If I were to win some fabulous contest and were allowed to request a made-to-order House episode, it might look something like this: Lots of snide, sarcastic House with a glimpse deep into one of those truck-sized holes in his armour. Philosophical questions raised but never answered. A reveal about House that answers some questions and raises more. Echoes of previous themes. Bending but not breaking the medical mystery formula. Cuddy flirtation. Compassionate yet spineful Cameron. Not too much Chase. Written by creator David Shore.
A lot like “One Day, One Room.”
Which doesn’t mean this is my favourite episode ever. I don’t expect “Three Stories” to ever get knocked off that perch. Plus, between “Autopsy,” “No Reason,” “Son of Coma Guy,” “Skin Deep,” “Detox,” “Lines in the Sand,” etc. … good lord, I need some complex algorithms to figure out my top 10. But “One Day, One Room” has all the elements that make me geek out on House. So caution: geeking ahead.
Another Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award later, Hugh Laurie proves how astonishingly adept he is at embodying all the contradictions of this character. House is hilarious, heartbreaking, annoying, cruel, hurt, tender, a liar, painfully truthful. Pretty much all in the same moment.
In this post-Tritter era (or as I like to call it, the “Tritter who?” era), House is back to being House, popping Vicodin in front of the boss who thought she’d successfully rehabbed him. She’s found him hiding from the hospital at the jogging park where he goes to sit, watch and imagine – and hide. She finds him sprawled in a very cruciform position. After “Finding Judas,” it’s hard not to see it as more of the House-as-Jesus theme, which I have to assume is referenced with tongues firmly lodged in cheeks.
Realizing the rehab was a fraud, Cuddy feels betrayed. While House balks at the “do my job or go to jail” card she’s got over him now, her personal appeal — “you owe me” — does the trick. Because as bad as he is at the personal, as much as he avoids the personal, it’s the personal that reaches him. Which is why he tries to avoid it.
The job Cuddy wants House to do is to continue treating a patient he met during STD day at the clinic. She’d turned forced clinic duty into a game to keep him interested, and, as he deduces, to try to force him to deal with humanity in order to find his own humanity. Cuddy agreed to pay House $10 for every patient he could diagnose without touching, as long as he paid her $10 for every patient he has to touch (when a gorgeous woman is behind door number four, we know he’s going to end up owing Cuddy for that one).
Eve (a terrific Katheryn Winnick) is the only one who does in fact have an STD. When he realizes she’s been raped, House shows compassion in his own peculiar way — he asks to be taken off the case. “Think I”m the right doctor for her?” he asks Cuddy. And there’s his humanity … and insecurity. He won’t inflict himself on her.
Much to Cuddy’s surprise – much to House’s surprise – Eve insists on talking to House and only House. She even swallows a bottle of pills to make her point. So despite the fact that her case has no intriguing medical mystery, House is at first forced to take it on, then is compelled to talk to her when he gets drawn into the philosophical and the personal.
She wants to talk, but not about what happened to her. First she wants small talk. Just talk. As Foreman points out, she wants normalcy and to focus on the positive. As Cameron points out, she needs help to process what’s happened to her. As Chase points out, the fact that Cameron romantically wants to believe House is good at helping facilitate that doesn’t make it true.
Eve has her own ideas. Protesting that she doesn’t have to have a reason for wanting House to talk to her, she claims she wants time, because time changes things. “No, doing things changes things. Not doing things leaves things exactly as they were,” counters the master of not doing anything about his own personal issues.
The central mystery of her case is why she’s latched on to House. He berates her for being irrational in trusting him.
Eve: Nothing’s rational.
House: Everything’s rational.
Eve: I was raped. Tell me how that makes sense to you.
Then she makes it personal. She asks him if anything terrible has ever happened to him. He likely ponders his long list of terrible things before asking, “what do you want me to say?”
“You wanted to talk about something that matters,” she points out. “Talk.”
Cuddy has ordered him to stay with the patient, but I’ve got to think that around this time, he’s hooked of his own accord. Because if I’m a geek for the philosophical bent of House, House himself is the ubergeek.
