House season finale: "No Reason"
For once, I really like the ep title.
About the episode--
Teaser? Blew me away. Even though it was in the preview. The suddenness with which Elias whipped out the gun and fired, the sound and force of the gunshot, the way House fell, Cameron's gasp, the camera lingering on House as he lay there breathing and trying not to be in shock. Awesome.
synn is right: It would have made a great last scene to the whole series.
I was preparing today to compare "No Reason" to that episode of BtVS where the Troika plant a weird device by Katrina's corpse and Buffy fights someone she thinks is attacking Katrina and time fragments and effect precedes cause and all this weird stuff happens and when it's over she thinks she's the one who killed the girl. Afterwards (before she beats up Spike, I think) she makes a comment about time having gone all David Lynch on her. Someone proposed that tonight's House ep would be the non-linear one the producers have apparently been promising, and with the hallucinations we assumed were coming (what with House's declaration in the preview that he thinks he's going out of his mind), I thought it would be similarly disjointed.
But as it turns out, the more apt comparison is to "Restless," the fourth-season BtVS finale consisting mainly of the four main characters' dreams. Everything that happened in "Restless" meant something (well, except the Cheese Man), whether about the dreamer's buried fears and insecurities, their strengths and comforts, or their relationships with each other, about solving the mystery (the First Evil was haunting them), or even about what was going to happen in the future. That baby was packed, and clever, and poignant, and revelatory, and expertly written and directed, and foreshadowed some things for the fifth season.
With "No Reason" we have an episode that took place, what, 90-95% in House's head? That means everyone's behavior, looks, words and tones, the swollen/exploding patient and the grieving widower/gunman, the events and the locations, from post-credits through his awakening on the gurney at the end, all say something about him-that Cameron was there when he woke up, that Chase followed his metaphors, that Cuddy and Wilson betrayed him (or Wilson at least wasn't fazed by Cuddy's decision), that his leg was better-on and on.
In "Restless" we saw that Willow still fears being "found out" as the geek she was in early high school, even though she'd seemed to have moved past that; in "No Reason" we see that House is afraid someone might make a significant medical decision for him while he's unconscious again, even though we haven't seen him confront the issue since at least the beginning of the season when Stacy was around. In "Restless" we had strange settings, unusual lighting/color, and characters doing odd things explained with dream-logic; in "No Reason" we had the random Mexican joint all super-saturated, the "physical therapy room" with Wilson on a treadmill and Chase on an exercise bike. In "Restless" there were countless moments that could be traced back to things said or done offhand in the day (episode) previous; in "No Reason" the Mexican place could have come from House's joke after the poopy-mouth incident about whether anyone wanted to go out for Mexican. In "Restless" Xander kept returning to the basement; in "No Reason" House kept coming back to the recovery room or ICU or wherever. "Restless" was chock-full of symbolism; "No Reason" had the bullet and probably lots of others. In "Restless" we had intimations of the season to come, reference to "dawn" and "you haven't even begun" and such; I suspect that some moments of "No Reason," in showing House's fevered brain working-working-working at figuring out the puzzles of the people around him, are foreshadowing plots for early Season Three.
Case in point, Wilson in the hallway. House asks why he's covering for Cuddy. Wilson goes blank, then puts on Obvious Lie Face when he answers. Could mean that House has picked up on something fishy, or is mulling over recent fears, and is anticipating that Wilson and Cuddy have something going on behind his back. Supported by Cuddy jumping up and hiding the folder (sperm donor paperwork? House's surgery records?) when he comes in. None of it may have been real, but it was internally consistent, and it was written that way for a reason.
One difference being that BtVS was a better show (gasp! outrage!), it was in its fourth not second season when it did an episode like this, there were four characters being analyzed instead of one, and that show was brilliant about plot and character arcs, so there were a lot of threads to tug and tangle. "Restless" took weeks to pick apart and mull over, and while it's going to take multiple happy viewings to wrap my head around "No Reason," I don't think there's as much to it as there was with the other. Or maybe I'm just saying that because, hey, Slayage conference day after tomorrow.
While we're talking about BtVS, the main problem I had with "No Reason" was with the hallucinations and structure of the episode. In BtVS, if something was off, you knew it right away, because the rules of that world were clear. Tonight, you never quite knew what was a hallucination and what wasn't. Let me try to explain this. One might have suspected that House was hallucinating when Elias was wheeled into the same room, because please, Cuddy's flimsy excuse that all the other rooms were full? Except that on a regular episode of House, that would be a good enough reason. Or one might have been tipped off when his leg felt better because of some magical medical technique attempted while he was under surgery, only it wouldn't be the first time the medicine was fudged. I say this with all affection for the show. It's just that when you can't trust the facts in a normal episode, you can't use them to prove or disprove that reality is wrong in a maybe-hallucinating episode.
