, there is no better moment on this episode or the series as a whole as when Victory, hoping to make amends with Joe and ride home with him to Manhattan, gets handed an envelope with the papers to return her business to her and is left on the side of the road to watch Joe’s limo pull away without her. Thank God, Nico and Wendy stole Joe’s scotch. Free, expensive scotch is necessary after a moment like that.

7. Fringe 1.8: “The Equation”

This was the first in a string of truly great episodes leading up to the winter break, and I chose it for this list because I found it to be not only important story-wise, but also very atmospheric in its storytelling. I loved everything with Joanne Ostler and her underground music lair full of VR equipment, all of which lent a very X-Filesish atmosphere to the episode. But the best part of this episode, hands down, is Walter’s voluntary trip back to the loony bin to get information out of Dashell Kim. Walter risks his life and his mental health to help the cause, and you can see him die a little bit inside, radiating fear, when he enters the doors of St. Claire’s. John Noble’s best performance to date is this episode, showing that the odd root-beer loving mad scientist is all too human inside.

8. House 4.14/4.15: “House’s Head/Wilson’s Heart”

Not only were these episode’s cool from an aesthetic point of view, they were also a great two-part arc in which an amnesia-stricken House must try to figure out the missing person he was riding the bus with when it crashed. When that person turns out to be Amber, Wilson’s girlfriend, the new team races to save her, only to find that she had been taking too many painkillers and cold medications prior to the crash which weakened her to the point where she couldn’t be saved. For a minor character, Amber a.k.a. Cutthroat Bitch was a major force on house. Anne Dudek imbued this role with so much power that the loss of her from the House universe was devastating. I cried, and House is not a show that demands any emotional attention from me. (Damn your puppy dog face, Bobby Sean, for forcing tears out of me!)

9. 30 Rock 2.14: “Sandwich Day”

This episode set up Jack Donaghey’s downfall, establishing a great character arc of him in the coming episodes, as well as lots of Will Arnett. Also, nobody cheats Liz Lemon out of a teamster sandwich. Nobody.

10. Chuck 2.7: “Chuck vs. the Fat Lady”

Lots of fun puzzles, lots of fun bonding between Chuck and Jill and lots of disappointment at the episode’s end when we realize that Jill has been playing Chuck all along and that the poor dude will never get to be happy. Chuck’s such a likable guy, and it’s a shame that he will seemingly never be able to have a normal life again. Also, Casey can hit a high C. That’s just a good fact to know.