Believe it or not, at one point the House finale post I wrote had yet another digression in there. I couldn’t quite make it fit and while it was inspired by Chase’s new talents in “House’s Head” and “Wilson’s Heart,” it’s really a light-hearted rant about the show as a whole:
I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but it has to be said that Dr. Robert Chase has been slumming all this time. He’s clearly even more talented than his former boss. It’s impressive enough that he suddenly became a surgeon despite the fact that, as even House medical advisor Dr. Lisa Sanders has pointed out, “a very fundamental split in medicine is you pick medicine or surgery, period.” Forget the hypnosis trick, too. Now he’s apparently a neurosurgeon, performing that deep brain stimulation on his boss (though I suppose the seizures make Chase seem not quite adept at his sudden new specialty).
Then again, Cameron went from a fellowship where she encountered one patient a week for four years to heading up the Emergency Department. I can only hope that Princeton-Plainsboro has the slowest ER on the continent, or that Cameron is similarly a prodigy. With that career trajectory, she’ll be Dean of Medicine by the time she’s 35. Which is apparently not unusual, either. Poor Foreman is the one doomed to career stasis, but at least he has a reason to hang around House all the time.
Ahem, where was I before I started proving how adept I am at suspending disbelief? Right, expressing how none of that detracts from a show that knows what matters is the heart and head of its characters and stories, not how faithful it is to real life. I think I heard somewhere that it’s a good thing TV shows don’t represent the world exactly the way it is, because they would suck and be redundant.
well, certainly going from a physician to a surgeon is a big leap, but does happen…however, performing neurosurgical procedures on your own in your first year of surgery is definitely out of the question. cameron’s transition is believable..going from physician to ED, but she definitely wouldn’t be “heading” the department.
Yes it happens … with additional training. Which takes a little longer than a summer. But, you know, time is not a fixed construct.
Well… it is a good explanation for why we got to see so little of him on screen.
While we were all worried that certain characters were left out/forgotten to give screentime, he really was just studying real hard ;)!
Wonder what other skills he’ll have gained after the month long break.
I’ve been giving “House M.D.” a pass on the medical stuff ever since the scene in which House came barging into the O.R. and, with his gown dangling around his wrists and wearing no mask at all, proceeded to run a patients bowel through his gloved hands. I’ve noticed other scenes in which he was in the O.R. unmasked as well.
As Hugh Laurie proved in “Fetal Position,” he is perfectly capable of acting with half his face obscured by a surgical mask. I can only hope that the medical advisors for the show manage to get the writers to accept one really fundamental fact of O.R. protocol – nobody, but nobody, ever comes into an O.R. unmasked. Not even Gregory House.
This will probably sound dumb, but I started giving it a pass early on when my hairdresser found out I worked in PR at the time and asked me if my job was like Bridget Jones’. I had never made the connection that we had similar jobs because of course no workplace is ever the way it’s portrayed in movies and TV. Next time I was watching House I thought, OK, why do I expect reality in the medical details, then? For some reason that was enough to put it out of my mind most of the time … unless it’s something really egregious that takes me out of the story (and I have to admit it’s the little things like not being gloved or gowned that get to me sometimes too – maybe because the details of medicine itself don’t really matter,)