"Reality is almost always wrong."
"Shut up, House."
Or one might have been tempted to disbelieve, because if everything was in House's head, then how could there have been scenes he wasn't in? There was that one moment in "Restless" when Xander and Oz exchange a couple of lines after Willow, whose dream it is, walked off camera, and it didn't sit well either, although it was funny. Could argue that House was the fly-on-the-wall in those scenes, such as the one with Chase with the patient in the bathroom, but it's not like the camera was held from his perspective in scenes he was in, so that doesn't really hold.
Regardless, come on, we knew he was hallucinating; the question was only how often, and whether they would really dare to make the whole episode a dream. The clearest sign for me was near the beginning when House gets out of bed to talk to Elias, and the transition was too abrupt; the scene just cut, jumped, and that's not like their usual style. Very reminiscent of dreaming and of techniques for achieving lucid dreaming, and then they started addressing that outright: House realizing that he doesn't know how he got where he is, realizing that stuff just doesn't make sense-and did the writing on the glass wall change from when we looked at the outside and when we cut to the inside? Did anyone pay attention to the clocks?
Lost my point there. I guess a lot of this was to say that the episode played more like a series of dreams than hallucinations, which I guess they were, like a fevered night when you're obsessing over a subject half in and out of consciousness, false awakenings and dreams-within-dreams, where House was unable to tell whether he was in reality ("awake") or hallucinating ("asleep/dreaming").
Okayyyyy, that went on a lot longer than expected. Onward and upward:
House/Cameron robot surgery foreplay with voyeur. Wait-let me say it again. HOUSE/CAMERON ROBOT SURGERY FOREPLAY WITH VOYEUR. Any kink is now officially allowed to appear on the show. You hear me, Official Writers? I want you to go read this and come back with something nice in the fall.
(Many many more recs on the way, kiddos.)
WHAT a cop-out. House punched Wilson! (No he didn't.) House ripped a patient apart on the operating table! (No he didn't.) House's leg got better! (No it didn't.) We had a series finale! (No we didn't.)
But I'm willing to cut them some slack because if it was all a hallucination, then it's okay that Wilson wasn't hovering when House woke up and in fact did not appear until halfway through the episode, once again, and had only one more scene after that. And because he was on a treadmill in a suit, which for an inexplicable reason was way sexier than when he walks down the hallway; because House hallucinated that they were in the bathroom together; because Wilson wore a sweater-vest in the bathroom scene; because he is seen clasping his pants closed; because he washes his hands thoroughly like a good doctor (you know he does, it wasn't just in House's mind); and because he did take House's punch pretty much in stride. (Punch = OMG so cool even with no real context and zero repercussions, because Wilson wiped his nose and smiled, and House was about to let him have it again.)
Gore, beauteous gore! Eyes popping, testes bursting (Chase's face! haha), tongues swelling, guts ripped, stitches pulled (ohhhh, House's hand shaking and passing out, gorgeous, not when he fell but just before*), tracheotomies performed half off-camera (and we'd just switched the channel from Anaconda, how fitting), House telling his patient exactly how people had messed him up since he came to the hospital. It was sad and disturbing, though, quite how messed-up and miserable that poor guy got.
*Wonder if that moment, him passing out, corresponded to him being shot again in real time in the neck.
House making everyone else do his physical therapy? Yes.
Random not-wife Mel-from-Queer-as-Folk pointless guest star psychoanalyzing him? No. And no again for emphasis.
Shades of something there at the end when everyone is doing everything in their power to keep House from performing an action that would make him wake up. I keep thinking it's a Deep Space Nine episode, but I don't know which-maybe the one where Bashir's been sent into a coma by an alien and he has to repair the station in his head as a symbol for restoring his own failing body, but I don't think that's it. Anyone?
Elias! Your eyebrows are love. I hope you get to come back next season. You should have a scene with Wilson and you can communicate without saying a word.
House imitating each of his Fellows. Nailed Chase (not that way, they're holding off so far), got Foreman pretty well, made fun of Cameron. Awesome.
House and Wilson's argument -- loved how House echoed Wilson in "House vs. God" by saying "Here we go." And has anyone else noticed how House keeps saying stuff to other people that Wilson has told him an episode or two earlier? Of course I can't think of the examples now. But it shows he's listening and digesting what his friend is telling him, even if he'll never let it show.
Oh my God, so past my bedtime.
Talk talk talk -- I'm leaving on Thursday with questionable Internet access for five days and want to get lots of House chat in before the possible cut-off.
