Paging Doctor House

I’ve always been a fan of the show House M.D. but during its initial run I missed quite a lot of episodes. With it being on Netflix currently, I decided to start at the beginning and watch every episode. Not binge-style, mind you, just every now and then I’d throw an episode on and enjoy it.

I finally got to the end of the second season the other day, and then yesterday I started the third. And that’s where I started noticing shit that I should’ve noticed way before now, and it stuck with me. I wasn’t going to write anything because the show has been off the air for four years now and I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice these things. But it kept eating at me, so I thought what the fuck, why not?

To catch you up. The second season ended with House being shot in his office by some dude. The entire episode is an hallucination inside House’s head because of blood loss, which you don’t find out until the end of the episode. During, however, he discovers a certain drug given to him during surgery should help him get full use of his leg back and no pain. It isn’t said or shown, but you can guess that he has it done in real life once he comes out of his hallucination at the end of the episode and tells Cuddy to give him that drug.

The beginning of the third season shows him running to work, which is apparently 8 miles from where he lives. The procedure worked and his leg works. He’s in such a good mood he decides to take on two cases. One turns out to be relatively easy, but the other involves a man who is completely paraplegic and has basically no real life other than being stuck in a wheel chair and being unable to move. House thinks he can fix the guy.

Here’s where I started noticing things. First of all, in every episode, every one of the main characters spends some time over-analyzing one of the others, or perhaps even the patients and/or their families. Once I noticed it, it pissed me off. If it’s character building, I think by the third season they’ve built enough. We got it by now.

These moments are time filler. Sure they can make for some interesting banter, and every now and then they actually help push along the story, on a whole they could all be left out and nothing would suffer except the time of the show. The only thing I learn from each one of these sessions is that not-so-secretly everybody hates everybody else.

With this particular episode I noticed a few things that taught me more about the characters than their over-analysis of each other. Like…