Premiering tonight.
Let's hope for more head-Kutner.
Did you see Sepinwall's preview of the premiere? He's raving about it, says it's an Emmy highlight reel for Laurie.
Do I have my actors crossed or is the head administrator of the institution House is in the same guy who played the head of the hospital on Mental?
So far, not a bad episode. Damn, House can be real dick though.
I just saw the ads, but isn't the one on HOUSE Andre Braugher? He wasn't in MENTAL. He was in H:LOTS, which was by far his best work.
SPOILERS FOR THE HOUSE SEASON 6 PREMIERE BELOW!
Most of it was fabulous, though I could have done without House rapping. The last half hour in general was a little wonky, particularly how Silent Girl was cured. It's really weird to watch a piece of American popular entertainment that doesn't portray a psych ward as evil and repressive, and I'm shocked that even before he went along with them, House never called anyone Nurse Ratched.
If that's it for Braugher, it's a shame; he was fantastic.
I Liked the first hour.
I found the second hour a little bullshitty. Silent girl, Sudden changes of locations, All Manic no depressive, Dead people.
I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was a pilot for something else. As it is, felt weird to go to all the tropes the show avoided for years.
THAT SAID, i thought it was an engaging two hours of good acting.
Thanks for that. I knew I had seen Braugher (and his work) somewhere else but couldn't for the life of me remember where. I thought his role was fantastic.
Though (SPOILERS Below)
I felt the second hour (particularly the last 30 minutes) wrapped everything up in too nice of a bow. I figured House would at least spend another show or two institutionalized.
The carnival scene with Captain Freedom was a nice touch but my wife called something bad would happen as soon as they were seen in the parking garage,
That had way too many cliches and no consequences. Hugh Laurie really is the only reason to watch this show.
On one hand, there was a lot of stuff just plain wrong with the show:
- For most part, how the crazy people on the show acted is not how crazy people act.
- In particular, manic isn't the same thing as hyper, and the manic guy wasn't written with the kind of mania problems that get you in an insane asylum.
- From the specifics of the case, House's problem didn't require any kind of anti psychotic drugs. Now, there are lots of places that will just give you them as routine, but Braugher's character and the blonde Doctor weren't written that way.
- House kidnaps a mental patient, who is eveidentally under involuntary hold, and nearly gets him killed and NOTHING HAPPENS.
- And the sheer implausibility of the Franka Potente relationship - I was sure she was a hallucination for at least half the show.
On the other hand:
- Franka Potente! I lurve her.
- Basketball, House style!
- House finally running up against someone every bit as smart as he is*.
- Sheer entertainment! I laughed my way through most of it, and Hugh Laurie is as watchable an actor who has ever lived.
* I would be game for a spin off about Nolan and the hospital. House with crazy people. Yes, I realize this is what Mental was supposed to be.
>>- Basketball, House style!<<
"How did it feel to wake up in the hospital and realize you'd failed at that too?" Am I a bad person for laughing at this?
I'm not sure how I felt about this as a House episode. As an exploration of House the character being (finally) put into an environment where his approach is challenged and he must finally admit that he's not right was fun, but pretty much everything involving the other patients feels like it was written for a different show. The catatonic woman with the music box, for example, was just way too trite.
I love Andre Braugher to death and hope that he becomes a reguklar visitor to Princeton Plainsboro.
I'm curious to see where this goes from here. If they stay with the House that walked out of that hospital indefinitely it's a big tonal change for the series.
" Am I a bad person for laughing at this?"
I laughed and laughed and laughed at that whole scene.
I would assume there'll be more Braugher - the way the episode was structured and the amount of questions they raised about him make it seem like he'll be back. I can't even express how much I enjoyed seeing Laurie and Braugher together, and how much I liked Nolan and House.
I really hope they don't just go back to staus quo with House. He can still be mean and funny without hitting the reset button.
I dunno. I really liked how they got away from the formula but then they go ahead and tie everything up in neat little knots in the last 15 minutes or so. It felt like a letdown of the whole episode beforehand.
I'm not sure I'd have watched a season of House stuck in there but I'd have watched another couple of episodes and with more time I think they'd have done a better job of it. I suppose they'll be going back to the hospital now with a different, nicer, House and more cases of the week and I'll keep watching but I think there could have been a lot more here.
Also opening with Radiohead and closing with The Frames, excellent music choices as ever!
Yes to everything, except the sheer entertainment part. There were just too many awful things, like music box dancer bit, the almost-killing "superman" part and the whole love-interest-moving-without-saying-goodbye cliche. The episode would have been a lot better if Potente were a hallucination.