About the episode--
Teaser? Blew me away. Even though it was in the preview. The suddenness with which Elias whipped out the gun and fired, the sound and force of the gunshot, the way House fell, Cameron's gasp, the camera lingering on House as he lay there breathing and trying not to be in shock. Awesome.
synn is right: It would have made a great last scene to the whole series.
I was preparing today to compare "No Reason" to that episode of BtVS where the Troika plant a weird device by Katrina's corpse and Buffy fights someone she thinks is attacking Katrina and time fragments and effect precedes cause and all this weird stuff happens and when it's over she thinks she's the one who killed the girl. Afterwards (before she beats up Spike, I think) she makes a comment about time having gone all David Lynch on her. Someone proposed that tonight's House ep would be the non-linear one the producers have apparently been promising, and with the hallucinations we assumed were coming (what with House's declaration in the preview that he thinks he's going out of his mind), I thought it would be similarly disjointed.
But as it turns out, the more apt comparison is to "Restless," the fourth-season BtVS finale consisting mainly of the four main characters' dreams. Everything that happened in "Restless" meant something (well, except the Cheese Man), whether about the dreamer's buried fears and insecurities, their strengths and comforts, or their relationships with each other, about solving the mystery (the First Evil was haunting them), or even about what was going to happen in the future. That baby was packed, and clever, and poignant, and revelatory, and expertly written and directed, and foreshadowed some things for the fifth season.
With "No Reason" we have an episode that took place, what, 90-95% in House's head? That means everyone's behavior, looks, words and tones, the swollen/exploding patient and the grieving widower/gunman, the events and the locations, from post-credits through his awakening on the gurney at the end, all say something about him-that Cameron was there when he woke up, that Chase followed his metaphors, that Cuddy and Wilson betrayed him (or Wilson at least wasn't fazed by Cuddy's decision), that his leg was better-on and on.
In "Restless" we saw that Willow still fears being "found out" as the geek she was in early high school, even though she'd seemed to have moved past that; in "No Reason" we see that House is afraid someone might make a significant medical decision for him while he's unconscious again, even though we haven't seen him confront the issue since at least the beginning of the season when Stacy was around. In "Restless" we had strange settings, unusual lighting/color, and characters doing odd things explained with dream-logic; in "No Reason" we had the random Mexican joint all super-saturated, the "physical therapy room" with Wilson on a treadmill and Chase on an exercise bike. In "Restless" there were countless moments that could be traced back to things said or done offhand in the day (episode) previous; in "No Reason" the Mexican place could have come from House's joke after the poopy-mouth incident about whether anyone wanted to go out for Mexican. In "Restless" Xander kept returning to the basement; in "No Reason" House kept coming back to the recovery room or ICU or wherever. "Restless" was chock-full of symbolism; "No Reason" had the bullet and probably lots of others. In "Restless" we had intimations of the season to come, reference to "dawn" and "you haven't even begun" and such; I suspect that some moments of "No Reason," in showing House's fevered brain working-working-working at figuring out the puzzles of the people around him, are foreshadowing plots for early Season Three.
Case in point, Wilson in the hallway. House asks why he's covering for Cuddy. Wilson goes blank, then puts on Obvious Lie Face when he answers. Could mean that House has picked up on something fishy, or is mulling over recent fears, and is anticipating that Wilson and Cuddy have something going on behind his back. Supported by Cuddy jumping up and hiding the folder (sperm donor paperwork? House's surgery records?) when he comes in. None of it may have been real, but it was internally consistent, and it was written that way for a reason.
One difference being that BtVS was a better show (gasp! outrage!), it was in its fourth not second season when it did an episode like this, there were four characters being analyzed instead of one, and that show was brilliant about plot and character arcs, so there were a lot of threads to tug and tangle. "Restless" took weeks to pick apart and mull over, and while it's going to take multiple happy viewings to wrap my head around "No Reason," I don't think there's as much to it as there was with the other. Or maybe I'm just saying that because, hey, Slayage conference day after tomorrow.
While we're talking about BtVS, the main problem I had with "No Reason" was with the hallucinations and structure of the episode. In BtVS, if something was off, you knew it right away, because the rules of that world were clear. Tonight, you never quite knew what was a hallucination and what wasn't. Let me try to explain this. One might have suspected that House was hallucinating when Elias was wheeled into the same room, because please, Cuddy's flimsy excuse that all the other rooms were full? Except that on a regular episode of House, that would be a good enough reason. Or one might have been tipped off when his leg felt better because of some magical medical technique attempted while he was under surgery, only it wouldn't be the first time the medicine was fudged. I say this with all affection for the show. It's just that when you can't trust the facts in a normal episode, you can't use them to prove or disprove that reality is wrong in a maybe-hallucinating episode.
