quit on them out of the blue, which left them with no guns to even try to fix something… so they thought and thought and came up with the best solution possible: a TIME WARP!!!!!!
Personally, I think going a year into the future so as not to have to deal with absolutely any of the big damage is awful and distasteful, but I also admit there wasn’t much to do. How could you deal with the Cuddy debacle when there is no Cuddy there to do it? Also, House had fled the country and was being persecuted by the police, so there was no way to close that storyline in an episode, so that the expecting public could go back to watching the medical cases they so much adore to watch. I personally think that even though occasional viewers like to think House is a procedural show, I think, as its David Shore has always stated, that it’s much more than that, the cases are just a way to unleash House’s personality and wit so that we can get an in depth knowledge into his soul. Aside from that, with the way cases went last season, which was purely decorative, then I think losing a few cases at the beginning of a season to focus on House is not as bad as leaving everything behind so the audience could get yet another lame nosebleed gone bad. Ok, but be it as it may, they chose to find a way to seal the problem up in one episode so everything could go back to normal, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing from the producers point of view, it may be the best way to save some rating, even if the quality falters a bit (but there’s been a lot of that lately).
Anyway, there you have it, House is in jail about a year after the incident, serving time with some pretty scary guys, being squeezed out of all his vicodin because of “exit taxes”, and he happens to stumble upon an interesting case the young female prison doctor can’t crack. The story develops in the 5 days House has left in prison until he can go out on parole, on the condition that he has to stay completely out of trouble for the time period. I have to admit that House in prison is very entertaining, and the concept they developed was interesting. The guy who runs the place told him he would have to give him 20 vicodin pills as his exit tax before he left, which was an impossible task. House tries to get them from another guy who smuggles things in but couldn’t do it because he is “peepless” in the outside; this meaning, there is no one out there in the world that could pay these guys outside for the vicodin. He can’t pay hi
m with any of the stuff he has inside because when everybody heard he was leaving and couldn’t get into any kind of trouble, they decided to go and steal everything off him. All of this making very good drama. As a perfect setup, House is paired up in a cell with a psychotic killer in a bad mood (because his pets keep dying). As a way to cover his ass from being stumped on by a psycho, House tries to keep the guy happy, helping him out and replacing his dead animals. This will obviously come and help him out in the end, when he is about to be killed by one of the first guy’s thugs. In parallel, the medical case he was working on (yes, in prison) made him have to decide between staying out of trouble or doing something completely irresponsible to save the patient. Pretty entreating, right? I think it honestly was.
The thing is that this isn’t enough, we have to go deep into House’s mind for the episode to be complete, and we have to have a medical case to do that. I just don’t know at which point the creators stopped trying to do that with actions and interaction and decided to just always have complete strangers telling him all the stuff that is going around in his mind like they’ve know him forever. The “young female” doctor was just someone who trusted him out of the blue and didn’t really bring anything to the case. This wouldn’t be bad for the episode but as I understand, she will be the new addition to House’s team, and she didn’t make a very good first impression (nothing like 13’s).
I think what I’m going to say may only be relevant to me because I’ve seen this show so many times, but I found it very distasteful that their first real talk (between House and “young female” doctor) was about him trying to leave her out of base by pulling a “Sherlock” on her and telling her everything about her, deduced by merely observing clothes and attitudes… this, as the keen followers of the show would know, was the way House and Cuddy met in med school and the reason she became instantly interested in him: “My first week of school, I hand my syllabus to the guy behind the counter. He barely looks at me and says I’m overly ambitious, I have a chip on my shoulder and I know how to party”. I don’t know, for me that was something wasn’t made as a reference (unless she plans to be House’s new love interest or sparring partner) but that referenced immediately to it, and I didn’t like it.
Anyway, both “young female doctor” and “older boss doctor” kept making comments to him like “House, you’re in here because you think you can do whatever you want, whenever you want… well you can’t” or “you’re done here, just like every other place you’ve ever set foot in your life” ooooooor “you took the first deal you got because you wanted to punish yourself. You think getting beaten up and helping this guy will wipe yourself clean?”… as if they watched the show weekly and new what House goes through.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t a masterpiece. They managed to come up with an interesting, entertaining story but its execution wasn’t as good as it could have been. To me, it just seems as if the writers are worn out, all out of new ways to achieve the greatness this show has been able to do in the past.
catablog123
Diana Vanegas
TV, MOVIES and GENERAL IGNORANCE 