But with the personal stuff, he needs help, so he goes to his entourage for guidance. First up is Wilson, who tells him to give the truth. But in this case, House isn’t sure the truth matters. “There is no truth,” he says to a confused Wilson, who asks “Are we role playing? Am I you? I don’t want to be you.”
House believes she’s not looking for the truth from him, she’s looking to extrapolate something from his experience in order to make some meaning out of the world as a whole, which is not the way to get to a greater truth.
Cameron tells him to tell her his life was great (“but it wasn’t”), to give her hope for the world. Foreman tells him to tell her his life sucked (“but it didn’t”) and to pretend to be healed, to let her know that healing is possible.
Chase goes for the easy route, of course — keep her sedated. He claims there’s no wrong answer because there’s no right answer. That sets House up with the opportunity to throw out one of his recurring philosophies, with shades of “Three Stories”: “Wrong. We just don’t know what the right answer is.”
In the end, House tells Eve a story about being abused by his grandmother. He’s told it with such ease, it seems obvious it’s a lie. She attacks him for it on the grounds that he continued to call his grandmother “Oma.” “Something would have to change,” she wants to believe, still looking for meaning.
When he tells her she’s irrational, she replies angrily: “What the hell can I do that you’re not going to dismiss as being just because I was raped?”
For me, that’s the most profound point of the episode: Our terrible events don’t make us who we are, yet they tend to be what people judge us on. Maybe we need meaning to turn them into something more than terrible events, but we are more than the sum of our tragedies. House lost much of the use of his leg, House is in pain, House pushed away the love of his life, House was shot, House was abused. None and all of that makes him who he is. As he says, some people go through terrible things and do just fine, some go through terrible things and their lives suck.
I’ve cursed other House writers before, and I’ll curse David Shore now, for making me write nearly a whole damn transcript while being completely absorbed in the show, in an attempt to catch the precision and beauty of the exact words:
House: You gonna base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?
Eve: I’m gonna base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. That’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms. And who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.
Cuddy delivers the news that will provide next obstacle to Eve’s recovery, and the next philosophical meat for Eve and House’s discussion: she’s pregnant.
House counsels her on abortion, but she’s determined to keep the baby conceived in rape. I love that the show tackles two of the topics you’re not supposed to discuss in polite society – abortion and religion – and has the main character take a firm, not-particularly-safe position on both. Eve views abortion as murder, but House sees birth as the nice, hard line between acceptable and unacceptable murder, and launches into debate club mode to expose flaws in her position.
She suddenly realizes he’s enjoying the conversation. “This is the type of conversation I do well,” he half smiles. He doesn’t do well with the personal type, since there are no answers. “If there are no answers, why talk about it?”
Though he insists she’s physically health enough to leave, he promises not to discharge her. Instead, he takes her to the park where “I sit, I watch, I imagine.”
And, he could add, “I debate.” This time, they get into religion as they hash out the irrationality of her trying to find God’s purpose in her rape and pregnancy. “Either God doesn’t exist or he’s unimaginably cruel,” says House. His explanation is that humans are base creatures who apply their intelligence to occasionally not being evil.
“What you believe doesn’t make sense,” House exclaims. “If you believe in eternity, then life is irrelevant, the same way a bug is irrelevant in comparison to the universe.”
It’s a nice touch in this episode, that from the cockroach in a patient’s ear to House sitting in the park with a bug on his hand, the imagery actually ties in to the dialogue of the show.
“Then nothing matters if there’s no ultimate consequences. I can’t live like that,” Eve says. “I need to know that it all means something. I need that comfort.”
He points out that she doesn’t seem particularly comfortable even with those beliefs. “I was raped. What’s your excuse?” she zings back.
When Eve expresses annoyance at his tendency to answer her questions with a question, he replies, “I’m interested in what you’re feeling.”
“You are?” she asks. He is? Of course he is, but to express that seems a huge leap for the man who won’t admit to personal connections.
“I’m trapped in the room with you, right?” he replies. “Why did you choose me?”
She explains vaguely that she feels that connection to him. And when he reveals that his story, his lie, was not exactly a lie — it was his father who abused him, not his grandmother — first his face, then hers, back and forth, alternately fades into focus, making the impact of his confession on both of them more pronounced. I rarely notice direction unless it’s either really bad or really well done, but director Juan J. Campanello did well here.
