House: Lucky Thirteen
By fred | October 22, 2008
(S05E05) House is and has always been a character-driven series, and very unsurprisingly the main character who does drive the show is no other than Doctor Gregory House himself, of course. Yet, he’s not the only one to matter, and often we do find out more about his team, especially as he himself loves to find out everything there is to find about them, even using services from a P.I. to achieve so.
House has a new team now, and we’ve been following those people from their very first days when they weren’t yet part of said team. Yet, that doesn’t mean we know a lot about them and who they are. Take Thirteen for instance, the mysterious and gorgeous Thirteen has always been a mystery, and even though some have started to actually refer to her as Dr. Hadley, we don’t know much about her.
What we did know, was that she was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and that it is progressing faster than she would have hoped it would. That’s the main and almost only thing we did know about her, and - not surprisingly - that also is what defines most of her life at this point.
She was the central element of this episode, so much that the medical case wasn’t really all that interesting. Just like Spencer used Thirteen to get to House, because she was into his “huge, throbbing.. diagnostic skills“, writers used this to get into Thirteen’s life and head. Once again, for a moment, the patient’s condition was also a reflection of Thirteen’s and that was its only purpose, really.
She is scared, of course, scared and lonely. As House pointed out, she’s on a downward spiral of destruction and she isn’t going to stop, and this could affect her work. Actually it did already, when Cuddy found her auto-medicating herself after a night out, instead of being with House and the rest of the team, trying to save the patient’s life. It was a shock to see House fire her, but then of course I’m not sure many really bought that she would actually leave the show.
It could have happened, sure, after all some of her predecessors were fired, but they’re also still around. It was hard to believe she would be let go just like that, and what made it even harder was the simple fact that she was still around, not just by the patient’s side but also helping House and his team, working differentials, etc But there was a reason for that, for House allowing Thirteen to remain involved in the case : he was actually testing her, of course.
As soon as House found out that the patient spent the night with Thirteen, he was interested in the case. In fact, I was surprised Cameron didn’t bother to mention that herself to House, because she knows him, and she had to know that whatever she has, even if she had nothing, her and Thirteen having spent the night together would have been enough to get House to take the case.
That there was actually a case, well, as House said himself : “Penthouse Forum meets medical mystery. Maybe there is a God!” He was going to have fun with this, we knew it right from the beginning, and so did Thirteen. She even knew he would be looking for the first excuse to go and visit her place. As always House was having fun but also trying to find out what she was possibly hiding (from him). He did not find it, Foreman did, but the way things evolved made it clear enough that House didn’t need it to know where Thirteen was.
He knew in what state of mind she was, he knew it could have and did had an effect on her work, but he needed to know whether or not she still cared about cases, and solving cases, about her career, he needed to know if she was looking for someone to save, or a case to solve, more importantly he had to know if she was falling for the girl, and the diagnosis. Because her involvement was with the diagnosis and not the patient, House was confident that he could still use her, she could still, despite her auto-destructive behavior, be helpful on the team.
In other news, Cameron was barely seen, Chase didn’t had much more to do, and Foreman is boring — What else is new? I guess I could be fine with things not evolving from the way they are, but that’s quite an under-use of Jesse Spencer and Jenifer Morrison and you gotta wonder why even keep them around.
Speaking of under-use, Lucas was back. Now that Wilson is back at the hospital, House needed to see whether or not things between them were actually really back to the way they were before. And when Wilson was obviously lying to him, the P.I. found his way back. Although this time, he was much less present and didn’t really brought anything to the table. Not that I dislike him, but now that Wilson is back I don’t think we need to keep Lucas on the payroll. It’s not like House ever needed a P.I. before to do his dirty work…
Wilson was lying about House, and he was also playing him. While the drugs were a bit too much, but also intended to tell House what was going on, falling in love with a prostitute totally worked. House didn’t even questioned it one second, because it was exactly the kind of things he’d expect from Wilson, who went as far as using Amber’s name to sell his lies. Very well done. Of course that didn’t explain the lie, and on that part again, he beat House.
Because it’s only once Cuddy was ready to let more people know about it that Wilson caved in, before that both he and Cuddy managed to keep it from House : After having tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant, and she’s now adopting a baby. House clearly didn’t see that shocking news coming, and did not even congratulate her. All he had to say, again, was that “If you’re happy, I’m…”
In the end we’re all back in the same place, Thirteen still has her job and her one-night-stand, the bromance between Wilson and House is fully back, nothing’s changed really. Except for Cuddy’s baby of course, and I do wonder how that will play in the rest of the season. All in all another really good episode of House, and a really good performance by hottie Olivia Wilde.
What did you think of this episode ? When did you knew Wilson was playing House ? What more could anyone want but “another life saved by girl on girl action” ? Anyone else waiting for a Kutner-centric episode ?
