This weeks TV Guide (page 61, “Guest Stars We Love”) indicates that David Morse’s stint on “House” is over with this episode. So if he needs House to break his addiction, it’ll probably be next season.
What? He’s not going to be at House’s trial? I thought he’d want to be be right there in the front row. I was hoping we’d get one more episode with him.
Damn I thought he was in for six episodes. Oh well. I guess I won’t miss him.
I’m with light strand on the subject of being happy when the story arc is over. It started off as interesting and has progressed into irritating. Too much suspension of disbelief necessary.
I’m also wondering what happens next. I’m hoping House returns to being the brilliant, curmudgeonly miracle worker we grew to love. If the writers continue to have him be an asshat, my interest will fade. I’ve enjoyed this show from the beginning, actually since I heard about the build up (loved Laurie since Blackadder and Wooster and Jeeves) but am teetering on the edge turning it off. Again, as light strand indicated, the episode would have been better without Tritter.
I couldn’t believe they didn’t already have a warning out the pharmacy to think twice before giving stuff out to House.
“Where’s Cuddy?” “She’s in this drawer.”
Are you sure they didn’t have it in the wrong section? I’ve yet to hear anyone express affection for Tritter, or for this story arc generally.
It makes me wonder if they didn’t get some message from on high insisting that they devote this season to the message that “drugs’re bad, m’kay?”
Meh. I’ve been doing my best to completely tune out the Tritter stuff and focus on the good, medical-mystery-solving parts of the show that still exist. The interaction and empathy between Dr. House and the little person mother was gorgeous, though; I’d have much rather all the Tritter-arc time been spent on that.
Can a doctor write prescriptions for himself? I guess not.
But House could still write Vicodin/Oxy scripts for someone else, couldn’t he? Why not write a script for some homeless guy or something and pay him to go in and get it filled? I know that’s probably illegal as hell but so is everything else House is doing to get pills.
I’ll breathe a huge sigh of relief along with **light strand ** when this arc finishes up. I really like David Morse, but I’ve had it up to here with this arc. One House is plenty in this series, thanks all the same. Two duelling Houses is just irritating. Not to mention the heinous liberties the writers are taking with the function of the US legal system. I keep watching things happen without any pretense at explanation that just flat-out wouldn’t happen.
A major hospital allowing a cop free access to all their files? Without a warrant (as he’s theoretically on his free time he has to be working without a warrant)? Even if a warrant were somehow magically issued (brain-damaged judge maybe?), any hospital would challenge it, complete with temporary restraining orders and their entire legal team, for months. If not years. Under no circumstance will they plop him down in an office with all their unredacted patient files (we know they’re unredacted because redacting the patient files sufficiently to be allowable for such perusal would take months). Or personnel files for that matter. Or any scrap of paper or other information belonging in the same Venn diagram as the concept of the word “files”.
Questioning hospital employees without the hospital’s attorneys present? Not a single chance in Hell.
Judges issuing warrants to seize assets and freeze accounts of doctors without a single scrap of actual evidence just because they work with another doctor who might be somehow dealing prescription meds (or I assume that’s the charge - if the charge is just abusing prescription meds, my objections triple, nay quadruple)? Less than a single chance in Hell. That scenario is an attorney’s wet dream. Well, a civil litigation attorney anyway. It’s a DA’s nightmare come true. That situation is the very embodiment of the phrase “illegal search and seizure”.
I bought the traffic stop bootstrapped into a stay in jail - that was at least marginally plausible.
The original warrant for House’s place was slightly less plausible but I was willing to let it slide on the grounds of suspension of disbelief because it’s a common device in TV stories involving cops. In actuality, that warrant never issues. A well-known doctor at the top of his field, associated with a well-known local hospital, with a well-documented medical need for pain meds? Said medical need diagnosed and backed by several other doctors? Any DA you took this in front of would give you a look and tell you to put down the crack pipe - no matter how irked with the doctor you are or how big an asshole he was.
*Every single other action by Tritter since then * - Are you f’ing kidding me?
And why in the Hell isn’t Cuddy using the influence she must weild as administrator of a major hospital to back Tritter the hell off? We’ve been given to assume this is all one cop with a grudge. One cop with a grudge isn’t even in the same league as one hospital administrator with a beef.
Puhleeeeze. Even if Cuddy weren’t interested in protecting House, she’d have been burning up the phone in defense of Wilson, Cameron, Chase and Foreman - not to mention the whole HIPPA violation thing. Her Chief of Oncology forced to retire his practice, even temporarily? A five minute phone call to any major news channel in the city puts a stop to this whole thing toot sweet.
We’re not even going to discuss Wilson’s “lawyer’s” reactions to all this. Any actual attorney worth their bar membership looks at this fact pattern and laughs like a fiend.
I’m about one more of these episodes from giving up the whole series - just because all that screaming at the monitor is so not doing my blood pressure any favors.
There’s supposed to be one more Tritter episode in which the storyline will wrap up with House going on trial. Unfortunately, we won’t get to see that episode until January.
I too would like to get back to the old, predictable House formula (“if you’re wrong, she’ll die!” “If I’m right she’ll die anyway. Now hook up the car battery!”) with House stumping around, popping pills and mocking everybody. I fear he’s going to end up in rehab, though.
I wholeheartedly agree (except that for me it started out as irritating and went downhill from there.) I keep hoping Tritter will be hit by a bus or something, just to get rid of him. He’s as the most annoying, obnoxious character I’ve seen on any show in a long time.
Funny, but you watch a show where a doctor gets to go well beyond any legal and moral bounds each week to get the disease, without personal consequence, and you can’t suspend your disbelief when a brainy cop does the same to nail him.
Note this may seem like a grudge but if you go back the very first thing Tritter noticed was the open pill popping. Kinda like when House spots an odd symptom that leads to a case.
