Fine Young Cannibals: 7X17

[readingrat]

I can't say that I was wildly excited by this episode.  Like many earlier episodes of the season it was like a piece of a mosaic, confusing unless one has enough to see the whole picture. That was the feeling many of the Huddy-centric episodes gave me; now House's reaction to the break-up is being served in small chunks, so I'll reserve judgment until I have the larger picture.

The Good Stuff
Taub as ring bearer - is that a reference to Frodo Baggins? Chase's wedding speech. (Okay, I hated it, but my personal opinions on what this show does to the concept of relationships in general and matrimony in particular have no business in a review, and seen objectively Chase's speech fulfilled a necessary function.) Wilson suggesting the window as an exit. House on the sedgway. House in the monster truck - if only it hadn't been so loud. (Hugh Laurie must have loved the filming of this episode.) Dominica, who is young, carefree and oblivious of what she's got herself into. The rest was ... odd, for want of a better word.

The POTW
It's a bad fall, for the POTW and for House. Seldom have we had a patient whose history is a mirror, nay, an extreme caricature of House's. Abused by his father to a degree that the scars are still visible; addicted to heroin, one of the stronger opiates, then sober after a near-death experience; someone who has done 'horrible things'. What horrible things exactly is unknown to House's team, but the rest of the patient's history is common knowledge after initial tests. The patient is hence regarded with reservations by House's fellows; the more cynical the fellow, the stronger the prejudice. Yet Danny, as they call him, manages to revise their opinion of him. His sincere wish for change and his confession of a censored version of his crimes impress Masters, his faith touches Chase, and his guilelessness convinces Taub. (Nothing convinces Foreman, who is in the best way of copying all of House's worst habits in the hope that his boss's genius will be magically transferred along with the jerkiness.) When it turns out that Danny's ailment is well manageable with the right diet, everyone is happy.

Danny's fall from the team's grace is sudden and unexpected. Their star patient is a mass murderer and cannibal. It seems safe to assume that his misdeeds stem from the period before his OD and religious epiphany, yet no one, not Masters and not Chase, seems to believe that either his good intentions or his growing faith will prevent more misdeeds. The team's horror at the FBI's revelation says clearer than any words that someone as screwed up as this guy, someone who has felt the compulsion to murder thirteen women and eat their flesh and bones, is unlikely to be stopped by such abstract concepts as 'good intentions' and 'faith'.

Agreed. But two aspects of this suck.

The 'Message'
Firstly, one of the fellows says in horror, "And we cured him!"
Well, yes. Had you known who he was, would you have let him die? If so, then you've learnt nothing since Clarence, the Death Row inmate, and Ezra Powell, the amoral cancer researcher. Healing people happens to be your job. Meting out justice is other people's call. That's what civilised societies have a judiciary for: to decide who is a criminal and what punishment they deserve. They don't try to treat your patient and you don't interfere with their job. Had you known he was a mass murder but failed to inform the FBI, then you would have been culpable. But you don't get to decide whether someone 'deserves' to be cured or not.

The second aspect is connected to the parallels with House. What the episode said about the patient, and thus infers about House, is that people like that can't change. A cannibalistic mass murderer can't heal. We can all hope that Danny is able to refrain from further crimes, but most of us don't believe that he will, and we certainly wouldn't risk anyone's safety by giving him the benefit of the doubt. We'd lock him up, preferably for the rest of his life just to be on the safe side. Transfer that to House and what do we have? No matter how long he has been sober, no matter what improvements he has made or what signs he has shown of getting his life back on track, a screw-up like House will eventually revert to his self-damaging ways. There is no way of stopping that because, like the POTW, House can't heal. And that is a message that I really don't want to have invested six-point-five seasons to hear.