Actually, I didn't even understand why House would be in the same ward as some of those other patients. They're non-functioning on a whole other level, and he's a danger to them!
Blonde doctor Beasley was totally put-upon: constantly having rank pulled on her by Braugher. She wasn't even the one to give House the whole "never see you again" spiel.
I dunno, after that amazing run of episodes at the end of last year, we get...this? Total let down.
Believe me I could just watch Franka all day.
But that was the thing, the cast were all giving 100% and making a slightly turdish second hour look like good writing. But all the resolutions and weird plot conveniences were just being covered in pixie dust. Also if Franka is moving the next day, why is her house totally unpacked? Then i wondered why Wilson wouldn't be there for his release. Then i kept wondering how he is gettign a license back after the Freedom Master incident.
I am just gonna pretend the whole thing was House Hallucinating and nothing actually happened. He just detoxed and went home.
<< Then i kept wondering how he is gettign a license back after the Freedom Master incident. >>
It was the medical license bit that kept sticking with me. I was under the impression that him losing said license was because he was hallucinating dead people that had him nearly strawberrying a friend/coworker to death and was therefore a danger to his patients. So why is it that suddenly being able to live and love again is enough for him to get reinstated? At some point, the focus seemed to shift from "let's make House not dangerous to patients" to "let's make House less of a dick", a concept that doesn't have a lot of staying power on this show.
<< I am just gonna pretend the whole thing was House Hallucinating and nothing actually happened. >>
The sudden transition early on from House detoxing to House being perfectly fine and ready to leave had me expecting the hallucination plot twist at any moment, and I was kind of disappointed that it never happened. But I guess they have to save that twist for the season finales.
Sadly. they already tried a Braugher-led hospital show--GIDEON'S CROSSING. Because a Nolan asylum show would rock, especially with the hot junior psych that was stuck with House most of the episode. An interesting direction would be that the hispanic doctor that wound up Freedom Man was actually a Lecter-wannabe trying to get mentally ill folks to kill themselves.
It's really the only way to explain that plot twist. Any psychologist should know EXACTLY what he was doing. Not to mention that a delusion isn't broken that easily.
Yeah there were a lot of weird plot turns now that i think about it. i have to wonder if this was a backdoor pilot or if these people come back again with a mysterious illness and now the patient is the doctor.
It was stretching things a bit that House was in for detoxing from Vicodin (and, I'm sorry, but I wish they had underlined that his psychotic break was a LOT more than just taking drugs) and then just happened to get stuck in because the head doctor didn't think he was nice enough.
Anyone who has full-on hallucinations the way House has some serious triggers that are not going to be cured or even seen by him "opening up" to someone. The largest hurdle was that they set up WHY the ending they had wouldn't work in the two-parter's first half, and then went right to the trite, quick ending to get him out.
Even once he had detoxed, no one would let someone who had admitted to seeing full on hallucinations and having delusions walk out the door without some serious checking up on them. They sure as hell wouldn't just take his word that he was all better.
I was almost prepared to give that one to them IF they showed that House hadn't told anyone the extent of his hallucinations, and there's a chance he hasn't, since "dreamed an affair and hallucinated for an entire night" wasn't on the list anywhere.
I guess I can believe he was walking around perma-stoned, and the abuse he put his body through and the mental stuff he didn't deal with lead to a psychotic break...and not saying how long he was in detox helped. We know if was a while, and could have been weeks (should be weeks).
The lack of...anything, for nearly getting a fellow patient killed, the fact that the blonde doctor was a non-entity who never connected in any way with House, and some other seriously trite moves sorta cut the legs out from under this one.
He also never came to grips with a few important things that were shown in the last season; his subconcious is EVIL. He tried to kill Chase. He must have had some recognition that his subconcious was bad, which reflects that he thinks he, as a person is bad, so I would have assumed that they would deal with that angle.
Instead, they come in from a weird "learn to trust people". I'm actually a little unsure just what House was supposed to have learned from his time. His intellect will eventually rationalize things into his own worldview and we'll be back to old House.
One thing I THINK they were aiming for though; reseting House back to Season 1 Greg House. If you go back and watch the show, he wasn't as big of a dick as in later seasons. He certainly smiled more. In a sort of long-view look, they could get some milage out of the idea that he became more and more of a dick until even he couldn't stand himself.
I just think it's a shame that they never brought that out in the show. The last hour, and the last half hour especially, just comes off as trite and a quick clean-up to a five-season build of his pain, or his perception of his pain, getting worse and him becoming unhappier and unhappier, able to rationalize that unhappiness, but emotionally unable to do anything about it.
