House 5.11: “Joy to the World”

The Wife:

It might just be me, but I think this week’s patient of the week is actually the saddest, most depressing patient of the week I’ve seen on House in awhile. Poor Natalie. Overweight and mocked by her peers, Natalie spent up until six months ago downing two or three bottles of vodka per week. Cuddy, helping with the diagnostic while Foreman continues his clinical trials, takes a shine to the sixteen-year-old, seeing something of herself in her. Despite her low self-esteem and alcoholism, Natalie is a model student. School is the only thing she’s good at. She tells Cuddy that even though she bought a lot of liquor, she didn’t really drink all of it. She was just buying it because a popular boy that she liked and was once very good friends with happened to be selling it. Poor Natalie’s liver and heart are failing, and Cuddy is desperate to save her, which House thinks is some kind of misplaced maternal feeling that Cuddy has been harboring since she lost her chance to be a mother. Unable to find a solution, Cuddy and House start to think that the girl may have very advanced leukemia. Cuddy wants to start her on treatment immediately, but House warns her that if she can’t get a new heart and a new liver, there’s no point in treating her for the disease. Bewildered at the fact that House seems like he just doesn’t want to try to save this patient and is content to let her die, Wilson reminds Cuddy that House is actually being kinder to Natalie by not forcing her to go through chemotherapy if something else that they can’t fix is going to kill her anyway.

You think the bangs are too much, don't you?

On advice from Wilson, House tries actually not being an asshole for a change, agreeing to even take on clinic duty when he isn’t scheduled to do so. In clinic, House has to try very, very hard to not be his usual curmudgeonly self. He meets a patient that he pronounces pregnant, despite her protestations that she and her fiancé are both virgins. Not wanting to admit what House assumes was some pre-marital infidelity, House tells the woman that perhaps it is possible for her to have gotten pregnant from skin-to-sperm contact when she admits that she and her fiancé do “other stuff” in bed. He then meets a woman who claims her inhaler isn’t helping her asthma. When House asks her to demonstrate how to use her inhaler, she proclaims that she isn’t an idiot and proceeds to spritz the inhaler over her through like a perfume atomizer. We then see her storm out of the clinic in a huff. (I guess House briefly reneged on his promise to be nice, and that woman indeed deserved it.) The pregnant girl returns to House with her fiancé in tow, who demands a paternity test. Hours later, House presents them with evidence that the girl conceived immaculately and that, in seven months, the couple would have a daughter with only maternal DNA. House tells Cuddy about faking the paternity test to save the woman’s marriage, which makes Cuddy realize that her patient, Natalie, doesn’t have leukemia at all. She has eclampsya, a complication from pregnancy.

When Cuddy presents this information to Natalie, her parents are stunned to hear that their daughter concealed a pregnancy. Cuddy points out that they likely didn’t notice because Natalie is a heavier girl and her body and boxy school uniform did most of the work of concealing her growing child. Like any father, Natalie’s dad’s first reaction is “who did this to you?” Natalie says that her one remaining friend, the jock boy she bought booze from, is the father of her baby. She had quit drinking when she realized she was pregnant in the hopes that she could have the child and give it up for adoption. Tearfully, Natalie recounts the story of the birth, bearing her child in an alley behind the soup kitchen she volunteered at, realizing that the child wasn’t breathing and leaving the baby in the alley, gently covered with Natalie’s coat. Even with the news about her child, one of the contributing factors to her low self-esteem and depression, out in the open, Cuddy has to tell the poor girl that if she doesn’t get a new heart and liver, she will be dead within days.

Cuddy goes off to do some detective work on her own and somehow tracks down the couple of crack addicts who found Natalie’s baby and convince them to give the little girl to her so that Natalie can hold her child before she dies. Kutner is so upset by the fact that school bullying caused Natalie so much pain and decides, with the additional blow that the girl has been refused a spot on the donor list because of her advanced condition, to track down some former classmates of his. He apologizes to them for bullying them in high school, officially making Kutner the exact opposite of what we all thought he’d be. Taub was so certain that Kutner identified with the case because he, too, was bullied as the adopted Indian orphan of murdered parents. Meanwhile, Natalie’s parents refuse to care for the granddaughter, finding the entire situation to be too painful and House, still trying to be a good person, asks Cuddy if she plans to adopt the little girl. Cuddy tells him that she’s already spoken to a lawyer and that she’ll get to be the child’s foster parent first and then, after a certain amount of time in foster care, Cuddy can apply to adopt.

Meanwhile, in a story that is almost completely unrelated, Janice, Thirteen’s new friend from clinical trials, has dropped out. Thirteen tracks her down to find out why, and she says it’s because Foreman didn’t take her nausea seriously enough. She found him to be too cold and didn’t want to deal with the trials anymore if he was going to be on it. Thirteen asks Foreman to apologize to Janice and try to get her back on the trial. When he refuses, Thirteen tells him he’s become Dr. House. After Foreman’s partner on the trials tells him that being part of House’s team and thus being able to see the trial patients only as numbers, not as people, is why she picked him for the job, he realizes that he doesn’t want to be like House, and goes to find Janice to ask her to join a lower-dose trial of the same drug, hoping it will ease her nausea. Thirteen thanks him for that Christmas miracle and they make out instead of going to the PP holiday party.

All in all, a holiday episode filled with miracle births and acts of kindness – those things being the true spirit of the season. I don’t really understand the Foreman-Thirteen hook-up or why that happened at all, and I can’t help but think that part of Cuddy’s act of kindness – though indeed kind – was actually more selfish than it was altruistic. And as moved to pathos as I was by the truly tragic character of Natalie, the more Housian part of me couldn’t help but think that both Natalie and the other pregnant woman deserved to be on our friend Geoff’s show on Discovery Health, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Apparently, not knowing that you’re pregnant is an epidemic in this country. Discovery Health has dedicated an entire series to it.

And, writers, thank you for naming the POW Natalie. It’s a nice play on the Italian word for “Christmas,” natale, which comes from the Latinate nascere meaning “to be born.” A very good, subtle and clever choice for this episode.

The Husband:

Man, Tank Girl has really fallen on hard times, hasn’t she?

 

House 5.10: “Let Them Eat Cake”

The Wife:

This week’s installment of House felt like an actual House episode and finally did something I’ve been asking for all season by giving Kutner something to do! For once, this show balanced the work on the main POW case with a Thirteen story, a Cuddy and House cat-and-mouse story and a story for Taub and Kutner.

All I want in this world is my job and a piece of fucking cake.

The POW this week was a fitness trainer who actually got thin by having gastric bypass and sells the hope of a healthy lifestyle to morbidly obese people through her DVD series. As it happens, her gastric bypass and new found “healthy” lifestyle was actually making her sick because she has coproporphyria, a hereditary condition that could easily be managed by eating a high carb and high sugar diet . . . like she used to when she was a fat person. When House and Taub recommend that she reverse her gastric bypass surgery in order to eat a diet that would correct the effects of her condition, she refuses and instead opts for drug treatment, proving what is true of many people in our image-obsessed society: she would rather be “pretty than healthy.” (More accurately, because she would have been pretty whether she was fat or not, she would rather be skinny than healthy.)

Thirteen has started to undergo her clinical trials for Huntington’s, but feels uncomfortable around other people in advanced stages of the disease. She tries to get Foreman to give her spot to someone else. Foreman tells Thirteen that she her muscle response times are already slower than they should be for her age, which means her nerves are already starting to degenerate. She starts showing up later and later and missing appointments altogether after she sees a woman in the waiting room who reminds her not of her imminent demise, but of her mother, whom she resented for her sickness. Thirteen later tells Foreman about her mother, a story that we were lucky enough to see unfold through young Remy Hadley’s eyes every time she looked at the woman in the waiting room. Eventually, Thirteen learns to befriend this woman, to make up for neglecting her mother in her time of need, and helps the other patient take her coat off over her shaking, jerky arms.

In the Cuddy and House plot, Cuddy has taken up residence in House’s office while hers is under renovations. She goes out of her way to annoy him just as he has done to her all these years, until Wilson points out that she chose House’s office because she wanted to be near to him, as she could have very well chosen to take over anyone’s office since she is the Dean of medicine at PP. She literally (and figuratively) takes his balls from him just to piss him off and interferes with his diagnoses. She and House almost kiss again when he confronts her about taking his furniture, but House, unable to admit his love for Cuddy, resorts to copping a feel. He then proves himself to her by ordering her desk from medical school for her new office without her knowledge. Cuddy is ready to admit her own feelings to him after this, until she arrives at his office and catches him in the arms of another woman.

