So I’ve watched the show House three times now. If you don’t watch the Fox network, listen to NPR, or read Internet Monk, perhaps you’ve never heard of the show. Allow me to explain.
House is about a grumpy diagnostic physician with a dead muscle and permanent peripheral nerve damage in his right leg, who limps around hurling abuse at people and, with his team of attractive young residents, diagnosing obscure diseases. That’s it in a nutshell and…um…that’s pretty much it actually. It’s quite a good show, but because too many people have had too many good things to say about it, I thought I’d do a bit of good-natured naysaying. Perhaps I’ve been infected by the curmudgeonly spirit of Dr. House himself. In any case, I plan to COMPLETELY RUIN a couple of episodes for you in the following, if you haven’t seen them yet, so don’t come whimpering to me if you choose to read on anyway (see what I mean about the curmudgeonly?).
The first episode I saw was the pilot, and I thought, “I’m not sure diagnosing diseases is as exciting as this show is trying to make it.” The second one I saw involved Dr. House explaining the medical issues surrounding his own health problems to a class of students, as if it had happened to somebody else; with flashbacks of the described events. I thought, “This is the best show I ever saw, this guy is the best actor I ever saw, and I have to start watching this show.”
For the next couple of weeks I forgot to watch, then I watched this week’s rerun. It involved some poor kid getting put through the medical wringer by House and his team of attractive young residents (TAYRs, for short), before House finally got his act together and figured out what was wrong with him. Also, House learned that he’s addicted to painkillers, but doesn’t see that as a problem. Sure, whatever.
A couple of medical facts which I’ve garnered from my House viewing and reading so far:
(1) Most mysterious diseases result, sooner or later, in a sudden onset of blindness, which clears up completely within a couple of days. Who knew?
(2) Most mysterious diseases are easily treatable, once your world-class diagnostic physician gets done playing trial-and-error with your life and figures out what’s actually wrong with you.
(3) Most female TAYRs will develop romantic feelings for their boss, against all reason, and leave the show before they have time to develop a personality of their own outside of this plot point.
This Tuesday’s episode left me with some lingering questions about House’s diagnosis. It seems that the problem was that the kid’s house (not House) was infested by termites. Termites give off some type of gas which [gap in comprehension] led to the kid’s problem. However, the symptoms were not manifested right away, because the gas was stored in the kid’s fat cells; and normally he burns only protein and carbs so that the harmful gas stayed neatly tucked away. When he sustained an injury requiring him to stay in a hospital bed for a while, he started burning fat, and out came the poisonous gas residue. Okaaayyyy….
House figured this out when, as one of his myriad of symptoms, the kid hallucinated that the family cat was attacking him. House perked up on hearing that the family cat had been dead for a month, had the cat dug up, and performed an autopsy on it, in one of the weirder scenes I’ve seen on television. The cat had died NOT OF OLD AGE, as previously thought, but….drum roll…of termite gas! So here are my questions:
(1) Why don’t all people (or at least more of them) whose houses are infested with termites get this disease?
(2) If the disease manifested because the kid had been lying in a hospital bed for a while, why did we see the onset of symptoms right BEFORE the incurring of the injury which put him in the hospital?
(3) What did the cat hallucination have to do with anything? When House started jumping all over this point, I thought at first that the kid had something that had been transmitted to him from the cat, or something, but no…it wasn’t the fact that the family had a cat, or that the kid hallucinated about the cat, that had anything to do with the case.
Anyway…it’s a really good show, and now that I’ve figured out when it is on, I’m hoping to start watching it regularly. But don’t let them think they can get any of this sloppy diagnostic work get past my keen medical mind…er, never mind.
I’ve watched House a handful of times as well (I’ve seen the three episodes you mentioned and maybe three others) and think that it’s one of the more entertaining shows on network tv right now for no other reason than the main character. The TAYRs are completely lacking in personality and could be replaced in any random episode without viewers noticing a difference. The plots are generally over the top and not especially remarkable. But having a protagonist who is obnoxious, smart, somewhat detestable, and funny makes this show stand out from the other medical dramas I’ve watched before.
(Although I thought the connection between the cat’s death and the termites was a little sketchy as well.)
Here’s another question for you: why doesn’t anyone in this NJ town ever get normal illnesses like pneumonia or appendicitis? If I lived in a community with so many rare and life-threatening diseases popping up all over the place, I would seriously consider relocating…
Yeah, the TAYRs are like the ensigns of this show…and I think that the female one was actually played by a different actress in the pilot…but it’s hard to tell!
There does seem to be an unusually large number of bizarre diseases, it’s kind of like those mystery shows where the same person stumbles upon a murder every week. After a while, you start to get suspicious.