House, 2x24, "No Reason"
House, 2x24, "No Reason" season finale, some thoughts:

I had a strange reaction to the ep, not entirely positive. As it was playing out, I actually liked it less and less as it was going on. The recovery of his leg was being treated willy-nilly with the Duckling barely reacting, the wannabe murderer was yanking House's guilt chain was deeply unrealistic (House is right: you can either ask for an apology or shoot first, NOT BOTH) and the hallucination trope -- what is real, what's not -- is not something I have a great deal of liking for. But then House figuring out it was ALL a hallucination, slicing the patient open at the guts and popping awake to reality and asking for ketamine: I loved the last 5 minutes of the episode when I realized what David Shore had done.



why would House in the end seek to trade his brain for a healthy body?

House hates his disability, but frankly, he also has to deal with constant, unrelenting pain, pain which was also damaged his mental acuity (Vicodin addiction, much?). When he's in Cuddy's office the first time, he tells her he's without pain for the first time, and the ketamine therapy isn't to heal the dead muscle in his thigh, it's to reboot the brain of chronic pain sufferers. House's leg will never be perfectly healed -- after all, it was in his hallucination he was leaping about and prancing up stairs -- but to be rid of chronic pain that's driven him to addiction? Made him even more bitter and angry than pre-pain?

The therapy carries with it a risk of mental impairment: Cuddy's words were that 50% of people who'd been helped eventually relapsed back into chronic pain, not into mental impairment. We have no idea what the actual risk of cognitive malfunctioning would be, but as House intimately knows, all medical procedures carry risk (when the initial infarction happened, he was willing to risk death for the chance of a complete recovery), and it's possible his mind was blowing up the possibility of being impaired, given that for him, that would be the greatest loss ever. All he's had since his leg went kablooey and he drove Stacy away with his combination of self-hatred and defensive wall-building is his brain. I think that's why I liked the meaning of this episode so much, in that House makes a decision to take the leap himself.



it was a fucking pro-active season finale!

Think of it this way: usually most season enders require reactive responses from the characters. Circumstances force them to react and get saved, or kill people, or blow up high school graduation ceremonies. And the hallucination part of this ep bears this out -- b/c of the shooting, he's given a treatment against his knowledge and his leg is healed but his mind is messed up -- House has to react, rage, come to terms with it. But since it was really a hallucination, what we get instead is House coming to terms with a lot things he finds crappy about his own life, digesting it all and coming to a conclusion that he wants change. That's he's willing to risk perhaps the most precious thing in his life -- his cold, brilliant, glowing brain with its fabulous diagnostic powers -- in order to not be in pain anymore. To maybe not be miserable, which is -- like Wilson's example with the people who were misdiagnosed with AIDs -- how he's been identifying himself for-fricken-ever. It's a horrible role to play, just like an AIDs sufferer is an awful role to play, but it's been at the basis of his self-identity for so long that House has bizarrely become comfortable inhabiting the role of the pissy misanthrope who can't do, but can say, anything he wants.

The whole dialogue between him and Elias Koteas was about House coming face to face with the limitations and lofty pretensions of that role: he pretends that he's OK with living his life within a small proscribed circle of ambitions (cure people, save lives, say whatever the hell you want and fuck with the rules of society) in exchange for being unhappy and in denial about his addiction and loneliness. It's a deal that he's never seemed to examine before, for all that he loves to eviserate other people's ambitions and self-serving delusions.

The last five minutes: House subconsciously dealing with his demons, thrashing it out, and then choosing to take the risk of getting better and not having a convenient excuse to be miserable and hateful -- that was powerful.



So all the Ducklings and Cuddy and the shooter were in his mind... what's that all mean for the characterization?

The shooter (was his name really mentioned as Moriarty in the show? I must have missed that, though that seems to be what everyone on the TWoP forums are calling him) is the Socratic method personified, the part of House that is appalled at what his life has come to, at what the consequences of his actions sometimes are -- the part of himself he's not entirely killed, the sensual, the sentimental, the part who can believe in simple human happiness and connection.

What gets me about his vision of Cuddy and Wilson is that House sees them as the caretakers. Because at the end of the day, he knows that they have his best interests at heart. Cuddy with his body (she's still his doctor in his mind) and Wilson with his soul (slashy thoughts *here*). Others have noted that Cuddy was more sedately dressed than usual, even the colors of her clothes muted, and he makes not one sexual innuendo to her face. It's a callback to the episode where he demanded she shoot him up with morphine for his leg, and why her name was on his wrist tag as attending physician: in his mind, Cuddy's role as his doctor supercedes any sexual thoughts he may have about her, which, disappoints me because I far prefer Cuddy in the Cuddy vs. Cameron horse race for his affections.

I also wonder if having Cuddy and Wilson conspire to cure him is somehow House's subconscious way of knowing the truth behind "Detox", the episode where Wilson is behind Cuddy's bet that House can't go without Vicodin for a whole week. If so, House's subconscious brain is scary-smart.

Cameron had two roles, that of nurterer -- sitting at his bedside for 2 whole days -- and object of desire. The robo-sex was pretty sexy, especially Cam's sloe-eyed reactions, but House/Cam is twenty different shades of wrong for me. The only comfort is that the sexuality was deliberately distanced by House; even in his hallucination, he couldn't touch her with his own hands, he had to use a robotic (mechanical) intermediary. Interesting and disturbing.



You take the best part of you and strip it of all meaning [paraphrase, from Moriarty to House in his hallucination]

The stripping comment refers to how he literally takes the caring out of healing. He treats his patients with contempt, skepticism and causes them pain arbitrarily but always puts them back together functionally. He's stripped the meaning of healing to its absolute basic sense and lost all of the... connotations of the word.

I think what gets me in the end is how cruel House is to himself. The things he says... "I don't know why you bother to keep living" ... I suspected that deep inside, House was unable to spare himself from his own judgements because those who're that cruel to other's must judge themselves even more harshly by the same standards. And House, in Koteas's mouth, is unsparing to his own faults and vulnerabilities. I think that's what impressed me about the whole season: the show took the promise of the first season, having a misanthropic doctor with a pain problem and addiction issues, and didn't shy away from the darkness and self-hatred behind his entertaining characteristics. They didn't shy away from making House unlikeable and somewhat despicable, or exploring the ugliness he has inside. And what really impresses is that is all on a show that's in the Top 20 rated TV shows on network prime-time. That doesn't feel real at all.

Not a perfect finale, but it gave such great meat for thought, and really makes me interested in the next season and what the pay off will be. </lj>