Monsters of Television

“Be not afraid.”

Yeah, I’m not going to feel sorry for you people.

Am I the only one that misses Laura Prepon with red hair? Every time I see her blonde it upsets me.

After a series of House episodes with a bit of gravity (including the very good “Wilson” and “5 to 9”), we get a mostly light-hearted episode. The threads of the season (Cuddy and House, Lucas and House, House’s recovery, etc) are left alone for a week so that we can, instead, focus on more antics between men of a certain age, namely the secrets they keep from each other even over the long course of their friendship and, more recently, constant proximity to one another.

The overall theme to this particular episode is the concept that “no man is an island.” House (natch) feels that anyone can be an island, that even while living among thousands of people, one can maintain solitude. As you might guess, Wilson feels the opposite. Ms Prepon plays a blogger who sees recording her life as a commitment to honesty, even to the detriment of her relationship and her decision-making abilities (“Dear strangers/readers, what kind of heart valve should I get?”). We would call her an “oversharer.” Her presence updates the “no man is an island” concept by bringing it into digital world where anyone can offer as much of themselves as they want. “Privacy is a modern invention,” Talb insists, supporting his statement with the fact that people used to live in small, far-flung towns where no one could keep secrets. The internet has made the world small again, the difference being people can choose which tiny village to create or inhabit. Our blogger friend, of course, is eventually stricken with some serious effects of a disease, which of course leads her to PPTH. The most disappointing thing: not even one Eric Foreskin joke.

Hitting on that privacy issue, House, who he still rents porn despite the irrationality of confining oneself to the limitation of the local store when there’s a vast universe of free naked anything, notices that his movies are gone. Wilson took them back to the store but conveniently “lost” one. Lest you believe Wilson took it for himself (he’d probably feel too guilty from the onanism), House figures out that he didn’t want House to see it for a reason: Wilson was retroactively cast in a porn. A film he helped a friend out with in college was eventually recut into a porn for later distribution (inserting scenes of another man dressed up like Wilson’s character for the doin’ it parts) and has fallen into the hands of jackassery. After House tells just about everyone in the hospital, most of them relaying their knowledge by reciting the line for the film, “Be not afraid,” Wilson seeks revenge. Wilson has recently been seeking a lot of revenge.

Wilson grabs Chase as his cohort in this mission but Chase is also the subject of his own sub-A plotline: he thinks he might be too pretty. No, seriously, that’s his story line. After House and Wilson poke fun at him for being so pretty that women don’t really care if he has any depth, he struggles the entire episode with this “issue.” I know I mentioned that this episode was light-hearted but there were times that I wasn’t sure if they were actually aiming for real drama in these instances or not. Even the non-medical patient storyline, where her communication with the internet community has caused problems in their relationship, didn’t have a whole lot of weight to it. I’m sure blogging tears people apart every day, but it didn’t feel like this was that big a deal. I didn’t feel sorry for Chase feeling like he’s too pretty (despite them trying to relate it back to Cameron at the end) and I didn’t feel anything for the couple whose biggest problem is quasi-anonymous dirty laundry on the interweb.

The only part of this episode with any depth has to do with the secret House is keeping. Chase and Wilson find out he’s been secretly reading a book of sermons by a unitarian minister. House tries to play it off as everything from research to an assignment for therapy. It turns out the book is written by House’s biological daddy and he’s been studying it. If a character on any other show where to pull this, one might just assume it was a way to passively discover some things about the absent father. But this is House so we have to think about this in a House-centric way: he’s reading it for clues about himself, to see if the inner-workings of his biological father might give some insight to his own inner-workings. He gets no answers. The End.

So the moral of this story is that a man can try to be an island but, even if he is one, he’s going to wonder where he came from so the need for connection to someone in the present becomes a need for a connection to something, past or present. Cuddy was in this episode for about thirty seconds (enough time for House to slip in a “make out” joke). Lucas was completely absent. This is pretty much a filler episode although, with House, it’s sometimes hard to tell. This is a pretty forgettable episode. Although watching Wilson dressed up in buckskin and antlers for his turn in porno is pretty priceless.

Oh, and thank the gods that Thirteen, after consoling Chase all episode, didn’t end up hooking up with him. That just would have been too much. House would officially be the Friends of the medical dramedy world.