House – “Twenty Vicodin”
House – “Twenty Vicodin”
The question that I keep asking year after year is “where does House go from here?” They write themselves into corners and then write themselves out so they can do the same exact show they have been doing for years. He went to rehab, he hooked up with Cuddy, he crashed a car into Cuddy’s house; all these seem as if they would limit future narrative possibilities. Now House is in prison. Another character says that he didn’t need to be (um, really?), but he sought prison time due to his usual self-punishing ways. Now House in prison could make for a great episode. The House in rehab episode was pretty good, why not House in prison? Well, I guess there’s a bit of been-there-done-that to it. The preview of the next episode shows us House will be getting out next week, thus completely nullifying the surprise that he was still in prison at the end of tonight’s episode. Odette Annable (née Yustman, from Cloverfield and Fallout 3) guest stars as a prison doctor who gets in trouble for (rightfully) trusting House. She’s obviously going to end up on his team. I don’t know, I feel like Hugh Laurie can play this role in his sleeps and some weeks I’m not convinced he doesn’t. Also, was I the only one distracted that the convict “who can get things” was STEVE FUCKING URKEL? He didn’t do much or act particularly Urkel-ish, but Jaleel White will never outlive that role… Also the thieving convict who takes House’s tuna was Nate Mooney (Ryan McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). May the problem with House isn’t that it always goes back to the same medical-mystery-of-the-week formula. Maybe the problem is that it tries to break away from it. House and Cuddy was an idea that while not totally idiotic, really painted the writers into a narrative corner. Now Cuddy is gone and House is temporarily in prison and they need to figure out some contrived way to get everything back to “normal.” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
Persistence of Vision 