House doesn’t do happy.

I wish I were reviewing any other season of this show.

See, I think the problem is, the House writers got burnt out somewhere around mid-season 4. Now their episode meetings are all like, “Okay, let’s find some crazy patient… like, let’s say, a suicidal guy, but he’s suicidal because he’s in pain, just like House! People will think we’re so clever. And then let’s do something freaky to him, like make his toe fall off!  And let’s send an intern to go on the Internet and find a bunch of tests they can pretend to do. And and and, let’s write some flirty House/Cuddy dialogue – whoops, sorry, we forgot how to do flirty, we’ll go with infantile, that’s close enough – and someone grab an old script from back when Chase and Cameron used to have lines in season 2 and let’s change the order of the words and give them to Taub and Kutner. Then, we can fill up the rest of the time by having Foreman and Thirteen make out for a while. Done! Now, let’s go work on that spec script for The Mentalist so we can get off this boring-ass show!”

I mean, I get that, three seasons in, they wanted to shake things up by shuffling the cast around. I’m totally on board with that, although I wish they’d just released Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer from their contracts instead of forcing the characters into the weird limbo they currently inhabit. But when they were picking their new cast members, they fired and then killed off the most promising contender. And then they took the least interesting member of the new crop and forced her to center stage before she’d ever demonstrated any semblance of personality or appeal (unless you count being pretty, which I don’t). And then some viewers didn’t like season 4, so they wrote a bunch of forced romances into season 5 to appease us, and we can see how that’s turning out.

Anyway, all that said, this week’s episode was better than I’ve come to expect from this show lately.

Our patient is a 13-year-old boy named Jackson with quite a collection of credits for such a young kid, and an intersex condition that his parents haven’t told him about yet. In a highly uncharacteristic move for this show, we first meet Jackson in a dimly-lit tinkly-music flashback to his birth, where a doctor tells Jackson’s distraught parents, “The ambiguous genitalia can be surgically repaired.”

Oh, lordy. I went into this episode hoping the ads had sensationalized this aspect of it because, you know, they’re ads on Fox. And, indeed, the episode itself wasn’t as bad as the ads had led me to fear. But, since it’s never brought up in the script, I’ll point out that the kind of surgery Jackson’s parents decided to have performed on him as an infant is in fact controversial. Maybe these issues weren’t as widely discussed thirteen years ago, I don’t know; but nowadays the Intersex Society of North America encourages parents not to have unnecessary surgeries like these done on babies. It’s considered more humane to let the kid decide when they’re older whether they want to have surgery.

Okay, enough PSA. Back to the show.

Cuddy gives Jackson’s case to House after making House promise not to tell Jackson about his intersex condition. House agrees, since he’s just going to make the minions lie in his stead. After some offensive comments about Jackson from House, Kutner, and even Taub (this show is just determined to make me hate the entire cast), Thirteen decides she knows best and tries to pressure the parents to tell Jackson the truth. After they unsuccessfully try to get her taken off the case (and not just because of the ridiculously short skirt she’s wearing to treat a 13-year-old boy), they finally give in. Jackson gets mad at his parents for lying to him for his entire life, which, well, yeah. Then, the doctors diagnose him with a fatal condition, and his parents are hopping mad at Thirteen for making Jackson hate them when he’s about to die. I’m not totally clear on how any of this is Thirteen’s fault, but it doesn’t matter because whoops! Jackson’s not dying after all. House figures out that all he had was dehydration, complicated by drinking too many energy drinks, complicated by an unnecessary test they ran at Jackson’s parents’ insistence when he was first admitted. And I guess everything is all better with the traumatized Jackson now, because his mom’s agreed to let him take dance classes.

Throughout all of this, House is being weirdly agreeable. At first, most of the characters blow it off. But Wilson knows no one’s slipping House antidepressants, since the show already did that,  so he figures House slept with Cuddy because that’s the only thing Wilson can think of that would make House happy. Hee. Cuddy denies it, and suggests that Wilson take advantage of House’s good mood by trying to get back some of the money House owes him. Hee again.

Also, House does clinic duty and is nice to a stupid guy who thinks his legs and arm are injured because when he presses into them with his finger, it hurts. House deduces that the guy in fact has a broken finger. Hee hee hee. I admit it, I rewound and watched this scene a couple of times. The concept was already funny and the actor, some guy whose big claim to fame is having been in a commercial with Christina Aguilera, was awesome. Hugh Laurie somehow manages not to crack up throughout the scene, and when Cuddy hears that House treated the guy without killing him, she decides that something is indeed wrong with House. She immediately runs to tell Wilson about it, because these people have absolutely nothing better to do with their lives.