And suddenly, everything House has said to Eve, everything Eve has said to House, takes on the burden of applying to his situation as well as hers. Does what he believes make sense? How does a man who believes in absolute rationality process abuse from a parent, other than to believe in our evil instincts? When he told Eve, “It doesn’t mean anything about you, it’s not your fault,” has he really learned to believe that himself? When he explained to her that she had control taken away from her and is now trying to get control again, was he talking about himself?
He tells her he wants to hear her story, and she begins to recount it as the scene fades into a song. Because the rape story isn’t important, though the connection is. Maybe he’s proven that he won’t dismiss her. Maybe they’ve each had a profound impact on each other in their one day together. Maybe they’ve both taken a step towards each other’s position. He’s certainly not as sure of himself as we’re used to seeing.
There’s another patient story interspersed with Eve’s that touches on some of the same themes. Cameron’s post-Tritter symptom is that she’s not covering for House anymore. When he’d tried to hide from clinic duty by performing a slew of unnecessary tests on an already diagnosed patient, she volunteers at the clinic where she is noticeably not hiding from Cuddy, as instructed.
Her punishment for disloyalty, as Cuddy points out, is to be saddled with another dying patient. She encounters a homeless man with inoperable lung cancer (played by ubiquitous character actor Geoffrey Lewis, also known as father of Juliette), with whom she gets to practice her relatively new off-hand dismissive attitude with patients, which is not nearly at House levels but is probably a sign she’s been infected with a low-grade Housian infection.
The patient is determined to not only punish himself for a wasted life, but to create meaning for his life by refusing treatment and dying in pain. “I need you to remember me. I need someone to remember me.”
Boy did he pick the right doctor. Cameron, who married a dying man so he wouldn’t be alone, who befriended a dying patient so she wouldn’t be alone, expressed a similar philosophy in season two’s “Acceptance”: “When a good person dies, there should be an impact on the world. Somebody should notice. Somebody should be upset.” Though this patient may not have been a good man, and though she claims she will not watch him suffer, Cameron respects his wishes and lets herself be there in his one day, one room, that she will presumably carry with her much further.
Before the day is done, Cuddy lets House know that Eve has had the abortion and been discharged. “She’s going to be OK.”
House: “Yeah, it’s that simple.”
Cuddy: “She’s talking about what happened. That’s huge.”
House isn’t convinced. After all, if there are no answers, why talk about it? He is convinced that in their futile desire to help, they lean on the only thing they can do to tell themselves they’ve helped: drag her story out of her. As she did with him. “All we’ve done is make a girl cry.”
Wilson asks the obvious question: then why? Why did House persist? And words I never would have imagined we’d hear from House’s mouth come out: “Because I don’t know.”
As House leaves, Wilson asks if he’s going to follow up with Eve. “One day, one room,” he replies. I guess that’s a no.
The next episode of House airs Tuesday, Feb. 6 at 9 p.m. on FOX.
Glad to see you liked this episode Diane, I like knowing that someone besides me liked it before heading to twop and reading the not so positive comments lol. From what I had heard about this episode I wasn’t expecting to like it, and maybe the low expectations are why I liked it so much. I was afraid they were gunna try and explain House with the abuse and therefore simplify him, but I ended up impressed with how they did it. I guess I should have more faith.
I was expecting funny though, and funny is what I got, so I’m happy.
I, too, liked this ep very much; not your typical “House” and I really enjoyed the change! It seems that House can only open up to strangers and show a softer side when he’s alone with a patient. I was amazed at the “not positive” comments on TWOP; but maybe after Tritter everyone was expecting/hoping for a regular ep and this threw them for a loop.
I very much enjoyed the break from the usual “diagnostics” type of show.
The great thing about the writing in this show is that bias of the writer(s) hardly ever shows through. When philosophies are discussed, both sides are presented even-handedly and with as much logic and passion as a proponent of that side of the philosophy would hope to have. I was very impressed with the dialogue in the park concerning whether life has any meaning, for instance.