House's Journey
If House is going through the five stages of grief, he's through with hedonistic denial. He spends 'Fall from Grace' in full-blown anger against Cuddy, well-masked in his opinion, but obvious to everyone else. All his actions make complete sense on some rational level: milking Cuddy's guilt for all it's worth (very House, that!) or marrying because of the financial benefit to be expected. Except that House has never cared about money. If last week's splurge didn't convince you of that, then think of the amounts he spent on having Lucas investigate Wilson and his patients. Wilson accuses him of being sadistic towards Cuddy, and Wilson isn't all that wrong. (Please note: I'm not passing a judgment on who has the greater right to be pissed off. It's just that I spend a lot of time telling my children that no matter what their current 'enemy' deserves, it is not their job to dole it out to them nor is it conducive to their own character to do so.)

Imagine a teen who has been skiving off school the past years, paying little attention in class and neglecting his homework. College looms ahead, so his parents come down hard. Our teen luckily sees the light and agrees to better his ways. For a time all goes well, but then he flunks a Math test. Mom, fearing for her offspring's career, freaks out and grounds our teen for an indeterminate time span. Our teen is upset, and rightly so. He has been working hard, his grades have improved all round, but he still has enormous deficits from all those years when school was the last thing on his mind. The Math test was unfortunate, but hey, it was a one-off, and he's sure that next time he'll do better. But Mom remains adamant, so our teen goes on rampage. He gets drunk and vomits all over her pristine kitchen; he refuses to do his chores; his room turns into a dump; he insults her friends when they come to visit. Mom, feeling bad for him but determined to get him through high school and safely into college, is understanding, but relentless. She gives way in every small thing, but not on the bigger issue. One fine Friday evening our teen, hopelessly frustrated, takes Dad's chainsaw and goes into mom's holy of holies, her garden. There he massacres every shrub and every rosebush, chops down the trees and sprays weed killers on everything that's too small to decapitate - complete carnage. Afterwards he has the satisfaction of knowing that he's finally got at mom's feelings - she hides them, but he knows she's upset. 

But somehow, knowing that he has finally managed to break his mother doesn't give him the satisfaction he expected to get out of it. As for Dad, who was firmly albeit ineffectually on his side, he too now sides with mom. Okay, no sweat, Dad always comes round to his side eventually, but still ... But as he looks out from his bedroom window on the ruined garden his parents' disappointment isn't upmost on his mind. His predominant feeling is disappointment with himself. His deed may have been justified, but he has overstepped an invisible line that he never thought he'd cross. In his anger he has destroyed something that he can't fix or replace, something that'll take years to restore to its former glory, and the damage to his integrity is greater than the damage to the garden.

I think that is where House is at the end of the episode. He realises that his knee-jerk reaction to being dumped has backfired in more than one way. Hurting Cuddy is in no way as satisfying as he thought it would be, hurting Dominica's feelings has become an acute danger, and as Wilson points out, the quality of this stunt is well beyond asshoodedness. He has crossed the line between being a jerk and being cruel. Whether he has ever crossed that line before is up for debate, but we can probably agree that he normally doesn't cross it intentionally and that he isn't proud of having done so.

Who's hurt?
Why should House getting married to a green card applicant hurt Cuddy more than House, say, sleeping with hookers? Because marriage is something that Cuddy longed for and House (passively) denied her. If we have any doubts about Power Girl longing for matrimony, there have been enough anvils this past year to set us straight. She nearly married Lucas, she is, as she admits to House, a sucker for white wedding gowns, and in her 'Bombshell' dreams matrimony and wedding gowns play a predominant role. (Hey, she'd even be Mrs. House!) But House, who knows her well enough to figure that she's keen on marriage and who was involved enough to give her everything else she demanded or desired, stopped short of that final commitment. House's reason is not important when considering her reaction to this; for Cuddy, the fact that he'll do something to hurt her that he would never have done to make her happy, must be the ultimate humiliation.

Other than that, Cuddy is remarkably calm and collected the entire episode. She should be coming apart; instead she seems rather less stressed than during all the previous sixteen episodes (and the previous season, come to think of it). No coincidence, methinks. As Wilson says at the end, things are 'normal' again, and apparently 'normal' suits Cuddy better than 'uncommon'. She's a lot better at dealing with House the Terrible Teen than with House the Official Boyfriend. She is kinder and more understanding, even when she reins him in. Dominica is treated as politely as one would hope the Queen treats an intruder at her garden parties. Even in the bedroom, when Cuddy should have been hysterical, she's already back to her old power games and enjoying them more than her previous, 'If you behave like a dick, you don't get sex.' Hey, she's even smiling at the end of that scene! (Someone remind me why a woman should attend her ex's wedding two weeks after they split up. What the heck was she doing there other than proving a point?)