Oh, shit. I think I killed a hooker.

That other woman, by the way, was the actress House hired to foil Kutner’s moneymaking scheme. Kutner had put up a second opinion clinic online under House’s name. Everything was going fine until one patient became too persistent about “House” not being able to help her and threatened to sue. Taub agrees to keep Kutner’s secret from House if Kutner will give him 30 percent of the profits. Kutner reluctantly agrees, and all is going well, until the patient shows up at the hospital demanding to see House. Kutner takes her to the ER to see Cameron and leaves her in Cameron’s care. Later, Cameron pages Taub and Kutner to tell them that the patient is singing “Lime in the Coconut” like a lunatic and bleeding out the ear. The next time they check on her, she’s dead, which scares the crap out of them. They visit the body in the morgue, and House comes in to berate them for lying to him about the case and using his name. He insists that the patient was sick with something so simple that she could have easily been saved. House scares the crap out of Taub and Kutner again when he tries to revive the corpse . . . and succeeds. Kutner tells House that he’ll take the website down right away, but House insists that he’d prefer 50 percent of the profits, especially because he owes the actress three grand for her work.

So the House and Cuddy sexual tension will continue, Kutner actually got a story (and a funny one, at that),Thirteen resolved yet another issue she had in coming to terms with her disease and the POW story provided mild social commentary. This is what a House episode is supposed to feel like, and I’m happy to see a Kutner story for once. Although next time, can we give him and Taub as much story-telling time as we do Thirteen?

 

House 5.9: “Last Resort”

The Wife:

First of all, I realize that Zeljko Ivanek’s character in this episode is technically named Jason, but I think we can all agree that Jason is not as cool of a name as Zeljko, so I will only refer to him as such throughout this post. That said, I think this extended episode was a really nice addition to the House canon: it used the formula, but shook it up by making it have to work within a high-stakes hostage situation; it utilized all of House’s fellows (at least a little bit); and it ultimately gave us a new character arc for Thirteen to follow (so maybe now the writers can focus on someone they’ve ignored . . like Kutner).

Zeljko was this week’s POW, who has become so frustrated with the state of healthcare (seeing an endless string of doctors who just don’t know what’s wrong, as well as being financially buried in medical bills) that he believe the only way to get someone to take his pain seriously is to take some doctors and hostages at gunpoint and force them to work on his case. This is just what he does when, hoping to take only hospital administrator Cuddy hostage, he catches House in Cuddy’s office and rounds up ten or so hostages and Thirteen to join him, forcing them to remain in Cuddy’s office with him until someone solves his case. He’s lucky House happened to be the best diagnostician on staff, otherwise he’d have been SOL.

“You really think re-enacting Dog Day Afternoon is gonna get you diagnosed faster?” – House

House does a quickie diagnosis and tells Zeljko that he needs to administer a test drug to prove that he has pulmonary scleroderma. Zeljko will only agree to the test if Dr. Cuddy brings in the medicine, alone. He then demands that the drug be tested on one of the hostages first, all of them except Thirteen and a nurse amounting to nothing but a handful of sick people who, if given the wrong drug, could be getting even sicker. House administers the drug to one of the beefier patients, who passes out. Thinking it’s a trick, Zeljko shoots an investment banker Patrick Bateman-looking patient in the leg as a warning.

This shot of Zeljko reminds me far too much of his guest spot on The Mentalist's pilot episode.

Realizing how serious the situation is, House does a conference call differential with all of his fellows, past and present, to help solve the case. During this process, a SWAT team from the outside lurks outside the windows, which House realizes Zeljko could hear from inside the room. Assuming his hyper-sensitive hearing is a new symptom, House assumes that he has a nerve problem, which Thirteen confirms when she notices that Zeljko has trouble moving the muscles on one side of his face. House convinces Zeljko to trade two hostages for the test to prove neuralgia. He then asks for another drug guinea pig, a position for which ready-to-die Thirteen immediately volunteers. The test is incredibly painful for her, but shouldn’t be for Zeljko if he does indeed have neuralgia. Nerve disorders are ruled out when the injection causes him pain, and in the lab, Foreman and Cameron find out that Zeljko’s white blood cells are normal, thus ruling out an infection. The team is now left with a either a cancer diagnosis or a heart defect.

Zeljko allows Thirteen to leave the room to get the heart-slowing drugs House requires to make the man’s heart return to normal speed, which, when injected into her normal-beating heart slows it down considerably, while Zeljko’s heart reduces to a normal speed. But then he starts sweating only on one side of his face, leading House to believe he has a lung tumor that’s pressing on his sympathetic nerves. Zeljko decides to trade three hostages for a trip to radiology and ties the two doctors, the nurse, and the remaining two civilians to him to journey to radiology. In the CT scan, he refuses to unhand his gun, which causes a sunburst over the image. House convinces him to give up the gun in order to get a proper diagnosis, at which point the nurse and one civilian hostage decide to make a break for it. The youngest hostage stays, just to check out what’s going down. When the CT scan does not reveal a tumor, House returns Zeljko’s gun, an act which prompts House, Zeljko and Thirteen to discuss the nature of cowardice and the need to be right. (For the record, both House and Zeljko have a destructive and violent need to be right, and Zeljko and Thirteen are both cowards about facing their own deaths.)

House now thinks that because of Zeljko’s wonky hearing (he now appears to be deaf in one ear), that he might have Cushing’s Syndrome. The hostage negotiators agree to get the drugs for him if he lets the boy go and stops testing drugs on Thirteen, an agreement upon which Zeljko immediately reneges. Thirteen gets incredibly sick, and Zeljko remains unchanged from the treatment. In a last-ditch discussion with the diagnostics team, all signs point to a tropical illness like Meliodosis, which Zeljko discounts because he’s never been anywhere south of Florida  . . . apparently not realizing that Florida is a tropical climate. Zeljko agrees to let House go for getting the answer, but wants to keep dying Thirteen to test the next rounds of drugs on, despite House’s warning that any additional strain on her body would fully shut down her kidneys and kill her. She agrees to take the last round of drugs, knowing that in eight years, she’ll be dead anyway.

“Who’s the martyr now? Either the drugs kill me or he kills me.” – Thirteen.

But when the time comes, Thirteen is unable to give herself the fatal dose, declaring, “I don’t want to die,” just as Zeljko steals the syringe from her hand and injects himself as the SWAT team blasts through the wall. When the smoke clears, the SWAT team arrests Zeljko, who seems to be at peace, finally, knowing that he’s actually gotten an answer for all his trouble. Jail, it seems, is worth that to him. Thirteen goes on dialysis to flush out her kidneys, and finally consents to some clinical trials for Huntington’s Chorea, her near-death experience giving her a renewed appreciation for life.

The Husband:

I was not looking forward to this episode. Hostage episodes are usually very desperate ploys to get viewers tuned in, story be damned, and usually result in most of the characters not acting like themselves in any capacity. It can be done right, however. I point you to “Bang!” from Desperate Housewives season 3, which is more than the sum of its parts.

Every single hostage situation episode of a TV drama usually gives center stage to the hostage taker and they rarely disappoint, so much like Laurie Metcalf’s wildly successful performance in the aforementioned DH episode, Zeljko was in it to win it.

The result was just okay, a gimmick that thankfully gave us more than one location – man, how big is that x-ray room? – and some resolution with Thirteen’s recent b-story arc (one that many viewers have been complaining about, but not me). My wife’s right, though – it’s time to give Kutner some focus. Nobody underuses Kal Penn and gets away with it. Nobody!

Special shout-outs for several of the guest actors. First, one to Natasha Gregson Wagner for actually blending into the story that I barely noticed her. (I dig on the actress quite a bit, but she has a tendency to overrun any scene she’s in, whether it’s in High Fidelity or Another Day in Paradise.

Another to Evan Peters as the young teenage hostage, who just makes me miss the show Invasion even more.