I subscrbe to the paralel character thesis and that means, in the House Universe, all brain boxes are not bound by our puny moral and legal bounds
Have House’s ratings been significantly affected by this whole Tritter debacle? Is it just that we’re a bunch of critical-thinking curmudgeons, and everyone else is lapping this up?
I realize it is a strectch, but so is the whole show. I do enjoy it. Partially because I believe House has to pay, once an a while, for his actions. Sure it’s silly.
Of course, there is no way Tritter could do what he does, but this is a fantasy land where doctors can punch out their co workers, flaunt rules, break into houses and abuse patients and still be seen as more a valuable worker than a liability. And even more amazingly people actually still like him.
You just have to over look the contradictions to reality, as we all have been doing. This is a player on the other side story where his double tries to give him a comupance. It’s more of a character rather than plot driven story. It is where House is supposed to face his limitations Nothing more.
And it’s bizarrely inconsistent. This week when Wilson said “You were so high, you nearly cut the girl in half” was just wrong when we all saw that last week he was so in withdrawal that he nearly cut the girl in half. If they’d let him get the pills, he would have been fine.
And Tritter’s stupid “I just want him off drugs - he hasn’t tried without pills.” Why does he care? Why doesn’t his captain or something get him back on a real case? Why has this allowed to go on so damn long? Why is this on the screen - I’m not enjoying it. The trial looks like it could be fun, though.
Those were great scenes. I’d like to see her come back. Or House v. Larroquette (pity about the whole death thing) or House with Morioraty from his hallucination… but make the Tritter stop already.
Yeah, but we’re used to House doing it! Having to suspend our disbelief to include the cop’s overstepping boundries is too much. Besides he doesn’t have House’s pretty blue eyes or cuddley curmudgeonliness.
I agree with the assesments about Tritter and I’m not crazy about House just being a plain old ass as opposed to a lovable ass, but I agree that I think they’re trying to show how an addict behaves. I could buy that House needs his meds for pain but he shouldn’t need to take a second pill, two minutes after the first. I’ll also be happy when they move past this storyline and just get back to the crazy medical stuff.
That was one hell of a depressing Christmas eve…House calling his parents and sounding lonely as hell (which he is), Wilson finding House and the empty bottle of pills and then leaving in disgust, Tritter telling House that the rehab deal is now off the table.
I may be a rotten person for this, but I laughed out loud after the following exchange:
Little person mom: “Are you high?”
House: “Higher than you.”
Because that would be dull. Would you prefer a boring show if it was “more real”?
If so, watch test patterns. If not, pay attention to the story, not the trivia.
I wouldn’t prefer “more real,” I’d just prefer a universe with internally consistent rules.
I have no problem with fictional worlds where the rules differ from my own. I watched BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and ANGEL for their entire respective runs, and generally enjoyed the stories in spite of the fact that vampires don’t, technically, exist.
But to enjoy the story, I have to have some idea what the rules of the fictional world ARE, and feel confident that those rules will either remain constant, or if they are changed, that there will be an explanation for those changes within the context of the world that’s being depicted.
In the particular case of HOUSE, it was established from the beginning of the series that: (1) in this particular fictional version of the world, House can get away with antisocial and ethically questionable behavior that in real life wouldn’t be acceptable, as long as his overall contribution to society in the form of saved lives remains consistent; (2) that House was a drug addict, but able to perform his job functions perfectly well in spite of that; and (3) that in this particular world, House is someone for whom I should root. So I accept those rules, and I enjoy the stories that utilize those rules (and others that the creators have devised since) to further the plot. I even have no problem with the recent decision by the writers to change #2 - that House’s drug problem is now impeding his ability to work effectively (although they’ve done a poor job of demonstrating that, IMO) - because the world’s rules can change, as long as there’s a reason why.
But here’s the thing: if you don’t explicitly show us that the rules in a certain area differ from the ones we have in the real world, we will assume that (for the most part), they don’t. When you then suddenly expect us to swallow something like the Tritter arc, a problem develops.
Because, OK, say I accept the new rules that the Tritter arc has suggested. So in the reality of HOUSE, there are no significant medical privacy laws. People live in what is essentially a police state, in which law enforcement has incredibly wide-ranging and arbitrary powers to seize assets, intimidate, threaten - and openly, not under-the-table. Hospital administrators have no political power, and an entire department of a major hospital can be closed with no one ever even noticing. Fine. I (hypothetically) accept that.
But where has that been for the last two years? If you’re going to put your characters in a police state that restrictive and authoritarian, it’s going to affect their lives every single day, not just in one instance. If you want that to be a part of your canon, fine, but now it’s a fundamentally different show. And I obviously don’t think they’re going there - that they’re going to set HOUSE in an alternate reality where the power of the police is far beyond anything in reality - and treat with how that would affect people moving forward. I think, instead, that they’re lazily ignoring the rules of their own universe, and will go back to them when they’ve finished this storyline.
To put it another way, if HOUSE resolved the Tritter arc by having memory-eating alien shrimp descend to Earth and feed on the brains of House, Wilson, Cuddy, Tritter, and the rest, thus eliminating any memory of the situation, it would most assuredly not be a boring show. But even if I was only “paying attention to the story,” I’d still find it inconsistent and jarring - as I do the present storyline.
Yeah, revenge I could understand but he shouldn’t try to act like he cares or has the right to be paternalistic toward House.
Yes, I thought he was being his usual mean self to her but then he ended up including himself in the "freak’ description.
To add to storyteller0910 fine post: we also know that in this world there are indeed such things as laws and lawsuits, and that the entire Tritter story arc started with Cuddy thinking that he would sure them. So we have a compelling reason to believe that they do indeed live within some reality of the legal system.