The Methadone Called 'Love': 7X14
Mar. 2nd, 2011 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readingratThe POTW ...
... wins my approval, if solely because of the grossness factor of the teaser. I was more than half convinced that he was hallucinating, what with all the blood of the crime scene and the starter that was still moving, so that his collapse was a moment of relief for me. It was a welcome change from the standard teaser that starts off idyllic and ends up in a right ol' mess.
The 'I'm lying to my nearest and dearest' is no news, any more than the wife stalking off when she finds out the truth. I still find the latter behaviour a tad unrealistic, despite having seen it on the show any number of times. Wouldn't one's normal gut reaction to the revelations of a potentially dying spouse be to let it slide until he's out of danger and then take it out on him? BTW, for those of you who know The Full Monty, the patient's dilemma reminds me of the foreman of that stripper group. (If you don't know The Full Monty, then go forth, get ye a copy and view it at once, for evil in the eye of the Lord is ignorance thereof.) To my jaundiced eye it seemed as if the medical mystery finally had that place of prominence that it deserves, even if we were offered nothing wildly exciting.
The Team
The mellower House is, the lower the morals in his team drop. It's a sort of jerkiness equilibrium - if House doesn't provide it the team fills the vacuum he leaves behind him. I'm beginning to like Foreman; he's a judicious mix of Wilson and House's absolutely worst qualities combined. His, 'I don't want to end like House,' had me gasping for the sheer blindness of it. There's nothing like a complete lack of realistic perspective to boost one's ego, I guess. Nevertheless, he tells Taub some tough truths, and although Taub reels at first, he has to acknowledge that Foreman is right - he has been wallowing in self-pity and he has no one but himself to blame. Are Taub and Foreman the new bromance? I don't think so. Taub lacks the easy charm that House brings into his cunning manipulations while Foreman hasn't got the elasticity of the Wilsonian punchbag that seems to give way, but swats you when you expect it the least. I think it's more a case of reminding us what House and Wilson are missing at the moment. Practically everyone is complaining about the lack of House/Wilson interaction - the producers must know this, and I hope there is some intentional plot development behind it, not just a lack of ideas.
The second pairing is Chase and Masters, with Masters giving Chase her unpleasant and entirely unasked for assessment of his character: he's either a male chauvinist pig or utterly shallow. Amazingly, that hits the mark; by the end of the episode a visibly chastised Chase opts to go solo to the whatever-that-event-was. Chase's own take on honesty in relationships is less positive: referring to his marriage he says it didn't go well. Ah, well, it wouldn't have gone well anyway, sighs the collected audience in front of my screen.
Masters's attitude towards the patient, however, made no sense to me. So far, her stand was that honesty towards the patient is necessary and of greater importance than the opinions of arrogant doctors. It was the team's conduct she censured, not the patients', and that had a certain justification. Sitting judgment on how a patient orders his private life, however, is no business of the attending whatsoever, and one doesn't need to espouse House's 'Any lie is justified' creed in order to deem Masters's conduct officious to the highest degree. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, she was fine about lying about her granny's tea cosy. Lying to the patient about whether his wife is returning falls within the same category (medically irrelevant), and this all the more so since Masters's assumption that she wouldn't return turns out to be wrong. All this just serves to make Masters's original stance appear ridiculous to the audience while actually being totally irrelevant to that stance, and that pisses me off. House is proven 'right', not because he is so, but because the character propagating the opposite opinion is shown to defend it in instances where it was never considered justified in the first place.
House messin' around
What I enjoyed watching in this episode was House messing around with everyone's heads, especially Cuddy and Wilson's. Yes, it would have been fun if he'd hired the Mariachi band to irritate Cuddy. But this was even more fun, for I am convinced that House auditioned the band in his office solely to spook Wilson, and he succeeded completely. Loved Wilson's faux incredulous smile when House accuses him of being in league with Cuddy just before he caves and admits to the crime, and then his meddling later when he 'warns' Cuddy of the Mariachi band. Maybe I have deep, dark prejudices where Wilson is concerned, but I think it's more than passive discontent at House's happiness; to me it looks like active interference in the subconscious hope of causing trouble, because his bet with House is so blatantly false and his admission of guilt so rapid that he must be hoping to get caught in the act. Now that is a perspective that is a lot more interesting than the one that Wilson is happy giving crappy but sincerely meant relationship advice.
It makes one a trifle sad to see that everyone believes the worst of House, but it's a fairly small drop of bitterness compared to Foreman's remark that I referred to earlier. House has no one to blame but himself (and I don't think he blames anyone else) if everyone is wary of his intentions with respect to livening things up for Cuddy. The boy who cried wolf comes to mind here. Foreman's attitude, on the other hand, is proven wrong in every respect solely by enumerating objectively what House has and does as opposed to what Foreman has to show.