And the loser is, once again ... Wilson!
If House is a clown and Cuddy is the winner in this, then Wilson is the loser. He's caught in a really tight place between his friends, his sympathy for House waning in the face of House's stunts and his ability to ward off the worst limited. He tries to bring House to his senses (without any success), Cuddy to her senses (with considerably more success - House's department may be an autonomous territory within PPTH, but Wilson is the power behind the dean's throne) and comfort Cuddy (who luckily doesn't need much of that). But no matter, for the more Wilson needs to do to keep his friends in check, the more we see of him. Besides, meddling and comforting is what a Wilson is best at.

It is something the team is strangely deficient in. As in the previous episode, they are all prepared to be outraged, but it is not Wilson who stands by House's side in this charade, it is his fellows, each vying for the best place instead of trying to stop House in any of his madnesses. Do they really think that flying helicopters through the lobby will increase his job security or theirs? And while we're at it, what about the vicodin? I used to believe that no one running interference with House's use of vicodin at the workplace was one of those PPTH myths that just had to be accepted as they were. Improbable as it seemed, the general acceptance of his vicodin habit as a god-given was a sort of unassailable axiom, rather like the one that deans obsess about the availability of tongue depressors and dress like hookers - necessary for the plot, and hence to remain unquestioned. Now, however, Masters is actually remarking on it. That means that the writers want to point out to us that there should be at least six people (four fellows, Wilson and Cuddy) doing something about a doctor who gets stoned at work, but only one person finds it noteworthy and none worthy of action. Odd.

Comments

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

Bargaining's not an option, so the next stage is acceptance
You forgot depression ...

"Normal" for her is pretty damned lonely, and it just got a lot lonelier.
Point. She just seemed a lot more collected than I'd be, and heaven knows I'm emotionally stunted and little given to public displays.

Dominicka says that she likes him. I believe her.
So do I. From her pov, what's there so far not to like?

In "Unwritten," in fact, I had the distinct impression that SAM liked House and enjoyed his company much more than Cuddy did. In this episode
That episode had me wondering whether they were setting up a Sam/Wilson/House triangle. I've never had the misfortune to watch anything less romantic than Cuddy and House in that episode.

Cuddy admires him, she loves him, but rarely did I get the sense, in any of their on-screen interactions, that she likes him.
Absolutely true for Season 7 and (for all the Cuddy there was in it) for parts of Season 6. And that's where I have a problem with character continuity. Till the end of Season 4 (roughly) I had the impression that Cuddy didn't love House, but that she liked him and that his antics genuinely amused her. Why else would she let him appropriate hospital property to build weird contraptions in the exam rooms, why would she make bets with him like in the second episode of Season 1 ('my guy knows a guy')? As for the 'no common interests' matter, that was the woman who was so totally engrossed in a poker game that she allowed House to steal her patient.
I don't know whether you read the abandoned Thunder Road Trip script of the season opener of Season 7, but it portrays a relaxed Cuddy enjoying the activities House organises for her, from cooking together to wrecking his motorbike. Now that I know how the relationship ends and that House is now tied to someone who 'likes' him and enjoys his antics, it's clear to me why that script was abandoned in favour of one that made the cracks in their relationship clear from the start and why we had a follow-up with 'Unwritten' in which anvils were dropped on us to ensure we'd notice that Cuddy is irritated by House.
My impression is that as long as they weren't sure whether they'd have a Season 8 they left their options open, but once they were reasonably sure that the show would make it into another season, Huddy's doom was decided and Cuddy's character was sacrificed.
On some level, that pisses me off.

his, because she decided that she did not want to hope she was not alone, she wanted to know it ... how's that working for you, Hun?
Well, House has always been one for knowing what's heading your way, whether it be AIDS or Huntingdon's or abandonment. I guess his attitude rubs off.