House realizes, of course, that Cuddy can’t really send him to jail without going there herself. Thus, she HAS to resort to “you owe me” and House’s odd moral code has him agreeing, but still looking to avoid what she considers payment. Great stuff!
And I hope now we can have a run of new episodes every week without a break for quite a while, please.
There’s only supposed to be two new episodes in a row after this then a gap until a yet-to-be scheduled run in March. Oh well, that’s not too bad, I guess, so I won’t compain tooooo much.
Great review, as always.
My Dad, not a very vocal TV watcher, came up with a great potential metaphor after watching this. Keeping the title, “One Day, One Room” in mind he suggested that this episode was a glimpse into one of the many rooms in House’s “house.”
Such a complex character obviously compartmentalizes. What happens when the doors are thrown open? And excellent episode such as this. 🙂
I was a big fan as well. Question: What is this TWOP people are talking about, with the negative comments? Just curious.
Television Without Pity aka TWoP. Apparently many posters there have no pity for this episode.
# John the Shipper Says:
January 31st, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I don’t get why some people liked the House plot, but not the Cameron plot. They go hand in hand.
House gets a patient that’s just like Cameron. She’s a damaged but idealistic young woman who forges an immediate but initially incomprehensible attachment to House. House lets his guard down for once and discovers that their shared pain connects them.
Cameron gets a patient who’s just like House. He’s an older man with a scruffy chin who clings to his pain as part of his self-criticism. Cameron for once has to stop trying to fix everything and just deal with the presence of pain.
Between the almost surreal (to me) parallelism and the fact that House and his patient went for a walk away from the building, I half expected that the whole episode would be a dream.
Taken from http://politedissent.com/archives/1549
John hasn’t met the rabid Cameron-hating TWoPers or he wouldn’t be puzzled.
The parallels are there, but I think it’s way, way too strong to say cancer guy is just like House, Maybe House with no job and no Vicodin and no rationality … which is no House at all, in my books. The differences are what bring more meaning, I think.
Namaste on the Blogcritics version has an interesting take:
the parallels between House and the cancer guy, both of whom were treated ill by their fathers and their two choices — the one who “did something” to change his outcome (House, of course) and the other who lived down to his father’s expectations until he had nothing left to do but die
I’d say Eve is hardly just like Cameron either, but I definitely felt echoes of the early days of House and Cameron, when it felt like two damaged people drawn to each other. Another commenter on Blogcritics felt the episode didn’t hold together because we never had a big reveal about why she chose him, but that’s more than enough for me.
Thank you for this excellent review/analysis of this superb episode. You really shed much needed light on this complex show. The rather shallow rants on TWOP really missed the boat on this complicated and courageous episode which stripped away yet another layer to House’s character.
While I got the parallel of the Cameron/cancer guy storyline to House’s interactions with Eve, I thought the Cameron plot was weaker in all aspects. Neither Cameron nor the homeless man were presented as characters evoking any strong interest and on re-watching I fast-forward through those boring parts to get back to House and his twisted, damaged soul. In addition, the delicious and meaningful interactions of Cuddy and House made this an all-around superior episode for me.
Yes, absolutely, that was a great episode. It’s exactly the kind of episode I watch this show for. And after the oh-so-long time without my fix and the disappointment of ‘Words and Deeds’ (which I still consider as the worst that this series has to show), I can safely say I’m incredibly satisfied.
And the review is spot on. Good job.
I loved this episode too, as you say, it was one of those where you get to see through one of those gaping holes in House’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude.
One thing did bother me, though. He admits it was his dad who abused him, yet when his parents came to visit at the hospital, House sat at the table and talked with them, albeit rather coldly. But if my father had abused me like House describes, I would not even sit at the table with him, let alone speak to him. I thought that was a bit odd.
“I would not even sit at the table with him, let alone speak to him. I thought that was a bit odd. “
which is why i’m so skeptical about his “reveal”
It was a great episode.
My take on it was more along the lines of the type of abuse. He alludes to his father being a strict disiplinarine. Where does that bleed into abuse. In our generation the line was far away from where it is now. Spanking, paddling, making him sleep outside, do we consider it abuse or just cruel.