And one to Wood Harris as the SWAT negotiator, a far cry from playing Avon Barksdale, the king of all drug lords, on HBO’s The Wire. His presence made me realize that whenever I see a talented African-American actor on TV and turn to my wife and say, “Hey, I know that guy,” it’s always somebody from The Wire. That show was apparently filled with every single fairly unknown African-American actor in the country. I didn’t even bother mentioning it last night, because I’m sure the conversation would have been this:

Me: Guess what I know him from.

Wife: The Wire. Shut up. I’m watching Zeljko.

 

Fringe 1.9: “The Dreamscape”

The Wife:

I can’t possibly be the only person who found the butterfly attack in this episode’s cold opening to be extremely funny, right? While I’m sure getting attacked by hundreds of butterflies with razor-sharp wings would actually be quite terrifying to experience, watching it happen to someone just looks funny. All I could think of is that the lacerations from razor-sharp butterflies must be akin to being covered in thousands of tiny papercuts. This scene stopped being funny, of course, when the victim, Mark Young, threw himself out the window of Massive Dynamic’s New York high rise and fell down to his doom in a state of suspended animation through a rain of glass and butterflies. This shot was so powerful, so beautiful, that it made me feel really terrible for laughing about the butterfly attack as Young drifts down before plummeting full force into a car.

This accident interrupts Olivia’s plans to go to a surprise party with her friends, whom we didn’t know she had at all. As she wipes off her lipgloss to return to work, I wondered about how out of character this attempt to humanize Olivia seemed. I know that she needs this breath of life, and that we do need to see her as someone outside of the cold-hearted bitch FBI suit she puts on every day. But this scene didn’t really tell me much about her other than that she seems to constantly have to put her social life on hold to do her work, which we already know from hundreds of other FBI shows is just an occupational hazard. I suppose the one insight it did give us is that Olivia is the kind of person who feels that she can’t wear lipgloss to the field. I’m not sure why, but I’ll assume that this detail combined with her earlier story about her drunken stepfather means that she thinks showing any signs of femininity equates a visible weakness in her work. If I knew more about Olivia, this scene would have made more sense overall as an illustration of the kinds of sacrifices she makes for her job and her country, but as she’s not the most fully-realized character on the show, it seemed a bit clunky to me.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter, as Olivia has to give up her plans in order to go to NYC and investigate. When surveying the accident site, she sees John Scott in the crowd, which jolts her. Walter notices that there are two kinds of lacerations on Mark Young’s corpse: deep cuts from the glass, and some other, shallower cuts that appear to have happened from the inside out. Walter takes the body back to the lab, and Olivia goes to discuss the accident with Nina Sharp, who doesn’t seem to have much information for Olivia other than to simply state that working on crazy science sometimes makes people go crazy. When Olivia and Charlie Francis search the victim’s house, they notice that he had recently booked a flight to Kansas on Oceanic airlines (which I can’t believe flies to Kansas – I thought they only flew the Pacific Coast route), indicating that his apparent suicide was not a planned event. Olivia is struck by Young’s butterfly collection, which appears to move before her very eyes, and notices the word “MONARCH” written in Young’s day planner.

Please get me some coffee yogurt so I can examine this man's numerous tiny papercuts.

Back at the lab, Walter determines that the shallower lacerations were indeed made from the inside of the body when he finds a synthetic psychotropic compound present in Mark Young’s brain. However, he has no idea what this means until John Scott ghost hacks Olivia’s computer as she researches the meaning of the term “MONARCH” (pulling up various images from California’s state butterfly to Queen Elizabeth – sadly, The Monarch from The Venture Brothers was not present in her search results). Scott sends her an email with the address 1312 Labrador Lane, which she immediately heads off to. The building is yet another of Scott’s dingy basement haunts in which Olivia finds some thumping containers of . . . frogs, another one of our Fringe symbols. After this discovery, she goes to Francis to ask for a bereavement leave, telling him that he was right all along about how Scott’s death would affect her, admitting that she’s still seeing him. Francis is about to grant her request when Astrid calls to tell her that Walter may have found a link between the frogs and Mark Young’s death.

Meanwhile, Peter gets a call from an old flame, Tess, who has heard that he’s back in town and says she urgently needs to meet with him. He meets her at a cafe and urges him to get out of town because if she can find him, then the wrong people certainly can find him. As he takes her hand, he realizes her wrist has been badly bruised. Michael is beating her again, which makes Peter incredibly angry.

I was thrown off by the presence of actress Susan Misner in this role, as I know her best from Gossip Girl where she plays estranged wife and mother Alison Humphrey. I now envision an alternate storyline for Alison where she leaves Rufus not to paint and fall in love with an artist in upstate New York, but to go to Boston and become Peter Bishop’s lover and partner-in-crime, which is a lot seedier. But I just realized now in looking her up on IMDB that I know her from one other show: the failed immortal cop drama New Amsterdam, which didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would. Misner played Amsterdam’s boss, Sergeant Callie Burnett, and she was basically a hard-ass every week. Misner is a beautiful woman, but I was shocked to see how old the makeup folks on Fringe made her look. The actress herself is only 37, and I had guessed last night that her character Tess might have been a hard-looking 38, which is to say she looked more like she was 48. Either way, I’m assuming that both Olivia and Peter are in their early 30s, so I was really thrown off to see Peter involved with a much older-looking woman. Even if Tess is also in her early 30s, she certainly doesn’t look it. I hope it was their intention to take a lovely woman and make her look way too old for her character, because otherwise, that’s just a really weird choice.

The substance found in Mark Young’s brain is the same substance found in the skin of the toads Agent Scott led Olivia to. Walter had (naturally) previously experimented with this substance, which causes people to experience hallucinations so vivid that their minds actually create the damage to their bodies that they think they are experiencing. So, if Mark Young hallucinated butterflies lacerating his flesh, his body manifested the lacerations. Moreover, the amount of this substance found in Young’s body was 30 times the normal amount a person would take, leading Walter to believe that this is a clear case of murder.

Olivia: You have to put me back in the tank.
…
Walter: You’re asking me to push the boundaries of all that is real and possible. Like roasting a turkey.

Olivia asks Walter to go back in the tank to help her purge John Scott’s memories from her mind and, also, to help her uncover anything Scott may have known about the substance he led her to. Walter is a bit reluctant to do so, fearing the damage he could cause to Olivia, but he goes ahead with the procedure. In the chamber, hopped up on LSD, Olivia goes through the door of a restaurant and sees herself and John Scott on their first date. (A scene which told me more about her character than the earlier scene of her on the phone with her friend did.) When her memory self leaves the table, she sits down and tries to talk to John, who she believes can see her, even though Walter assures her he cannot. She then finds John with Mark Young and two other men having a secret conference. Once the deal has been made, she watches John shank one of the guys as Young and a Latino man walk away. This scene disturbs her so much that Peter has to bust in and drag her out of the tank.

Olivia gets Astrid to digitally render a sketch of the Latino man she saw in John’s memory and asks Broyles to help her get full disclosure from Nina Sharp about every project Mark Young ever worked on at Massive Dynamic. Thinking about how to reach this man, whose name, by the way, is George, Olivia tries dialing the digits that correspond with the word “MONARCH.” When she does, she reaches George, whose cell phone is traced to the Lincoln Tunnel. Dunham and Francis immediately head to New York where they chase George through NYC traffic until he gets hit by a cab. Olivia grills him in his hospital bed, where he demands complete protection from Massive Dynamic in exchange for his cooperation, claiming that if they killed Mark Young, they’d kill him, too. He suggests that MD offed Young as a warning to other employees and tells Olivia that The Pattern is just a smokescreen created by Massive Dynamic so that they can do whatever they want and get away with it. (Honestly, The Pattern being a giant corporate conspiracy was not news to us, right? We all saw that answer coming together pretty neatly, right?)

With this news, Olivia heads off to MD headquarters to question Nina Sharp about everything she isn’t telling Olivia and Agent Broyles about the goings on at MD. She accuses Nina of protecting the shadowy William Bell, MD’s CEO, by killing off employees who threaten to expose his dealings. Meanwhile, in George’s hospital room, John Scott appears, his skin glittering like Edward Cullen’s vampire skin in the sunlight. Scott wordlessly and violently kills George by slitting his throat. After her uninformative interrogation of Nina Sharp, Olivia calls Broyles to tell him that she’s being suspiciously obsfucative, to which he responds that she needs to lay off Massive Dynamic because a nurse just saw George’s throat slit itself from the inside-out.