The larger problem is that there's no quick fix to a psychological problem, so they wrote themselves into a corner where they had to blame it as much on the drugs and deaths as they could, make is seem like a one off occurrance, and focus on him being an unhappy dick than on him having a psychotic break or a mental illness.
Meh, I hope they manage to move on from here, but on one hand it's stuff they can't forget about while on the other...it was handled so poorly that they really need to address why things are the way they are.
<< but I wish they had underlined that his psychotic break was a LOT more than just taking drugs >>
I thought they sort of did that, when Dr. Pembleton said that House was on Vicodin for years but didn't start hallucinating until after his dad and two coworkers died within a short period of time. But then rather than deal with that, they seemed to focus entirely on, like you said, House having to open up to someone.
I am just gonna pretend the whole thing was House Hallucinating and nothing actually happened. He just detoxed and went home.
The more I think about it, the more I think pretending might not be necessary here. It's kind of hard to reconcile everything that happened last night with even the stretches the show has made in the past. On top of that, it really felt like Franka would be revealed as a hallucination right up until her car played a pivotal role in a "real" event. I'm not sure how they could handle the reveal a few months down the line, but I would be quite unsurprised if the whole didn't turn out to be fake.
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oh that reminds me. I didn't think Frank a was gonna be a hallucination but I DID think she was either an undercover doctor or a higher level patient on some sort of outpatient thing.
The fact that she shows NO remorse about Freedom Master really weirded me out.
Aye, I agree. It was pretty clear to me that this was a lot more than just the drugs.
I spent the whole episode waiting for House to cure the catatonic woman with his medical knowledge. I was a little surprised when it turned out all she needed was a magic music box.
I was happy that they didn't go the "one of the mental patients actually has an obscure disease" route. It was a bit too expected.
In retrospect, I wish they had gone the expected route though. Magic Music Box was way worse.
Concur!
I would have liked some kind of medical mystery, instead of them just doing a riff off Cuckoo's Nest.
The music box thing is a little confusing - had she stopped talking when they brought her in and she just fixated on some random music box in the nurses' station that managed to sit there unnoticed for years?
Or was she uncommunicative and came in with the box, and they took it away at some point and just left in the station, never noticing that she was staring at it and might be helped by having it returned?
Agreed. I wish House had just turned out to be the case after having fucked his brain up with opioid abuse and the drugs he took while trying to solve the bus crash plus his skull fracture/possible brain bleed.
It looks, judging from the Global preview I saw on Youtube, that they're not going to jump him right back into medical stuff, and still do some work on dealing with him, as the next episode doesn't look very set in the hospital. If they do this over a few episodes it might work better, but they really just cut their legs out from under themselves with the last half-hour of the two-parter.
Also...I still have trouble believing that someone who had a complete psychotic break would just be detoxed and sent home after he has one moment of trusting someone.
The only thing I can think is that he didn't tell someone the full extent of his hallucinations and delusions...unless he was popping those vicodin at absolutely liver-killing levels...and I sort of hedge that by remembering what Wilson said about his blood test.
Within the science of the show, I suppose it works, but they seemed to want to make the point that mental problems don't just go away, and then turned around and sent him home because they had made a tiny breakthrough.
If he has to keep on seeing the shrink and going to therapy, and if they are careful about not throwing him right back in as if nothing happened, then I can sorta give it the rope, but as is...I just wish they had the balls to follow through on where they left us at the end of last season.
The music box was never explained at all. And in the beginning her stare is more general. I think the idea was that the superhero was crazy enough to make the intuitive leap that she had a fixation on the box, and I think she was afraid to talk for years.
There's a really long stretch I can give it that she's been doped up so much that she slipped into the catatonic state and doesn't talk or react, but when she hears the guy say he's a superhero something in her brain makes he think he CAN save her, and she fixates on the box, which he notices, and he thinks he can save her.
When someone focuses, she begins to focus on the box, thinking she can be saved, and finally, someone gets the box for her, and seeing her friend and sister-in-law happy, then being saved by a superhero, she overcomes her fear and says something, but is still obviouslly out to lunch (she wasn't being sent home, iirc, but sent to a different facility).
It's a long walk to make for that plot point, and really trite, but I that's the implied story behind that which I took away.
It really, really felt like a truncated story. They needed at least another hour, or they should have skipped all the "House turns things upside down", but then you don't play to the strengths of the show.
I think how they go on from this point will tell us whether this storyline worked or not. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though, and it was still better than the cop storyline from season 3.