As a child of bad parenting you accept their faults, it may not be “right” but it is what you do, you make the choice. He says in the ep. when his parents are there that they seem like nice people and they are. He probably believes that.
I think the most telling thing in the ep. was the fact that when asked this question, he out right refused the proposal to discuss the shooting. That would be something BAD in his past. Is it too soon, has he not processed and compartmentalized it enough to really talk about it. She was raped, he was shot. These are both violent attacks on you, leaving you helpless. That seems like a more direct correlation to what she was going through. Why drag out the distant past.
I don’t know, him getting shot never seemed to have any impact -negative anyway- on his life. If anything, it ended up an opportunity to try and fix his leg. Not that he should be thankful for the bullet, of course, but it never seemed nearly as traumatic for him as his past has been rumored to be.
I must echo the words of praise for this wonderful review and analysis of the episode, which touched me in a very personal way. When the ep aired I did something that I’ve never done before… I went online and looked for someplace to talk about it. Unfortunately, most of what I found were the sorts of unsympathetic rants described above, no discussion of the actual themes of the episode.
Rafael said: But if my father had abused me like House describes, I would not even sit at the table with him, let alone speak to him.
I take it from your statement that you have not in fact been abused by your father like House was. The fact is that childhood abuse has deep and complex effects on the personality and emotional makeup of a person, and the relationship between the abused and the abuser is never simple. When your abuser is your father especially, it is not always so simple as just cutting them off, refusing to sit at a table with them, etc. Regardless of what was done, the person remains your father, and you may still crave their love and approval, even while despising them. Sometimes the conflict is never resolved. Sometimes the larger family dynamic makes it difficult to remove yourself from the abuser altogether… notice that House in Daddy’s Boy did in fact try to avoid sitting down with his parents, but the meeting became inevitable. Clearly House has never really confronted his father about the abuse, which makes the situation all the more sticky.
Thanks for that, Gella. I completely agree that it’s terribly simplistic and naive to say that someone abused as a child would cut all ties with the abuser. And this show is rarely simplistic and naive.
I agree with John too – the parallels between House getting shot and Eve getting raped just aren’t there. The story he told about his abuse gave the post-rape feelings he projected onto her much more resonance than anything related to the shooting would have.
No, I haven’t been abused by my father. I do agree that a father abusing a child is emotionally complex than being able to sever ties with the father is not an option for the child. But once the child has grown up, he can decide whether to let his father be a part of his life or not. I would think this depends on the extent and gravity of the abuse.
Naturally, since we know very little about House’s childhood abuse and I haven’t been abused by my father, I’m probably wrong. Perhaps House somehow understands why his father did it or he simply forgives him.
rafael,
I want you to know that I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m just trying to explain to you something that I know about from experience, and still don’t understand.
It is not as simple as the extent of the abuse, nor is it as simple as understanding and/or forgiving. Even as an adult, family ties can hold very strongly, they can even hold a person to their abuser. Abuse, especially over a long period of time at an early age, can severely fuck with a person’s ability to confront their abuser. The problem you are having with this concept is that you are viewing it from the perspective of an adult who has come into adulthood without having been abused, and looking at abuse from the outside, looking at it logically. It seems logical that someone who was abused should be able to, when they are all grown up and independent, say to their abuser “Fuck you, get out of my life” and cut them out. And, some do manage to do so. But for one thing, it is not easy for a child who has grown up knowing abuse as a fundamental and essential part of their relationship with their parent, to separate the abuse from the rest of their experience of the parent, including their love. Even as an adult who knows what abuse is and that it is wrong, emotionally they may still connect the abuse with parental love and be conflicted about severing ties with the abuser. You still love your daddy even if he hit you, because he also took you to museums and taught you to appreciate good food and explained why salt melts ice. You love him even as you despise him, even as you hate him, and even though there is no longer physical danger you still fear confrontation because you don’t know what that confrontation will reveal about him or about you, or what if anything will change about your relationship with him. And besides which, cutting off your father completely also means cutting off the rest of his family, which is the rest of your family. That is a huge HUGE sacrifice to make and makes it all very much more complicated than you suggest.
Does this make a little bit of sense?