Peter has been off continuing his own misadventures throughout all of this, beating the shit out of Michael, who later reports to his cronies that Peter Bishop is back in town. Other than the gambling debts we do know about, I’m interested to find out more about Peter’s checkered past. I’m also pretty sure that Tess getting in touch with him may have been a set-up to expose him, because until now, he’s done a pretty good job of laying low and keeping away from the folks he’s on the bad side of. I’ll see you again, Alison Humphrey, I’m sure.

Olivia begs Walter to put her back in the tank so she can further access John Scott’s memories, but Walter refuses, fearing the worst if Olivia tries the procedure again so soon after completing it. That night, as she struggles to sleep, John Scott ghost hacks her computer again to email:

I SAW YOU. IN THE RESTAURANT.

This leads me to believe that the clone/android John Scott Nina Sharp has in her big ol’ basement back at Massive Dynamic might have a fully-working consciousness that is able to do any number of awesome technokinetic things. I also think that his actual consciousness can interact with his memories, although I’ll leave that up to Walter to explain if it turns out to be true.

Finally, the Massive Dynamic phone number (1-877-8-MSSDYN) is a real number, according to the Fringe boards, although I’ve not yet called it myself. Nor have I tried calling MONARCH, because I don’t know what area code I should append to it and I don’t want to accidentally piss someone off.

Also: Six-Fingered Hand, Butterfly, Daisy, Apple, Apple

The Husband:

Here’s the big section of the George/Olivia hospital-set conversation. I post it because not only it is important to get every word to sink in, I just also think it’s very cool and represents a major turning point in the series.

George: I didn’t kill anybody. Why would I? That guy was a treasure trove of unbelievable things. Massive Dynamic killed him.

Olivia: Massive Dynamic killed Mark Young?

George: That’s right.

Olivia: Why would they?

George: Maybe as a warning to any employee who’s thinking of doing the same thing.

Olivia: Maybe? I think it’s easy to invent a story that you think I want to hear.

George: Really? Did I invent ZFT? Flight 627? The Northwoods Group? John Scott? The Pattern? The whole thing is a hoax. It’s all a smokescreen so Massive Dynamic can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. Do you understand that? Massive Dynamic is hell, and its founder, William Bell, is the devil. And I can prove all of it, but only if I get protection.

Olivia: So why me? Why do I get the privilege of your cooperation?

George: Because I know I can trust you.

Olivia: You don’t even know me.

George: John Scott told me about you. Immunity and complete protection, and I will tell you everything I know.

This conversation helps further along what I suggested last week in our Fringe write-up, that more of the show’s various elements needed to tie together. I’m happy that they may be going the route of a more serialized structure, having used the first handful of episodes to set up singular crises, and now we’re watching them connect right before our eyes.

As for it being obvious that The Pattern is just a big smokescreen, technically there could have been alternative suggestions, that maybe Massive Dynamic simply noticed something akin to The Pattern and used it to their advantage, as opposed to fabricating it entirely. So no, it was not new news per se, but it was definitely enlightening.

And the fact that Olivia can now harness John Scott’s memories that are hidden somewhere in her brain due to the activity in the show’s pilot? That’s extremely helpful, to say that least.

Quick note: If you, like us, had the episode of Fringe cut off at 10 p.m. due to a combination of House running long (as planned) and Fox not communicating to our collective DVRs and TiVos that Fringe was going to run over as a result, it’s easily accessible at Hulu. Just click at minute 42 and it’s a nice lead-up to those seven minutes that you actually did miss had you Tivo’ed/DVRed it.

Here’s the link.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/46404/fringe-the-dreamscape

 

House 5.7 and 5.8: “The Itch” and “Emancipation”

The Wife:

I’m writing a House twofer this week because last week I realized that I don’t really like writing about House. I don’t dislike watching it by any means, but it’s probably the most formulaic of all the procedurals I watch and that makes it a lot less interesting to write about. Nonetheless, last week’s “The Itch” and this week’s “Emancipation” both did something really interesting: they listened to the fans and came up with ways to fully utilize House’s old team, as well as the new team. As crowded as the cast is now, using both teams is actually kind of working out, so I hope the Season 4 detractors are happy now.

“The Itch”

The title refers to a bug bite on House’s hand that he just can’t stop scratching, creating a large, gross wound that he can deal with, as opposed to the large, gross wound in his heart from his unresolved kiss with Cuddy. Wilson believes that the fact that these two won’t talk about their feelings is causing them both to act differently, which neither party will admit, ultimately leading to spineless Wilson growing some balls and calling House out on his inability to have relationships with anyone, especially with someone he really loves, like Cuddy.

Well, everyone, it looks like the leg bone is, in fact, connected to the hip bone.

The POW in “The Itch” is an agoraphobic man who refuses to be taken out of his home by EMTs, thus making him Cameron’s case. Because of the highly unusual case (good to see everyone out of PPH), Cameron consults with House and his team. They can’t use any of the traditional hospital machinery, so Cameron and Co. start by looking for indicator markers in the blood via EEG testing to try and find out what’s wrong. Knowing that the patient had a seizure when he was first “brought to the ER,” Cameron tries to induce seizures any way possible, to no avail. House decides to bring in outsiders to test the patient’s agoraphobic response, but the patient only experiences intense stomach pain, not seizures, which they assume is an obstructed bowel. House tricks the patient into having in-home surgery, but secretly brings him into the hospital once he’s under sedation. Cuddy intervenes and keeps the patient from going back to his home, for fear of post-surgical infection. Obviously, the patient is none too pleased that he has woken up in the hospital and threatens to sue. Cuddy, in return, tosses Cameron and Chase off the case.

Cameron tries again to get the patient to agree to in-home surgery, but promises to only do it in-home this time. No tricks. Taub operates, and they discover afterward that the POW’s toes have gone numb, which House thinks is an indicator of Celiac’s Disease, so they start force-feeding him gluten to see if they can progress his condition. When that doesn’t work, House wonders if the patient hasn’t been accidentally poisoning himself with household chemicals that have built up in his bloodstream and weakened his heart from constant exposure. He then realizes that its actually lead poisoning from shrapnel left in the patient’s side from a gun shot wound years prior. The shrapnel has been acting like a time-release poison that finally let loose. The gun shot occurred several years earlier when he and his girlfriend were mugged. She died from her wound, while he survived and became completely introverted and increasingly afraid of the world.

The writers made the connection between House’s misanthropy and the POW’s agoraphobia pretty explicit in a lovely end sequence to this episode, wherein House rides over to Cuddy’s house and approaches her door, but can’t quite ring the bell, and the POW finally, for the first time in seven years, leaves his house and touches his feet to his front steps.

I appreciated the use of Cameron and Chase in this episode, even though it was at the expense of (mostly) Kutner, and I loved that end sequence.

[Husband Note: It seems a lot of people have been searching online for who played the agoraphobic, or, more importantly, what they know him from. His name is Todd Louiso, and I will always know him as Dick from High Fidelity.]

“Emancipation”

I don't need you to be smarmy, I need you to be my conscience.

In this episode, an emancipated minor is the POW and Foreman tries his damndest to emancipate himself from House by working on clinical trials. Without House’s consent, he takes a pediatrics diagnostics case from Cuddy in order to help him prove that he can work two cases at once. Foreman’s case actually broke my heart a little bit because I really don’t like the idea of children being deathly ill. I think the worst part of this story for me was when the little boy crashed and the nurses had to bring out the tiny children’s defibrillator paddles. Tiny paddles shouldn’t have to exist. I know that they do, because every human body is weak and fallible, but I’d prefer to not think that they do. They make me really, really sad. Almost as sad as stories about animal abuse. But, Foreman’s case did come with the upside of utilizing Cameron and Chase as “his team” while House worked on the main POW with his fellows.

House’s POW also gave me something I’ve been fucking whining about all season: a Kutner arc! Well, it sort of did. Kutner identified with the POW, a 16-year-old factory employee and emancipated minor. She tells him that she was emancipated after her parents’ death because she didn’t want to go into foster care. Because of his emotional connection to her (his parents died when he was 6), he’s willing to believe her and stand up for her, until the minute he realizes that she’d been lying to him all along when he asks her about her dead parents in the MRI machine and sees her limbic system light up – the part of the brain that utilizes the imagination. She then admits that she got emancipated from her parents, not because they’re dead, but because her father raped her and her mother covered it up. Here, Kutner is done with her and its time for Thirteen to try her hand at the case.

Where the team had previously thought vasculitis, they now move on to a diagnosis of arsenic poisoning from the homemade furniture that may have been produced using chemically treated woods. Sofia starts convulsing when Thirteen gives her the treatment for the arsenic poisoning, which leads the team to realize that lesions have formed in her brain. The arsenic in her bloodstream was actually treating those legions: she has leukemia and will need a marrow transplant. Thirteen tries to convince the girl to call her parents as they will give her the best match, despite what they may have done to her in the past. Taub steals Thirteen’s Huntington’s diagnosis to try to rationalize with the girl about taking the marrow transplant to save her life, as people like Thirteen have no chance at surviving their diseases. Still, the girl refuses.

Thirteen goes to find the girls parents and tell them that she’s dying, but instead she finds that Sofia has stolen the identity of a perfectly healthy girl and as been living as her. Angry, Thirteen (whose real name we find out is Remy Hadley, to which I say, who the fuck are your parents?), confronts the girl about her stolen identity, which she claims is because she didn’t want her parents to find her. House knows that she’s lying. She covered up her rape with dead parents, so House believes that the rape story may also be a lie to cover up something worse, a notion which led me to this question: what the fuck could be worse than being raped? The answer, clearly, is being murdered. But since Sofia is alive, there really isn’t much worse than being raped. For her, it’s accidentally killing her younger brother. More accurately, letting him die when she wasn’t watching him. That’s sad, but that’s not worse than being raped. I think we can call agree that this POW doesn’t quite have the same scale of awfulness as everyone else has. I’m sure she feels very guilty about this accident, but it was an accident. Being raped? That’s not an accident. That’s an actual crime. Anyway, House reunites her with her parents who will presumably forgive her and save her life with precious bone marrow.

Meanwhile, with Cameron and Chase’s help, Foreman manages to solve his case of a four year-old boy who seemingly has nothing wrong with his stomach but is getting sicker and sicker, and eventually crashes. Cameron and Chase beg Foreman to cave to House when the boy crashes, but House refuses to help because it isn’t his case. Eventually, Foreman realizes that the boy’s older brother was unintentionally making him sick by giving him too many vitamins, causing the boy to overdose on iron. This was a pretty sad realization as well, because the older brother really thought he was helping his brother grow stronger by eating more vitamins. He laments that his brother will hate him forever, but Foreman assures the older boy that his brother knows how much he loves him and cares about him and that he won’t be mad because it was a simple mistake, some advice I’m sure Sofia would have loved to hear the day her brother died.

In the end, House allows Foreman to do clinical trials, this time because he told House he would be doing them, like an adult, where as the last time, he asked for permission – a distinction which makes all the difference for House.

 

House 5.6: “Joy”

The Wife:

I found this week’s House to be strangely unsettling and the more I think about it, it’s probably one of the finer pieces of writing the House team has produced this year. This week we got two POWs: a 37-year-old man who lives in a pristine, undecorated household with his young, apathetic daughter, both of whom seem to be sleepwalking through life and the biological mother of the baby Cuddy has been approved to adopt, Becca, who ultimately must make the choice between saving her own life and the life of her baby.

In House’s case, Taub and Thirteen discover that the patient literally is sleepwalking through life. His brain is producing motor function when he should be sleeping. He can even drive a car out to get cheap cocaine while he sleeps. The cocaine he buys is cut with milk powder (probably one of the better things you could cut coke with), which leads the team to think he might be lactose intolerant. This bit of evidence, combined with a display of jaundice from kidney failure and sweating blood, finally leads House to the epiphany that this man has Familial Mediterranean Fever (even though he has a Whitey McWhiteman name, he’s actually Persian and changed his name after 9/11), a condition that causes lactose intolerance, sleepwalking and anhedonia, the inability to experience and display emotions, especially joy. His daughter, who offered emotionlessly to give up her kidney to save her father, also had the disease. When their treatments finally begin to kick in, the two share a wide smile together for what must be the first time in a number of lonely gray years.

It doesn't seem like she's feeling . . . feelings.

In Cuddy’s case, she brings in the biological mother of her adoptive child because she notices a lace-patterned rash on Becca’s arm. This leads to the discovery that Becca’s baby’s lungs are underdeveloped and Becca’s placenta is bleeding. If Becca delivers early, she will survive but risk the baby’s life. If she delivers in two weeks when the baby’s lungs are more developed, she might die, even if Cuddy and Cameron keep her on plasma and bedrest for the duration of that time. Cuddy goes to House to help her make a decision as the lead doctor on the case. House considers this yet another test in his plot to torture Cuddy/see if she’s ready to adopt a child with her busy hospital administrator lifestyle. Cuddy wants to deliver Becca later to ensure that her baby, tentatively named Joy, will survive, thus giving her the thing she so desperately wants. House warns her that this is not the most medically sound decision, as it is worse to risk the mother’s life than that of the child, especially if that child might not live anyway. (Cuddy only admitted Becca after becoming slightly paranoid from House’s numerous warnings that adopted babies are not the cream of the crop, so to speak.)

Cuddy tries to encourage Becca to deliver later, but Becca insists that she simply can’t do that, and that she feels really awful about potentially taking Joy away from Cuddy if the baby were to die. Becca chose Cuddy from numerous profiles at the adoption website specifically because she wanted her baby to have a mother who wasn’t “a loser” former meth addict, but someone who was successful and powerful and well-off, like Cuddy – someone entirely unlike Becca and her mother and her mother’s mother. I admire Becca’s sentiments about wanting to give her child the best life possible, as I think that’s really want any parent wants for their child. Becca chooses to deliver early and save her own life. Naturally Chase, the only surgeon at Princeton-Plainsboro, performs the Caesarian section. This scene was one of the most intense I’ve ever seen on this show, with Cuddy calling out to her weak-lunged child to “Cry, Joy! Cry!” – a desperate plea from a would-be mother to will her dream to life. After cleaning her lungs of amniotic fluid and, I assume, a butt-slap, Joy cries out loud and clear, filling her lungs with air and life and filling Cuddy’s nearly-broken heart with, well, joy.

House immediately pulls Cuddy away from her baby to help him deal with the kidney transplant consent for his case, urging her to get used to saying the words that she will inevitably saying for the rest of little Joy’s life: “Mommy has to go to work now.” (True, hospital administrators do work a lot, but in the real world, each department also has an administrator, so that people like Cuddy don’t have to work 24 hours a day, save for being constantly on-call.) When Cuddy later returns to check on Becca, Becca informs her that she no longer wants to give up Joy and that she’s really sorry about filling a wonderful person like Cuddy with such hope and then knocking her down a peg. Cuddy responds to this politely, but then returns home to pack up all of the baby things she had bought and to wallow in the grief of a parent who has lost a child. House, contrite, comes to check on Cuddy, where she informs him that this was her only chance to become a mother, and that she can’t put herself through a loss like this again. He assures her that she would have been a wonderful parent, which she balks at because he spent this entire episode showing her how shitty and selfish of a parent she could be. House cannot respond, save only to lean in, almost in a trance-like state, and kiss her.

The saddest kiss in the world.

While the “finding happiness” theme in both plots was a little more obvious, I liked that the subtext of Cuddy and House finally kissing in that trancelike state connected to the fact that House’s patients this week were also sleepwalking through life, just as Cuddy and House seem to sleepwalk through their obvious attraction to one another. Both of the cases in this episode were unfathomable to me: I cannot imagine quite what it would be like to spend years of your life sleepwalking, utterly joyless and never notice, nor can I imagine what its like to give up a child, or worse, to take a child away from someone. These are all horrible things, but none were as horrible as the tense moments after Joy’s birth where no one was sure if she would live or die.

I reiterate: pregnancy is scary. And yet seeing those moments where Cuddy was so happy to hold that child make all the terror worth it. Even a few moments of joy seem to be worth all of the horror in the world, especially the horror of never knowing happiness at all.

The Husband:

At this point in the world of movies and TV, I would be more surprised if, in a story that involved a surrogate mother and her relationship to the receiving person/family, the surrogate actually goes through and gives up her baby. Every single fucking movie and show does the exact same thing, the surrogate mother seeing her child and suddenly changing her mind, crying and apologizing to the recipient, and we as an audience are supposed to feel sad, but it’s hard to do that anymore.

(Juno, of course, did a nice job breaking this trend, but my favorite variation on the story is Christopher McQuarrie’s shoot-‘em-up The Way of the Gun, which is just so over-the-top violent and complicated that the surrogacy catalyst involving a very woozy Juliette Lewis is pretty much just a MacGuffin and not an actual point of emotion.)

Thank God it worked here on House, though, because we have been following Cuddy’s issues with being a mother for years now, and it really did do a great job of leading us to believe that Cuddy would, in fact, receive the baby. However, once the baby takes its first breath and cries, I just sat and waited for the inevitable. Props to Lisa Edelstein for doing such an incredible job with the scene in which the inevitable happens, because otherwise I’d just roll my eyes. (Hey, surrogate mother, are you willing to pay for all the medical bills that Cuddy would have 100% eaten had you given up your baby? I didn’t think so.)

After a fairly haphazard first few episodes this year, I think House is probably as good as it’s ever been, and if they can keep the quality up for the rest of the season, the Emmy-winning “House’s Head” won’t be the only episode that is truly considered a classic.

And the kiss was fantastic. Much better than Izzy and Karev last week on Grey’s Anatomy as far as long-gestating hospital-based show kisses go.

 

The Ex-List 1.2 and 1.3: “Climb Every Mountain Biker” and “Protect and Serve”

The Wife:

Bella and her friends are all moderately active Southern California denizens, prone to lounging at the beach in the late afternoons and heading out for early morning surfs. (For those not in the know, that really is the best time to catch some bitchin’ waves.) But when Bella and Co. attend their annual day of non-activity that involves watching the Ocean Beach Marathon while brunching, she is literally hit in the head by the Ex of the Week: Jake Tanner (Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay’s Eric Winter). Jake, a formerly lazy oaf that Bella dated in graduate school in her punk phase in 1996, has morphed into a hyper-active marathon runner. And mountain biker. And rock climber. And so on. In college, she could never get him to leave the apartment. All he wanted to do was either have sex or watch TV.

“The only reason people go out is to find someone to have sex with while they’re watching TV.” — Jake

Bella reconnects with Jake on a series of dates ranging from mountain biking to rock climbing to ocean kayaking to Ultimate Frisbee. Even his more low-key dates involve some form of competition: Trivia Olympics with his office on Thursday nights. He also has the weirdest girl-on-girl fantasy I’ve ever heard on TV: 5 Bella Clones hooking up with 5 Maria Sharapova clones . . . to play basketball against each other. (I guess he won’t be interested in this week’s upcoming episode of House, huh?)

“What’s the deal with the constant activities? It’s like camp without the kissing and alcohol.” — Bella

When Bella finally gets Jake to stop moving, he realizes that he hasn’t properly dealt with his break-up from his most recent ex, Celeste, who just happens to be his boss. Whom he plays Trivia Olympics with. When Jake decides to quit his job rather than be around Celeste anymore, Bella takes a step back and ends the relationship that was running her ragged.

Meanwhile, Bella has been cat sitting the lost Moo cat of one of her high school boyfriends, who is apparently super hot now. This inspires all of the roommates to invent the greatest drinking game ever: Google Ex Smackdown. I found a version of the rules here, if anyone is interested in making this your Friday night activity with some friends. I imagine the home game would still involve fun quips about friends’ exes such as:

“That girl so didn’t look like Natalie Imbruglia. She was a poor man’s Phoebe Cates at best.” — Bella

Oooh, yours is married with six children. I don't know if that deserves one shot or 9.

I do have a couple of questions about Bella from this episode:

1. If she went to graduate school, why is she a florist? Sure, it affords her the ability to close down her shop and do whatever she wants, but those flowers can’t be paying for her Master’s degree in  . . . whatever.

2. Who the hell would make an every-other-day custody arrangement for a child, let alone a dog? I don’t see why they couldn’t switch off weeks or maybe exchange the dog on Wednesdays and Saturdays? So that they both get a day of the weekend? The dog custody situation is all very odd to me.

Finally, I fucking hate the title sequence. It’s so horrible and jarring because it starts with that dialogue sequence and then just disintegrates into bad Photoshop work. If this show gets a second season, I need new titles. Seriously.

“Protect and Serve” might actually be my favorite episode of The Ex-List so far, in which Bella hooks up with her bad boy ex from high school who is now a cop after someone snatches her iPod from her apartment.

The flashback for this episode was great because it involved Bella’s dad, who until now has not done anything but removed a sign from Bella’s shop. I have fond memories of actor William Russ myself from 1991, as he played Corey Matthew’s dad on Boy Meets World. He’s done a lot of TV work since then, but I most fondly remember him from that particular show. And while he has aged a lot since the 90s, I’m happy to see him as a regular on a show like this.

Bella’s dad, Jimmy, a highway patrolmen, hated Ronnie, her boyfriend from sophomore year, which CBS insisted on spelling as “sophmore” for some reason. (Good job, CBS. Alex Trebek would school your asses by intentionally pronouncing that extra “o.”) Jimmy is none-too-happy that Bella is dating Ronnie again, even though he appears to have turned over a new leaf. Auggie isn’t a fan, either. As it turns out, Ronnie might not be such a good cop. He threatens Bella’s landlord to keep him from raising her rent and intends to do a sweep throughout the city to shut down minor criminals, such as those who sell knock-offs . . . like Bella’s psychic.

I did not hate the psychic this week, either. Probably because she was actually integral to the story and made Bella question her belief in the prophecy, rather than simply showing up to repeat the same shit we’ve all heard before and being a bitch about it.

Bella reverts to being like her high school self around Ronnie, sneaking out to meet him in the middle of the night and necking in his car at lover’s lane. Auggie, hoping to break up the pair, convinces Jimmy to start treating Ronnie as though he likes him. Jimmy takes Ronnie and Bella out to dinner and talks about how much he respects the force, reminiscing about his days as a highway patrolman and, more importantly, his days in the Navy. (Nice touch on San Diego authenticity there, showrunners. My dad was stationed in San Diego for a while, as many sailors are. In fact, at UCSD, all incoming freshmen receive a pamphlet called “Getting to Know Your Local Military.” They also, I’m told, receive a pamphlet called “Staying Safe in Tijuana.”) Because her dad likes Ronnie so much, Bella immediately wants to break up with him.

Meanwhile, I responded very positively to the B-story this week in which Vivian, the hot history teacher, is spotted by some of her students in her bikini at the beach one afternoon. Shortly thereafter, the principal receives an anonymous note concerned about Vivian’s “inappropriate behavior.” When she realizes that the note was written by the girlfriend of one of the boys who has a crush on her, she talks to the girl about how its neither one of their fault that the boy in question was being stupid. She reassures her students’ confidence, reminding her that she is a beautiful girl and that her boyfriend is stupid if he can’t see that. Out of respect for this girl, Vivian wears a cover-up over her bikini at the end of the episode. Ghandi or no Ghandi, Vivian is an awesome teacher.

Oh yeah, and “Protect and Swerve” totally is a great name for an all-male dance review in uniform . . .

The Husband:

Right now, I’m still a bit undecided on if I’m totally into the main romantic material — that is, Bella and her quest narrative for looooove — and am undecided if it would perhaps work better in a 30-minute format. Right now the stories have the potential to wear a little thin at 60 minutes (sorry, honey, I wasn’t into the “Protect And Serve” A-story nearly as much as you were — but I can tell you exactly what keeps me digging the show, and that would be Bella’s friends and family.

A very unique group of people in a very unique setting — that would be SD’s suburb Ocean Beach which looks positively awesome in the show — they are a delightful bunch of people, and for me the episodes live and die on their interaction with each other and with Bella. That’s what makes the Google Ex Smackdown so hilarious, not just that they’re tormenting Bella, but they seem like actual, genuine people.

It’s when they get saddled with dumb stories where I worry about them. Case in point, Cyrus (Amir Talai) and his third episode nonsense surrounding trying to con people into buying security systems and then getting ripped off by homeless people. I much prefer him just lounging half-naked in a dirty kiddie pool in Bella’s yard, firing off verbal tirades about how he’s so much better than everybody else.

Oh, and it also helps that sister Daphne (Rachel Boston) and best friend Vivian (Alexandra Breckenridge) are F.A.F. (If I may be somewhat crude, that acronym standing for Foxy As Fuck.) It’s just me and my waifs again, as usual.

 

House 4.5: “Birthmarks”

A quickie with House . . .

The Wife:

In this week’s episode of House, the patient of the week was a recovering addict who traveled all the way to China to find her birth parents only to be rejected by them and fall deathly ill after trying to lift a Buddha statue. Back in New Jersey, House learns of his father’s death but could not be less interested in paying his respects to the man who raised him. Thematically, the POW’s struggle to find her identity parallel’s House’s rejection of his identity by rejecting his father, even though he has long suspected that, much like the POW, the man who raised him was not his biological father. There were some truly great House and Wilson moments in this episode as Cuddy drugged House so that Wilson could kidnap him and drag him to the funeral. House spends the episode trying to stall Wilson once he wakes up beside him in Wilson’s car on the freeway. He drops Wilson’s keys down a grate at a rest stop, then gets Wilson arrested after speeding past a Highway Patrolmen on a country road.

At the jail, we learn the story of how House and Wilson met. Wilson, recently divorced for the first time and upset, started a bar fight at a medical convention in Louisiana (hence the warrant for his arrest) and House, bored as hell at said medical convention, bailed Wilson out because he was officially the least boring person at said convention. Their entire relationship is based on that moment, despite the fact that they have nothing in common. I’ve missed Wilson this season, just as I miss the Wilson-and-House repartee. But I also missed Wilson because I love Robert Sean Leonard and it has been a great joy of mine to watch how skillfully Bobby Sean manages to pay off the show’s writers to keep him out of episodes as much as possible. Nonetheless, this episode was filled with shining performance moments from him that showed us just how much of a bruised little boy Wilson is, unable to really deal with loss and how, through that, we see just how much of a bruised little boy his best friend House is, too. Some of Leonard’s performance in this episode reminded me of his Broadway turn as tuberculosis-riddled Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night back in 2003. The scene where House and Wilson have it out at the funeral particularly reminded me of a certain scene in the play where Edmund’s elder brother Jamie (played by the tremendous Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the 2003 Broadway engagement) badgers his younger brother to admit his faults, looming like a spectre of dread over his younger brother. I certainly saw House as Jamie Tyrone in that moment, goading an enfeebled Leonard into an admission of emotion. I wish I could describe the connections between those scenes better, but it’s unfortunately not a textual connection between the two shows so much as an emotive connection between the dynamics of the performers. Splendid work from Bobby Sean. I’m glad he’s back, and hopefully back to paying off the writers again for the duration of the season.

With House out of the way at Daddy’s funeral, the writers got a chance to make up for their misuse of House’s old team and give Cameron and Chase slightly more than 30 seconds onscreen. Everyone got to help on the case, which was a good way to keep the House Season 4 detractors at bay for a little bit. Of course, with House out of the medical realm, we also got to see Hugh Laurie enjoy some fine acting moments of his own, especially when he has to stop himself in the middle of his speech at his father’s funeral and correct his rhetorical path. House had to show a sense of restraint and remorse, something Laurie never really gets to do in the role. It was not as great a moment as the scene I mentioned above, but still a powerful testament to Laurie’s skill as an actor. I have faith that one day, he will finally get his Emmy for this show.

But for as nice as those House/Wilson moments were, I felt that there was something sorely lacking about this episode: a Kutner arc. Taub has been given an arc relating to the POW, as has 13. This week seemed like the perfect chance to explore Kutner’s relationship to his adopted parents and his biological parents’ death, something which was only beautifully hinted at as he sat alone in his room, eating cereal in front of the television as a reaction to Amber’s death. I think the writers really missed their chance here, because Kal Penn really needs a chance to shine, and his parent’s murder can not be so swiftly dealt with by casually saying to a POW that being on the outside looking in as the adoptive brown son of a white family is a cool way to live life.

But, hey, for that gaping flaw, I never would have predicted that shoving pins into a baby’s ductile little skull would potentially cause an adult that survived such torture to become an addict, nor would I have predicted that method of baby-killing at all. Clearly, the writers had too many good things to think about this week. Fitting in a Kutner arc would have made this episode far too good to air.

 

House 5.3: “Adverse Events”

The Wife:

On this week’s House, our favorite curmudgeonly diagnostician continued using his new best friend Lucas to dig up dirt on his team and on Cuddy.

The patient of the week is Breckin Meyer, playing a starving artist named Brandon who begins to suffer from visual agnosia, which gives him distorted perception, rendering his artwork to be like that of so many bad Picasso imitations. This is pretty much what I would have expected, because when I think Breckin Meyer, I do not think “great artist.” I think, “Hey, that’s the guy who played Jon Arbuckle in the live-action Garfield movies.”

Why you don't hire Breckin Meyer to play an artist.

In investigating the cause of Brandon’s visual agnosia, House plays mind games with his team, dropping bits of information that Lucas has uncovered about them:

• Thirteen paid 12% interest on a car loan.
• Kutner once crawled for twenty miles, setting a world record and getting his name in the Guinness Book
• Taub’s wife has a secret bank account with close to $100K in it, all accumulated in cash deposits made once a week.

Thirteen suggests that drugs may be the cause of Brandon’s visual agnosia, citing all the messed-up artists she’s known in her hedonistic bisexual glory days. House at first writes her off as a moron because ERs test for drugs (and because 12% interest on a loan is a really stupid deal), but later realizes she was right: Brandon has been making extra money in order to impress his super-hot girlfriend (Marika Dominczyk, who played Bernadette the stock-room girl in The 40 Year-Old Virgin) by participating in clinical trials – sometimes for up to three drugs at once.

I knew I shouldn't have taken that Bisexadrine . . .

As the team discusses just which drugs Brandon may have been on recently, House cleverly injects each trial drug (which has a made-up name in trials, anyway) with a name that reflects each the new facts he’s learned about his team: Bisexadrine, Cuckoldasol and Worldsauruskneesasil.

House weans Brandon off the various drugs he’s been taking only to reintroduce each one independently into his system in order to judge which one is the cause of his visual agnosia. Taub’s suggestion about a former toxin being stored in Brandon’s fat cells that is only now being released due to weight loss leads Taub to discover a warehouse full of Brandon’s unsold old paintings. Every other month, his paintings display distorted perception, leading to the revelation that the cause of Brandon’s visual impairments is indeed drug-related. House realizes that the intermittence of distorted perception is probably because some undigested pills have become trapped in a beazor (a sort of hairball for people) in Brandon’s stomach, occasionally releasing little bits of toxins into his blood stream and causing negative reactions with his other drugs when he’s taking them, thus warping his perception of the world, leading to some very upset portrait subjects and a very confused Thirteen and Taub when Brandon insists that they don’t appear to be the same people. (Seriously, Breckin Meyer-vision is weird.)

Not Taub and Not Hadley are not your real doctors.

Taub’s insecurities about his marriage worked their way into this case. As House reveals Mrs. Taub’s secret bank account, it leads Taub to believe that his wife may be having an affair, which worries him because it points out his own former infidelities. Taub cannot decide if he should confront his wife about this, but realizes he must after he sees that Brandon was so hesitant to reveal to his girlfriend that he wasn’t a successful artist, thinking, of course, that a catch like Heather wouldn’t want to be with a douche like him if he weren’t wealthy. Taub decides to ask his wife about the secret account. She tells him that he just ruined his own surprise, as she had been saving up the money over the years so she could buy her doctor husband his dream car, knowing that he’d be working so diligently that he would never do it himself. (Aww, she loves that cheating douchebag.) When presented with his gift, Taub realizes that he needs to confess everything to his wife. I’m sure we’ll see how that turns out next week.

As for medical gobbeldygook this week, I’m glad I got two emergency tracheotomies in a row and that beazor illustration was freakin’ sweet. I need more disgusting visuals of people’s insides on this show. Because I don’t even get those on Discovery Channel’s Mystery ER, which is exactly like House, but without characters or good acting. I expect disgusting visuals on a medical show, and someone needs to give them to me.

The Husband:

I have no idea why. Maybe it was because it was our first time seeing Mini-Stud in his own habitat. Maybe it was just that Peter Jacobson (the actor who played Mini-Stud) and whoever played his wife really rehearsed the shit out of their first scene together. I don’t know. But when Mini-Stud confronts his wife about her bank account is probably my favorite scene this show has had for a very long time. I don’t know why. It’s not even that original. He thought she was having an affair, he felt guilt for his own affair, he confronted her about the account, then she tells him she was buying him a car. See? Simple. What the hell is going on in my brain?

I just think it was played extremely well, and as for an insight into Mini-Stud’s life, very revealing. The creepy muted greys of his house. The hushed way the couple talk to each other. It just actually had real emotion, something that this show doesn’t show very often. Usually, the show works in very broad emotions of anger, sadness and humor, but this scene seemed like almost a different show. A show I could potentially enjoy more.

Surprise! I totally don't deserve this car because I cheated on you!

On a lighter note, I really dig that Lucas and House are both nearly tearing themselves apart for just a little bit of Cuddy’s affection, sort of a never-touch love triangle. It’s a nice, sweet story with the potential for a very dark future, and if we’re going to have any of the original cast have the most screentime, I’m glad it’s Cuddy. (Sorry, Omar Epps, I know that because of Mekhi Phifer’s death on ER last week that you and Taye Diggs are now the sole young black network TV doctors, but I’d like maybe a little more acting out of you.)

Still, the Cuddy affection-fighting really tickles me, because no matter how good actress Lisa Edelstein is on this show or in movies (especially Keeping The Faith) or how much I hear that she was once a very popular New York party girl, she will always by Cindy McCauliff, the transgender woman on Ally McBeal who Richard Fish was in love with until he found out she had a penis. Keep that in your mind when you watch Dr. House and Cuddy flirt. It gives the scene a whole new energy.

 

The Mentalist 1.1: “Pilot”

The Husband:

I haven’t checked the ratings yet – actually, I don’t even think they’d be up only two days after its premiere – but I don’t see The Mentalist lasting very long. I don’t pretend to be a guru when it comes to how long a show will last (unless it’s either brilliant or very quirky, in which case there’s a 95% chance it will fail), but I know that I’m not very interested in seeing the rest of the season, and I feel others may agree with me either now or further down along the line.

I do appreciate the concept of the show, as the main character’s particular skill set – being so observant as a bureau consultant that he made a career as a psychic for years – is one that has a lot of potential. Sure, it’s similar to the cable sitcom Psych, but I think every concept deserves both a comedic and dramatic approach. Unfortunately, so far there is far too much wrong with The Mentalist.

You're not wearing any underwear. I can tell, because I'm extremely observant.

Tone

Somebody forgot to give all the actors a memo, the one that said perhaps maybe you should inject some life into your characters. All of the actors, save for Amanda Righetti, simply sleepwalked through the pilot, as if their direction was “be dour.” There is no joy in this show, not even when main character Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) starts doing his whole “I’m a genius and I shall solve the crime simply with guess work, my wits and my ability to trick people into revealing their motives” thing.

Shows don’t have to be bright and peppy to be enjoyable, but even ones like Criminal Minds, Numb3rs and the CSI threefer have a great and pounding energy to them and aren’t afraid to be goofy every once in a while. Life’s too short to be humorless, and that’s what the Mentalist pilot was – humorless.

The Case

It’s difficult, in one hour, to introduce all the main characters and still have time to tell an effective story-of-the-week, but it’s not impossible. Not by any means. However, the central case of the pilot was completely irrelevant, far too easy and, basically, very boring.

Remember the pilot of Criminal Minds where Gideon had to track down a Seattle killer all while telling the story – which bled into the even better second episode – about how he profiled vicious killer Lukas Haas and defeated him using mere words? That didn’t ignore the episode’s plot, and tied the past and present together far better than The Mentalist did. (And hey, whenever Criminal Minds gets too grim, we always have Garcia to cheer us up with her awesomeness.)

Remember the pilot of Numb3rs when Charlie joined his brother’s team and calculated the whereabouts of a rapist? That first case told us everything we needed to know about the Eppes Brothers, had the guts to have the case nearly destroy the both of them, and it had its share of laughs.

Not here. Nope. I appreciate that the case tied directly into Jane’s past in re: his background with the infamous Red John killer, but it was so forced and, yes, dour, that all it did was inspire yawns.

Showkillers

Oh, hi, Amanda. I see you're here to kill my show.

Here’s where I get all observant about certain actors on this show. This show carries with it two separate showkillers, plus one semi-showkiller and another with very little TV under her belt.

A showkiller is someone like Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Day Break, The Inside) or Eric Balfour (Conviction, Sex Love & Secrets, Veritas), whose existence on a show will almost always spell doom for the series, usually during its first season. Both of the aforementioned have their exceptions to the rule (Baldwin on Chuck, Balfour not destroying Six Feet Under and 24 by leaving at the end of each show’s first season), but their track record ends up in the negative.

Here on The Mentalist, the two big showkillers are Amanda Righetti and Owain Yeoman.

Amanda Righetti

• Lead ensemble on Fox’s Reunion. Canceled before it could even air all 13 filmed episodes, leaving the show’s central murder mystery unsolved.
• Lead ensemble on Fox’s North Shore, a Hawaii-based show that didn’t last beyond its first season.
• Recurring guest on Fox’s The O.C. Only around for 12 episodes and then never seen nor heard from again. Show plummets in quality after season 2.

Owain Yeoman

• Lead ensemble on Fox’s Kitchen Confidential. Show aired three episodes, was pulled from the schedule, then had three episodes burned off months later, and then canceled outright without having all its episodes air.
• Lead ensemble on ABC’s The Nine. Terrible show. Glad it’s gone. Never even got to finish its season.

Simon Baker himself has been the victim of cancellation (save for three seasons on The Guardian, which I never watched) with CBS’s Smith (3 episodes) and something called Heartbreak High, which lasted one season.

As far as Robin Tunney goes, she has been a regular on only one other TV show, Fox’s Prison Break, and she was murdered during the first episode of the second season.

Robin Tunney phones in her performance in this week's episode of The Mentalist.

Final Judgment

Altogether, it doesn’t look good. Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Simon Baker can draw them in. I like him in films quite a bit, especially the romantic drama Something New, but there are just too many procedurals on TV right now, and I would rather that viewers watch something great like the struggling NBC show Life in its second season than watch good actors look sad every week.

The Wife:

I was bored. I was really, really bored with this pilot. After about 19 minutes of this show — at which point I realized Owain Yeoman was not going to do anything more than grunt, show up in reaction shots and look nice in a suit — I realized that the pilot wasn’t going to get any better and that I would not be watching again after this 60 minutes was up.

I agree with my husband that the idea behind this show is essentially a good one, but watching a dude with really great powers of observation solve crimes is absolutely not why I watch procedurals. I like a procedural that has a lot of blood and guts and gore and horribly twisted crimes. That’s why I watch House, Bones and Criminal Minds. And I also like Numbers.

I like all of those shows because they’re built around interesting characters or, when the characters are a little less important as on Criminal Minds, the shows are built around some truly awesome crimes. I watch House and Numbers for the characters and their interactions. I love watching House destroy himself and be such a bastard to everyone around him. I love Hugh Laurie’s performance and I love watching how skillfully Broadway actor (and crush from my youth) Robert Sean Leonard can find ways to keep himself out of the episode as much as possible. Equally, I love watching the Eppes brothers on Numbers work together to solve crimes and put behind their differences in doing so to be brothers. I am a big fan of Krumholtz and will always watch him. (Also, Judd Hirsch as their father is awesome.)

Bones not only has interesting characters, but also truly grotesque model work and neat-o forensic science. While I think that Criminal Minds is lacking compared to these other three shows in terms of character development, it definitely has two characters I love: Matthew Gray Gubler’s Dr. Spencer Reed and Kristen Vangsness’ Penelope Garcia. It also has the absolute darkest stories each week, and I really appreciate that. In fact, I like Jeff Davis’ show so much that I even sing along to the theme song, which, by the way, has no words. That’s right, I sing the names of the actors.

The Mentalist, on the other hand, seems to have none of these things that I enjoy about my other procedurals. The characters are devoid of character, and what Simon Baker chooses to do to create something out of nothingness comes off as really creepy, to me, at least. And the Red John killer? That’s about as run-of-the-mill as you can get. Come on, CBS. I watch Criminal Minds. You’re not going to impress me with a dude who draws smiley faces in blood. I have seen people hunted for sport on your other, much better procedural.