House: You Don’t Want To Know
By fred | November 21, 2007
(S04E08) It’s pretty much always the same with this show, for me. I’m always very excited when I know a new episode is coming, I can’t wait to get to see it because I know that whatever is going to happen during that hour will be yet another great moment of brilliant television. I may not know what will happen, what the case will be or anything, but I know - and, to be honest, I expect - that this will be a blissful moment.
I do feel that this is the greatest show on TV, and as such I do expect a lot from it every week. This for sure does put a lot of pressure on House and his team, because I’m pretty sure I would never be satisfied with a “more-than-okay” episode. Hell no, from House I expect a lot better than that, but the treat is that every time when I’m done watching, I feel like I got even more than I was hoping for.
Seriously, I love this show, and I am pretty sad and pissed about the whole strike going on, not only because I will miss many great shows, starting with this one, but also because I was so waiting to see which one would get me more excited and pleased and thrilled about : House, or Lost.
Anyways, back on this episode. This episode was all about mystery, and “magic”. It was about the magic being gone as soon as the knowledge is out. And it was about the power of knowledge, how to know something, or to not know something actually, can improve your life.
While right on what our favorite doctor loves, this is also something very “anti-House”. Knowing things is something he loves, finding out mysteries and understanding - that’s what he is all about. Whenever House takes a case, he doesn’t care about the patient, he’s not trying to cure or save the patient, that is simply a (possible) symptom of his objective, which is to understand what was going on.
He wants to know whats beneath the surface, what the eyes can’t see, because - as Thirteen put it brilliantly - “because you think that the next answer will change something, maybe make a little less miserable. And you know that when you run out of questions, you don’t just run out of answers, you run out of hope.” Obviously this girl is very much like House in her great ability to read people, cause that was as dead-on a description of House as there can be one.
Different mysteries were mixed together in this episode. First, obviously, we had the new case of the week, we also had the magician refusing to give away any of his tricks. There was also Thirteen, a mystery in herself, and we have to add to that list the mystery of how Big Love got to get Cuddy’s thong.
House has always been intrigued and interested in what he doesn’t know. That’s why earlier this season he tried to “kill himself”. He wanted to see what was there, once your dead, to see if there was actually something or not. This week had nothing as big but it was just as important to him, he wanted to find out how the magic worked. While it was argued that knowing breaks the magic, of course House did not agree. If the magic is gone once the knowledge it out, then there was no magic to begin with.
I really liked how House tried to have the magician to reveal his secret, making analogies with his medial knowledge over the case or his great capacity to read people to explain his way of seeing things, and how for him things needs to be known and understood, or else they don’t make any sense, and as such are not magic but meaningless and useless.
It should also be noted that for once, while he kept his secrets, the patient did not lie. Ever. To anyone. House is always basing all of his work on the assumption that everyone lies, yet while there was many lies and manipulations going on this week, none of it came from the patient, it was all from the doctors.
Which leads us to the challenge of the week in yet another TV reality allusion on the show : get your hands on Cuddy’s thong and decide who’s going to elimination room. This was pretext to learn again about our new doctors and the way they behave. It was interesting to see Taub and Amber to team up, although I have to say I was pretty disappointed in their attempt.
Did they really thing for one second coming with a different one would work ? So all anyone had to do was to go buy one and win ? I don’t think so. It was obvious that House would not just take what they’d bring for granted and find a way to check whether or not this was the real deal.
Speaking of which, I feel pretty stupid that I didn’t see the twist coming sooner. Because it was kind of obvious that he had not only asked her but worked out a deal. How else would he have been able to put his hands on her panties, and more important why would Cuddy have let House find out otherwise ?
So Big Love cheated and broke the rules, only it was House’s rules - and those are not to be broken. I’m not sure this was ever said before hand, but you could figure out yourself that you should not work against him and be Cuddy’s puppet, one Foreman is more than enough. That said, while the explanation given may sound unfair, there’s another way to look at it that makes things just right : the challenge was to get Cuddy’s thong, and not to get caught.
When he decided not to go that way and to work out a deal with her, he also changed the rules a bit : he still should not be caught, only now it wasn’t from her, but from House. Obviously he failed at that, and the punishment was crystal clear : he is gone.