[Diane, por favor no es necesario que traduzcas esto, no pude contener la verborragia]
Llego un poco tarde, pero quería compartir mi entusiasmo por este fantástico episodio. Como ya han dicho antes otros bloggers, es todo lo que uno podría desear de un capítulo de House: excelente tema, inteligentemente tratado, fantásticas actuaciones y una notable dirección de mi compatriota argentino Juan José Campanella.
Además de tu perspicaz reseña, Diane, agradezco especialmente la profunda reflexión de Gella y todas las lecturas que se han hecho sobre los paralelismos entre los dos plots del capítulo. Es un gran acierto de David Shore al no ofrecernos conexiones simples entre las dos historias, sus contactos no son simétricos ni precisos, pero justamente creo que se juega con la semejanza y la diferencia para hacer el argumento más interesante y atractivo. Uno de los mejores aciertos de la serie es que (en sus mejores capítulos) trata al público como personas pensantes, no necesita darle las respuestas, ni las conexiones y las interpretaciones ya digeridas, sino que espera que el espectador saque sus propias conclusiones. Además, no supone que haya una sola verdad o interpretación de los hechos y acciones de los personajes. Como dice aquí House en un momento, no interesan las respuestas, sino las preguntas. ¿No estamos viviendo una época dorada con excelentes productos televisivos? Or it`s just me…?
Julia tells me not to bother translating, but here’s a brief recap … she loved the episode, Gella’s comments, the director was a fellow Argentinian, it’s a credit to David Shore that the connections between the two abuse stories weren’t exact but connections could be made that added depth and interest to the story, the show treats its audience as intelligent and there isn’t one truth or way to look at the characters, etc. Then she adds that we’re living in a golden age of TV, or is that just her?
Sorry, Julia, I had to at least give the flavour of the comment! I agree – House is obviously my personal golden child, but even among the shows that don’t appeal to me personally, there’s a lot of quality TV out there to choose from.
Yes, Gella, that does make some sense. I suppose I am being too logical, but I still find it hard to believe that, despite how much abuse can fuck with you, once you are an adult your perception of what went on when you were a child should be a lot clearer. This should at least have an effect on your relationship with your father – you should question whether he’s OK in the head, whether you can still talk to him naturally, as if nothing had happened.
Still, you are perfectly right in saying that I simply don’t know what it’s like, so it would be arrogant of me to take this stance without doubting it.
Diane, hablas Español fluido?
Rafael,
clearly House does not have a normal or good relationship with his father. He can’t talk to him as though nothing happened. First he tries to avoid talking to him at all, and when he can’t, he is short and sarcastic and hardly makes eye contact except to glare with cold disbelief when he’s told he doesn’t know how lucky he is. Had his father come alone, I wonder if he would have sat down with him at all. What I read from the circumstances was that he did it primarily for his mother’s benefit, because she hates conflict… and also perhaps partially in reaction to his father’s dig about things being “out of control,” an implication that if House can’t get away for a moment to have a sandwich with his parents, he must not be handling things right or well… he must be screwing up.
Nothing is “normal” about Greg’s relationship to his father… he readily admits that he hates him… though not to his father directly. He clearly realizes that there is something wrong with the man… when House is talking to Eve, telling her that it is not her fault, saying that “none of this says anything about you, some jerk hurt you is all,” he’s talking to himself too about his father’s abuse. But having a mother whom you love and who hates conflict, and who is still married to your abuser, is in itself a pretty big factor in how the thing will bear itself out. I’s bet that if House’s mother died tomorrow, House would be telling his father off two seconds after she went in the ground. House realizes that he was abused and knows intellectually that the abuse was not his fault. That is further than many victims of childhood abuse *ever* get.
Gella, you write very convincingly. You’re perfectly right and now I do see how strained the relationship with his father is. Much more than I initially noticed when I watched the episode.
Gracias, Diane, otra vez, y perdón por haberte dado más trabajo…
La última respuesta de Gella es exactamente lo que hubiera querido escribir.
Rafael, me alegro de que hayas aceptado su punto de vista, así como que hayas comenzado con la discusión del asunto. (Habrás podido ver lo bien que Diane comprende y traduce el español, un aspecto más para apreciarla!)