House: Why It’s Better To Be A Stupid Person

The patient in this week’s episode of House makes the case that being a stupid person is a much more happy existence than is being a smart one. Now I’m certainly no genius, a fact I’m quite proud of, but I’m smart enough to know that the guy is right. Ignorance really is bliss. I’m reminded of a line that Billy Bob Thornton (jesus I never thought I’d be quoting that guy) says in Bandits as Terry Collins: “You know the hardest thing about being smart? I pretty much always know what’s going to happen next. There’s no suspense.” That’s certainly how the patient—James Sidas—feels. Sidas was once a famous intellectual, but when we meet him in the prologue, he’s working as a delivery man and dropping off boxes at a book store. The owner of the store recognizes him and tries to get him to sign a copy of one of his books that he has in stock. Sidas tries to but finds that his hands don’t work. Yikes. Cue the opening credits!

House takes the case with no protest, trying to show Cuddy that he is a new, easygoing man. This of course is a ruse because House wants to get in her pants. At least he’s honest…with himself. The team—consisting of Chase, Taub, Thirteen and Foreman (but minus Cameron because she left the show last week after calling the whambulance)—initially think Sidas is suffering from a rare blood disorder called Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. Yeah, I definitely know what that is…

Now why, if Sidas is such a genius, is he working as a delivery man? Well as he tells Taub, it is because he doesn’t have to think. He fell in love with his wife Dara because she didn’t care about his brains, and decided he would rather be dumb and happy than smart and miserable. He’s dumb not only because of his job but because he has been drinking cough syrup like hot chocolate for years. That, coupled with alcohol, has been damaging his brain and lowering  his IQ for years. Sounds like a pretty good system to me. At any rate, the team starts running the usual battery of tests. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if, for once, the team’s initial diagnosis was right and the treatment lasted five minutes? I mean man, for supposedly the smartest doctors in the galaxy, these guys never get it right the first time!

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to comfort Chase about Cameron leaving him, and Chase just wants to be left alone. This is perhaps the smartest course of action Chase has ever taken. Personally, if I had just succeeded in getting Cameron to haul her sanctimonious ass out of town, I’d be partying like a drunken monkey on Drunken Monkey Day. And yes, I realize that sentence didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I’m writing this thing on an airplane and am desperately trying to block out the screaming babies sitting behind me, so just go with it.

House’s agenda this week: breaking up Cuddy and Lucas. Yeah, I knew he wasn’t going to stand for that for very long, and I say more power to him. As he tells Wilson, he’s really doing them a favor. His reasoning is that either one of two things will happen: Cuddy and Lucas will break up, in which case House is doing them a favor by preventing them from wasting more time with each other, or they’ll stay together, and House’s meddling will actually strengthen their bond. House is banking on the former, even though Wilson tries to talk him out of it. Why? Because that’s Wilson’s job. For once, I’d love to see Wilson go totally on board with House on a completely uncouth and inappropriate mission.

House keeps trying to charm Cuddy but she keeps brushing him off. But he will not be deterred. You gotta give it to him. If nothing else, House is one tenacious dude. Finally, he succeeds in getting Cuddy to invite him over for Thanksgiving dinner at her sister’s house—a vital part of his Secret Evil Master Plan. Except Cuddy outfoxes him and gives him a fake address. Hey, even I find that cold. So what does House do?

He shows up at Lucas’s house and waits for him, a full bottle of tequila in tow. When Lucas gets back, House drunkenly tells him that he loves Cuddy. Of course, House isn’t really drunk, he’s just employing one of the oldest tricks in the book. Lucas eats it up like candy corn and breaks up with Cuddy, saying that he doesn’t want to come between the two of them and their history. Or is Lucas a more formidable force than House gave him credit for?

Taub is also taking flak, from his wife no less, about leaving his plastic surgery practice for the second time and going back to work for House. When he misses Thanksgiving dinner, she starts doing the whole pouty-middle-aged-housewife-passive-aggressive thing. She thinks that Taub has emasculated himself by going back to work for House. So when Chase punches House in the face for causing Cameron to leave (this is actually a ruse, as Chase just wants to make a scene so that everyone will stop trying to comfort him), Taub is quick to snap a photograph with his camera, take it home to his wife and pretend that he did it. What a weasel. And yet, I can’t help but admire him slightly.

More diagnoses and epiphanies and last-minute desperate treatments follow. That’s the House formula. Either you accept it or you don’t. Given all the dildotastic drivel that’s on television these days, I accept it, and am grateful for a show with a modicum of intelligence. And Hugh Laurie still seems like he’s having fun with the role, which is enough for me to keep watching rather happily.

For another take on this episode, read Stephanie Jaar’s review here.

Season 6, Episode 8:  Ignorance is Bliss (originally aired November 23, 2009)

For more on House, click here.

Tuesdays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro