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readingratThe POTW
How does one keep the viewer interested in the never-ending parade of patients? Easy - it's a House-centric show, so have House interested in the patient. The viewer will then automatically follow suit. Unfortunately, our protagonist is interesting to us precisely because he shows little to no interest in his patients. During this season this has had fatal results: I couldn't even get myself to feel empathy for the doomed mother of a new-born - a tear jerker in any other constellation - because our hero was more interested in the exact location of a missing dime than in his dying patient(s). If he doesn't care, why should I?
The writers' way around this dilemma is to supply a patient every season or so in whom someone that House cares about has a vested interest. That automatically rouses House out of his standby mode, and with him the audience. So far we've had Mark Warner, Crandall's putative daughter, Emma Sloane (the pregnant photographer), Foreman (in 'Euphoria'), Amber and Don Tucker in that category - if I haven't missed anyone, then a patient per season was a pretty good estimate.
The method works fine for me; I actually care whether the patient survives because House's well-being is in some way dependent on the outcome of his efforts, and that's a lot more entertaining than watching him work on a puzzle, knowing that the psychological fallout won't be worse than, "Dang, now I'll have to do an autopsy to confirm my diagnosis, won't I?" So although I really don't care per se whether Cuddy's mother lives or dies - in fact, I'd have been chuffed if that nasty old child abuser had died - House's entanglement in the case on more than one level ensured that I stayed focused and interested in its outcome. As such, having Cuddy's mother as POTW was a definite upside of this episode.
I don't know enough about the medicine to decide whether it was novel or exciting - I think we had a similar case once where a bullet lodged in someone's leg caused the symptoms and we had the nun in one of the first seasons who had an allergic reaction to a copper IUD. Still, House diagnosing Arlene Cuddy based on her inability to recognise sarcasm and then slitting her open to expose necrotic muscle is kind of cool, as is Arlene swinging the malcreant hip implant like a mallet at the end. Yet it isn't the medicine in this episode that creates the tension, even though we have the usual wrong diagnoses/treatments followed by the inevitable worsening of the patient's overall state up to the very brink of death, but the labyrinth of dead ends our hero finds himself in. Refuse the case and you get blamed if Cuddy's mom dies. Take it and she dies, and you get blamed too. Stay on it despite being fired and you all land before M&M (something with 'mortality', wasn't it?), waving your licences goodbye. Let her die under someone else's aegis and your girl-friend will toss you sooner or later.
Back comes the old House ...
... and that was the best thing about the episode. House has been creepily mellow and 'nice' all season - there were raucous protests from certain sides that he's handed over his balls to Cuddy. Now while I have no objections to House turning into a nicer human being, there are two downsides to the 'handing-over-his-balls' scenario. One is that tamed!House is a very boring House. It's sheer viewer egotism on my part to rather have an unhappy, but exciting screw-up on screen than his sane, kind, caring, but mildly boring clone. The other is that if sex with a woman whom House dominated successfully for six season suffices to turn House into a doormat, then why exactly have I been admiring the guy's obstinacy, obduracy and principles? This episode, however, shows in high relief all those qualities of House's that make him an unbelievably arrogant and selfish asshole. And if he ever handed over his balls (which I take leave to doubt), he claimed them back last night in no uncertain terms.
There's that unquenchable arrogance on which the entire episode hinges. Perhaps no other doctor would have diagnosed Arlene Cuddy in time, but House would certainly have diagnosed her a lot faster had he (and his girl-friend) not decided that she's a hypochondriac. Back again, too, is the egotism that'll make House sacrifice everyone and everything to achieve his own aims. After one-and-a-half seasons of almost paternal solicitude for his fellows, he coerces them into risking their career by threatening to fire them. There's a definite difference between what he does and what Cuddy does in this case. Cuddy at no point pulls rank on House, telling him as his boss to take the case, because at no point does she have any intention of firing him (or anyone else). House's choice is not 'take the case or get fired', it's 'take the case or your girl-friend gets pissed'. He has a personal stake in risking his career, his fellows have none, yet he forces them into unethical and potentially career-wrecking actions. To put it in a nutshell, they are in a tight spot because their boss didn't have the backbone to say 'no' to his girlfriend and bear the consequences. This is definitely the worst aspect of House's character, the second worst being his lack of empathy when confronted with other people's feelings. His, 'So my diagnosis was wrong and your mom's dying, but luckily Kaufmann was wrong, too," rates a ten for sheer tactlessness. Si tacuisses ...I love seeing these facets of House's character out in the open again - there's been far too much sentimentality about him from all sides recently. People seem to have forgotten why he's disliked by so many; there's a kind of 'House is a misunderstood philanthropist, wronged by friend and foe alike' wind blowing though fanhood that has little to do with the reality of this character.
... and his balls
Personally, I don't think he ever surrendered his balls. If he didn't object to whatever tribulations Cuddy put him through till now, it was because he couldn't be bothered, not because sex addled his brains. Up till now there was no problem that couldn't be solved in some way with some sort of compromise that didn't cost him too much. Even the 'You don't lie to me' situation, much as it went against the grain for him, was no insurmountable obstacle. All he needed to do to get around that one was go into default mode, namely lie. Looking back, I can only surmise what the primary aim of that rather laboured story arc was: to show that although House hated apologising for a situation in which he felt he'd done no wrong, it only affected his pride and not his principles, so he did it. The patient was safe at that point, so he could afford to give in. It was only a prelude to this situation, which I believe might be the one on which the whole relationship ultimately hinges.
The situation is a different one here: House sees his patient endangered by Cuddy's modus operandi, so he reads Cuddy the riot act. He tells Cuddy brutally what her actions will entail - she'll kill her mother if she lets her go - and he shouts her down in no uncertain manner. There's nothing nice about it because there's nothing to gloss over here. If House doesn't put his foot down he'll lose his girl-friend and, maybe more importantly, his patient, and that's a situation in which House is not prepared to compromise or back off.
But it's not only good old House back, he's brought the old Cuddy back with him. This is Cuddy as we know her from early seasons: she shows absolute deference to House's medical opinion and methods even to the extent that she lets him run her hospital, rather like she does in 'Humpty Dumpty' or 'Living the Dream' - how often during this episode does she tell House that she knows he is right when he is actually wrong? Then there's her vacillating ('I don't want to be informed about what you're up to unless I want to be informed about it') that reminds of her odd method of making House detox in 'Merry Little Christmas' where she refuses to supply him with Vicodin until she realises it's in her own interest to have him functioning to some extent. It's the same with the fellows; the moment she tells House to stay on the case after being fired it's obvious that he'll involve his team and put their jobs on the line, but it takes the confrontation in her office to make her see what her initial decision means for the fellows.
And ultimately she gives way on a non-medical issue, namely on who runs her life, her mother or House. That was the whole point of the ending of the episode 'Mirror Mirror' in which the patient identifies House as the more dominant of the two (and Wilson as the top alpha male, let's not forget that!). It has basically always been the way I saw Cuddy: as someone who keeps House around for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that she desperately needs his approval. Anyone remember her jumping through hoops for him in 'Fetal Position' in the hope that he'll say, "Well done, Cuddy"?
Neither House nor Cuddy come out of this looking particularly good, but I've got the characters back that I've been missing for a few seasons now, unvarnished and tarnished, but real again.
Why bother me with ...
... Taub? What exactly was the idea there? That whole plot line had a contrived feel. It's as if the writers have this manual hat says, 'Devote two-thirds of your screen time to the POTW and one-third to House's private life,' and suddenly realise, Dang, this time the POTW plot and the House private life plot are identical, so what do we do now? And for lack of a better idea they churn out another Taub plot. If there was a connection to House's woes I missed it.
... the Cuddy mother-daughter rants? We are at fever pitch: Arlene is already in the ambulance, on her way to sure death; Cuddy rushes up soaked to the core, pulls open the ambulance doors and says - Mother, now I know why you were always so tough on me. Seriously? Is that the one thing you need to talk about when your mother is dying? It reminds me of the crap Cameron spouted during 'Lockdown'. IMO that's sloppy writing; the writers want to make some sort of statement about a character and can find no way of showing it so they make that character (or some other character) state whatever it is directly, no matter whether it's in character or likely to be said in the given circumstances. And didn't someone, the one who is always right, once say, Almost dying changes nothing? Yet we're supposed to believe that over forty years of family structures and communication strategies will change within one short confrontation.
The long-term implications
When the Christmas hiatus was over, we were treated to two episodes of pure fluff that left me wondering whether I'd just imagined the previous conflict between House and Cuddy, Cuddy's control issues and House's juvenile games. As I noted above, those were probably just harbingers of the evils ahead. This time, the basic conflict simmers quietly in the background, because neither House nor Cuddy are interested in a confrontation; both are intent on getting through this situation with as little collateral damage as possible. Nonetheless, in his final exchange with Masters, House voices the fear the underlies this episode much as the continuous rain and thunder in the background does: the unfortunate combination of girl-friend and boss in one person will lead to situations where even the combined efforts of both House and Cuddy won't be able to prevent conflicts of interest that will lead to untenable situations. We're not talking lies here, dangerous procedures or the like, but the sort of irrational, illegal working methods that make treating Cuddy's mother a complete nightmare for all the physicians involved, House included. The problem might not be Cuddy's attempts to control House (which he can bypass with a bit of an effort), but that as his girl-friend, she hasn't the objectivity to control him any more, a scenario which could lead to either or both of them losing their jobs. And there's hardly a realistic chance that their relationship will survive that.
