Didn’t see a thread on this yet, so I’ll just start one.
It’s been a three-week hiatus, but the Doc is back at last!
Episode preview from IMDB:
It’s election season, and in the midst of a tight campaign, an incumbent New Jersey senator’s campaign manager falls ill with liver failure and temporary paralysis. Cuddy pushes House to add a female doctor to his team by hiring brilliant third-year medical student Martha Masters in Thirteen’s absence. House and the team are wary of the young doctor’s lack of experience and medical perspective, but are forced to give their new by-the-book teammate a chance to prove herself. After the campaigning senator makes a surprising announcement, House and the team look to the candidate to find clues about the patient’s condition. Meanwhile, Foreman learns that Taub has a past connection to Masters, and in an effort to save his patient’s life, House must make a critical decision that may compromise his relationship with Cuddy.
First House I’ve enjoyed in a long while. I liked the math references; they weren’t too obnoxious. I like the rebuttal the young Masters offered to the patient where he mistakenly proposed that the treatment would only be 15% more effective than arsenic; arsenic having a 0 % chance of being a cure means that the treatment, no matter how small it’s chance of curing / not killing the patient, is infinitely better than arsenic percentage wise. (Although Wolfram|Alpha, the authority on such matters, is indeterminate.)
There was also a reference to Euler’s number (2.71828182845904523536… apparently the 20th digit is 6) and a mobius strip. Besides the outlet for Nerd trivia, the Masters character seems kind of boring. It’s like a tiny asexual Cameron.
I also don’t quite like the portrayal of the cast as being unanimously cruel and sarcastic towards each other. I’d like to see a little bit of genuine, vulnerable emotion between the characters. Instead all we get are clever innuendos.
I agree with MattProle’s assessment of Masters, she just seems like a bit of a rehash of Cameron, with the added twist of supposedly being super smart. I didn’t find her particularly compelling. She seems more like a plot device to sort of instill the former prsence of Cuddy, as hinted at by House at one point, to give him the needed conflict of what’s “right” so as to free up Cuddy’s character to have more room to conflict with House on the relationship front.
It was interesting, to see House seeming to genuinely give pause to lying to Cuddy about the test. It’s a big step for him, even if Cuddy will never see the actual dilemma he faced, and from how it played out for the character impact I liked it. That said, the technical execution seems a little sloppy to me. I have a hard time believing House would be so careless about having the Senator come into the clinic. Surely, someone would have recognized him, as the nurse did, and moreso wonder why he was using a free clinic. What if Cuddy had happened by why he was there? I know House had to be sloppy for Cuddy to find out, but I just would have figured, especially with his dilemma, he would have been a lot more cautious.
I liked that they mentioned schisto as a potential cause.
I did like Masters, and people seem to be missing the point. She is someone who has strong black-and-white morality, and she’s a nice foil to House’s “Do anything necessary.” House can get away with it because the script lets him, but in real life, he’d be suffering consequences (could he have kept his medical license if Cuddy tells the medical board what he did with the blood test).
I’m not sure how long the character stays, but I have a feeling that she will act as House’s conscience.
Decent episode, and I loved the line about the Internet and breasts.
But I hope this Masters chick is a short-timer. She’s just too annoying. Unless they make her personality much more interesting and much less abrasive, she’s going to be a negative.
Wilson, as usual, perfectly encapsulated the moral dilemma into a sound-bite that House could chew on.
Well, the senator was already in the hospital visiting the POTW. Having him swing by the clinic isn’t a huge stretch.
I really expected Masters to be related to an important hospital admin, which is why Cuddy seemed so intent on keeping her on board. The episode’s title fed that assumption as well. The conflict in Cuddy’s office excellently turned that on its head for me.
I thought that briefly but then concluded that with her “morality” strengths, she would not have been party to that kind of farce. Even to protect Taub’s feelings.
He didn’t? I thought at the very end of the previous episode while the camera was on House in bed, Cuddy got up to go change the diaper, he overheard her finding the dime, then he heard the baby say “House!” just before the credits rolled.