House – The game is a foot

The title of this week’s episode, “Moving the Chains” reminded me of the ends of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem “Fern Hill.” The last lines of the poem are: “Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” The reason why this episode reminds me of the poem is more complicated than the shared word “chains.” At the end of the episode, two young men, two young patients, have to deal with lost and broken dreams. House tells the young vet, “You knocked up a girl. You’re just another guy,” when the kid argues that he was just a guy when he first went to war, but now he is going to be a father.

The young football player wonders what his life will amount to now that he can’t be drafted for the NFL, and House tells him that his life will be the same as everyone else who graduates from college, without the student loans. Bleak? Or just realistic? House is not big on sugarcoating things. He is all about the miseries and realities of life. After all, if someone as brilliant as House is miserable, what right do ordinary mortals have to want happiness?House is, if I may say so, getting better again. Now that all of the staffing changes have been sorted out, the show has resumed its focus on interesting medical cases. The case of the football player was not as interesting as that of the psychopath last week, but his diagnosis was just as tricky as some of those in the earliest seasons: who looks for cases of melanoma on a foot? Particularly the foot of a football player who gets injured regularly, compounded by this particular player’s dark skin.

The football player’s case couldn’t be as interesting, however, as the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Foreman has slowly but surely, over the years, become a standout character. He is, in some ways, universally disliked by his team as a team, but liked by the people as individuals. Cuddy is unsympathetic, usually, but she respects him and got him a higher salary this season, at the expense of his colleagues. We also found out that about the time that Foreman was unraveling earlier this season and at his angriest and most erratic, his mother (who, if you remember from earlier seasons, suffered from dementia) had died. Even though House did not know Foreman’s mother had died, I think Wilson (isn’t Jiminy Wilson really House’s very own Jiminy Cricket?) nailed it when he suggested that House doesn’t want Foreman to make the mistakes House has made with his family. “Family is family,” House says. However, this is a very un-House-like thing to say, given House had to be kidnapped to attend his own father’s [okay, maybe not biological father] funeral.

A parent dying is a huge life watershed that House has dealt with again and again, not only with House’s father, but Chase’s. If you will remember, the day Chase found out that his father  had died, he was so upset and distracted that he inadvertently caused a patient’s death.

House has gotten a lot of flack (including from me) about crossing too many lines between personal and professional on the show, as the characters appear to have no boundary whatsoever between the personal, the private, and the professional. However, what the show is starting to show me, as it repeats these themes like a battering ram, and also as I address the crossover between my own personal and professional lives, is that this boundary is invisible and meaningless. None of us are able to focus or concentrate properly professionally when things are unraveling for us personally. Gregory House, MD, explodes the idea of these boundaries, forcing people to face the personal [Foreman’s brother Marcus (Orlando Jones) out of prison] head on and immediately, faster and in more damaging ways than people are comfortable with, so they can heal and then get back to the main issue at hands, which is: saving people’s lives.

Clacked by Jen Creer
on Feb 01, 2010 @ 22:18 EST5EDT