"Reality is almost always wrong."
"Shut up, House."
Or one might have been tempted to disbelieve, because if everything was in House's head, then how could there have been scenes he wasn't in? There was that one moment in "Restless" when Xander and Oz exchange a couple of lines after Willow, whose dream it is, walked off camera, and it didn't sit well either, although it was funny. Could argue that House was the fly-on-the-wall in those scenes, such as the one with Chase with the patient in the bathroom, but it's not like the camera was held from his perspective in scenes he was in, so that doesn't really hold.
Regardless, come on, we knew he was hallucinating; the question was only how often, and whether they would really dare to make the whole episode a dream. The clearest sign for me was near the beginning when House gets out of bed to talk to Elias, and the transition was too abrupt; the scene just cut, jumped, and that's not like their usual style. Very reminiscent of dreaming and of techniques for achieving lucid dreaming, and then they started addressing that outright: House realizing that he doesn't know how he got where he is, realizing that stuff just doesn't make sense-and did the writing on the glass wall change from when we looked at the outside and when we cut to the inside? Did anyone pay attention to the clocks?
Lost my point there. I guess a lot of this was to say that the episode played more like a series of dreams than hallucinations, which I guess they were, like a fevered night when you're obsessing over a subject half in and out of consciousness, false awakenings and dreams-within-dreams, where House was unable to tell whether he was in reality ("awake") or hallucinating ("asleep/dreaming").
Okayyyyy, that went on a lot longer than expected. Onward and upward:
House/Cameron robot surgery foreplay with voyeur. Wait-let me say it again. HOUSE/CAMERON ROBOT SURGERY FOREPLAY WITH VOYEUR. Any kink is now officially allowed to appear on the show. You hear me, Official Writers? I want you to go read this and come back with something nice in the fall.
(Many many more recs on the way, kiddos.)
WHAT a cop-out. House punched Wilson! (No he didn't.) House ripped a patient apart on the operating table! (No he didn't.) House's leg got better! (No it didn't.) We had a series finale! (No we didn't.)
But I'm willing to cut them some slack because if it was all a hallucination, then it's okay that Wilson wasn't hovering when House woke up and in fact did not appear until halfway through the episode, once again, and had only one more scene after that. And because he was on a treadmill in a suit, which for an inexplicable reason was way sexier than when he walks down the hallway; because House hallucinated that they were in the bathroom together; because Wilson wore a sweater-vest in the bathroom scene; because he is seen clasping his pants closed; because he washes his hands thoroughly like a good doctor (you know he does, it wasn't just in House's mind); and because he did take House's punch pretty much in stride. (Punch = OMG so cool even with no real context and zero repercussions, because Wilson wiped his nose and smiled, and House was about to let him have it again.)
Gore, beauteous gore! Eyes popping, testes bursting (Chase's face! haha), tongues swelling, guts ripped, stitches pulled (ohhhh, House's hand shaking and passing out, gorgeous, not when he fell but just before*), tracheotomies performed half off-camera (and we'd just switched the channel from Anaconda, how fitting), House telling his patient exactly how people had messed him up since he came to the hospital. It was sad and disturbing, though, quite how messed-up and miserable that poor guy got.
*Wonder if that moment, him passing out, corresponded to him being shot again in real time in the neck.
House making everyone else do his physical therapy? Yes.
Random not-wife Mel-from-Queer-as-Folk pointless guest star psychoanalyzing him? No. And no again for emphasis.
Shades of something there at the end when everyone is doing everything in their power to keep House from performing an action that would make him wake up. I keep thinking it's a Deep Space Nine episode, but I don't know which-maybe the one where Bashir's been sent into a coma by an alien and he has to repair the station in his head as a symbol for restoring his own failing body, but I don't think that's it. Anyone?
Elias! Your eyebrows are love. I hope you get to come back next season. You should have a scene with Wilson and you can communicate without saying a word.
House imitating each of his Fellows. Nailed Chase (not that way, they're holding off so far), got Foreman pretty well, made fun of Cameron. Awesome.
House and Wilson's argument -- loved how House echoed Wilson in "House vs. God" by saying "Here we go." And has anyone else noticed how House keeps saying stuff to other people that Wilson has told him an episode or two earlier? Of course I can't think of the examples now. But it shows he's listening and digesting what his friend is telling him, even if he'll never let it show.
Oh my God, so past my bedtime.
Talk talk talk -- I'm leaving on Thursday with questionable Internet access for five days and want to get lots of House chat in before the possible cut-off.