But enough shilly-shallying, beating about the bush, nattering on about trivialities ...
House's Happiness
Everyone deserves to be happy - isn't there something in the American Constitution about the 'pursuit of happiness'? We also all know that our work tends to suffer when we seek happiness outside of it. For most of us a relationship is a time investment, which automatically means that we aren't available 24/7 for our employers any more. Most of us are okay with that, even though it means that we are nowhere near as good at our work as we used to be. The pursuit of happiness needn't involve a relationship. In House's case it makes no difference whether his choice is methadone, Cuddy or bowling with Wilson of a Tuesday night. If any of those choices make him happy, then in my opinion he has a right to make them even if it costs patients' lives. I don't expect the doctors among us to work till they drop just because they work in the health sector while I don't. If there aren't enough doctors/nurses/EMTs to go round, then that's tough luck, and anyone who is unhappy with that is free to join the their ranks and sacrifice themselves on the altar of humanity.
But this isn't only about happiness, it is also about who we are. Once again we are confronted with the question, 'What is the essence of House?' House's answer is, his gift of being able to save people's lives. Not just any people, but the ones no one else can save. Furthermore House is convinced that his gift suffers if his misery is trimmed back to the same acceptable length as Samson's hair. Whether House's conviction is true or not is not the point; the point is that he believes it is, and he acts on that belief. We've had this before in 'The Softer Side' where House opined that mellowing enough to give in to the desires of the patient's family nearly killed his patient. The reason he was so mellow was that he was finally pain-free due to methadone. The conclusion he came to was that he needed to quit methadone and return to the misery of vicodin to make sure he didn't end up losing his gift.
To make sure we're talking about the same thing: we aren't talking about selfless nobility here. If House were altruisitc, intent on saving every life he can, he'd join that tuberculosis guy in Africa, he would help out in the ER when he has no case, he wouldn't have shunned cases altogether in the four years after the infarction and he'd take more patients. House isn't bothered about saving or not saving lives as such - he's bothered about the ones only he can save. House is convinced that he's the dog crap on the sole of life, worth nothing in and of himself, but only with regard to the special ability he has. That ability is only of use as long as it saves people whom others can't save. If he is stripped of this ability and is one of the crowd (albeit still a very elitist crowd consisting of Wilson, Foreman, Chase and Taub), he doesn't count as anything in his own eyes.
So is that the essence of House, is it so important that - as many fans demand - he should drop everything (Cuddy, methadone, and anything else that could potentially make him happy, including Wilson) to make sure he retains this gift? I consider it possible that it is, and that House can't survive without this something that makes him special, elevates him from the masses and makes him feel that he isn't just scum, but that his life has some justification.
If that is the case, and from House's general reaction, I'd say it is - in the same breath that he says he is happy because of the relationship with Cuddy he also says that he isn't getting anything out of the relationship - I can only feel sorry for House, for this has nothing to do with uniqueness or any other positive adjective I can find. This is purely a problem of self-esteem. House's self-esteem is so low that he cannot see that he is not just the genius who solves medical puzzles, but of value in and of himself. There is nothing romantic about this, nothing heroic and nothing worth admiring. It is quite simply tragic. Anyone with the slightest bit of self-esteem would say, 'It's tragic that people may die because I've grown fuzzy around the edges, but I too have needs, demands and emotions.' That House lacks this self-esteem is a problem that can't be solved through the love of a good woman, and it's certainly not one that Cuddy has the ability to tackle. There are, of course. people who base their self-worth on their partnership (I happen to be one of them), but that is hardly a model to be emulated or propagated. If nothing else, it means a lot of stress and responsibility for the poor person whom one depends on for one's mental well-being.
I think it's pretty clear that I do not believe that House chose happiness over misery, love over lives in that last scene. Judging by the scene in the bar, he arrived at Cuddy's place with every intention of giving her her own version of the 'Let's end it, Stacy,' speech, but was stopped at the sight of her. What he meant to say probably went along the lines of, 'This is going to cost lives. Maybe I can deal with it today, maybe even tomorrow, but one day it will have cost one life too many, so we'd better end it before I end up blaming you.'
What House chose was procrastination, temporary happiness, and guilt. He could have chosen misery and uniqueness (and made a lot of fans out there happy at his expense). What he should have chosen is working on himself and his self-esteem issues. It's called therapy, there's an excellent series by Brgihidsfire (starting with Treatment), that describes that process in detail, documents how House finds other traits within himself worth living for, and also shows how a relationship can fit in meaningfully once basic issues such as trust, self-worth and respect have been resolved. How his relationship is to work if deep inside House blames himself for loving Cuddy every time someone dies, is anyone's guess. Cuddy certainly did not look as though she had an answer to that one. If a patient's death is a form of diagnostic recession, then House and Cuddy's relationship probably is not recession-proof.