Then, House falls asleep and stops breathing, so Foreman rips open his shirt and twists his nipples to wake him up. None of the characters found this funny but I sure did. Wilson and Foreman both decide House must be using heroin (I thought when the Vicodin wasn’t enough House used morphine? Oh, I guess we’re supposed to have forgotten about that). Then we get another funny scene where Foreman calls Wilson while Wilson is having dinner with House and starts yelling over the phone about how House is on heroin while Wilson tries to act natural. House figures out what’s going on in three seconds, and then attempts to demonstrate that he’s not on heroin by doing a shot of bourbon, because apparently one can’t do heroin and bourbon at the same time if one is on this show. Then House pukes and Wilson screams in the middle of the street about how House is on heroin, because that’s always cool to do. House clarifies that he’s actually on prescription methadone, which apparently has a lot of side effects, and Wilson and Cuddy are sure he will die as a result of taking it. But methadone makes House’s pain go away, and I guess it also spontaneously makes his thigh muscle regrow because he now can walk just fine sans cane. And yes, the show already did this too.  Look, David Shore, believe it or not, there are plots in the world that don’t revolve around your characters’ medical conditions or tortured romances.

Cuddy forbids House from using methadone while working at her hospital. So House quits, and shaves, which I guess is significant? I cannot admit I’ve ever paid much attention to House’s facial hair; has he always had that same beard? But more interestingly, House claims he’s interviewing for another job. Now that would be a twist for this show: let’s dump the entire supporting cast and move the setting, and – and I need to stop going down this path since it was clear from the outset that the show had no intention of doing so. Instead, Cuddy lets House keep his job, but she wants to administer the methadone herself. But then House goes off the methadone, because it was the reason he made bad decisions in Jackson’s case, and because the producers already learned when they tried this storyline the first time that House is boring when he’s not limping.

Cuddy, as she always does, makes excuses for him and calls him a genius. (You know, I’m sure there really are people in the world with Cuddy’s inability to make sound judgments who are in positions of comparable power. And that thought scares me a lot.) Then we get a House/Cuddy moment in which she begs him to take the methadone because she likes him better when he’s on it, but he refuses, saying, “This is the only me you get.”

Begin rant:

Look. They had me with the House/Cuddy, and then they lost me.  This is what happens when storylines are forcibly stretched out over an entire season rather than following a more realistic path. Yes, it’s possible to successfully implement a lengthy building-up-to-romance plot. See Jim/Pam in seasons 2 and 3 of The Office for the only example I can think of wherein a believable long-term buildup worked for both the viewers and the characters. But this season of House pushed the House/Cuddy way too hard in those early episodes. And then they gave us a kiss way too early in the arc. Then, apparently, the writers realized that in order to fit with House’s character as established in the 4 seasons, they had to back off. And they backed off so far that it became painful to watch the repeated references to their non-romance in the episodes since.

Not to mention that it’s kind of ruining the show for those of us who have always respected and liked Cuddy as a character who’s emblematic of smart, successful, career-driven women who don’t put up with crap from men, whatever their genius status may be. Because now she’s reduced to groveling at House about coming or not coming or whatever to her baby-naming ceremony and playing stupid-even-for-this-show pranks.

End rant.

Also, this episode has some cutesy Foreman/Thirteen stuff. They’re being super-careful about hiding their relationship because they know House will pick up on the slightest sign. And they also have to keep their relationship a secret from everyone else on the show, because they’re both such unlikeable characters that there is not a single person they can trust not to sell their secret to House. You’d think that might make them realize that there’s something very wrong with their lives, but nah. Kutner and Taub figure out that Thirteen and Foreman are still together based on how Foreman smells, though, and make fun of them for it (and also Kutner makes some more offensive bisexual jokes, which, fun!). But by the end of the episode it’s unclear whether House knows they’re together.

This is stupid. At least it didn’t take up half the show this time.

Meanwhile, Chase, no doubt pissed about having been unjustly sacrificed from Top Chef to save Stefan’s unworthy hide, doesn’t deign to show up in the episode. Neither does Cameron. This makes twice in three episodes that they haven’t appeared, which is a problem for me, because I love Chase and I like Cameron and I neither like nor love any of the other characters on this show anymore (although it’s possible that Cuddy and/or Taub could re-enter my good graces after a well-written episode or two).

Next week – I don’t know what will happen, because this time I managed to stop my DVR before it showed me the promo. But I predict: more longing House/Cuddy glances; more forced Foreman/Thirteen intrigue; three lines of dialogue for Chase and five for Cameron; and more eye-rolling for me.

Season 5, Episode 16: The Softer Side (originally aired February 23, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out A Brand New House by Cameron Cubbison.

For more on House, click here.

House, Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of FOX Broadcasting Company and IMDbPro