Okay, so maybe this isn’t earth-stopping news. But it makes me feel better. Based on the comments I had on my post about the season premiere of House, though, I was starting to wonder if I’d seen the same show. So, imagine my JOY when I found out that USA Today critic Robert Bianco didn’t like it either.
I thought Bianco nailed it on the head by comparing Season six’s premiere to an ABC AfterSchool Special. Look at all of these likable crazy people! Let’s hug! Blech. I still maintain that House’s treatment warranted at least a three-episode arc, if not the entire season. Why not juxtapose his recovery with the struggling diagnostics department under Foreman’s leadership?
One more beef before I sit down and crawl back under my rock: Wasn’t the condition of House remaining in treatment that he would participate in order to practice medicine again? So, what the hell kind of artifice is it then to have House fearful to return to work and his former environment? Only to discover, on the verge of taking drugs, that going online to diagnose people is more fun! And how on earth did he find this exact patient’s postings? It was just “online”? The web is a big place. This show has researchers. Can’t you either find or invent a website where all of this would be posted and easy to Google? It would have been GREAT to have the patient posting his questions to the late Lawrence Kutner’s website. Talk about full circle.
At any rate, though, it was ridiculous (for the writers, not his therapist, who was as surprised by his quitting as Cuddy and Foreman were) to keep House from practicing medicine when that has always been his raison d’etre, and it shouldn’t have been a huge revelation that his puzzles are the key to his mental health (and I am not sure they actually led to his undoing). And what about Cuddy? He had been hallucinating about her curing him, hallucinating about holding her lipstick– isn’t it perhaps his feelings about Cuddy, paired with the deaths of his colleagues, that caused his breakdown, rather than the Vicodin and medical practice?
Come on, House writers. Get with the program.
Clacked by Jen Creer
on Sep 30, 2009 @ 16:00 EST5EDT
He was probably secretly following up on Foreman and 13 the whole time online out of curiosity to see if they would fail or not.
House is still in treatment. Just because he is fit to return to society doesn’t mean he is all better, and they never said that he was. He wanted to practice medicine so that he could work again and earn a living. That doesn’t have to mean getting his old high stress job (which drove him to abuse his drugs in the first place) back, though that seems to be what he needs.
House’s leg pain is the source of the Vicodin abuse. I wanted to like this show again having been addicted to it since the second season, but I don’t. There’s only so much case-of-the-week and will-he-won’t-he-with-Cuddy and will-Wilson-ever get-a-backbone that one person can take. I was hoping that the writers were changing the format this season by completely scrapping the entire cast, keeping House in treatment(for at least 1/2 a season), and THEN returning him to Plainsboro, but no. Foreman isn’t House and never will be. That unconvincing “epiphany” he had with his pruning fingers made me want to vomit. I thought, “that’s it, forget the shark, it’s the whole aquarium this time,” but I think that already happened last season. Getting rid of Taub (whom I actually liked) and 13 (yes!) is good for the show, but will getting the old team back together really save the show?