stunt_muppet

You know how I keep talking about how only two or three TV show episodes have ever made me cry? Tuesday’s House is the newest addition to that list.

Should probably keep this review short and sweet, as I have little relevant to say besides “wah!”. But I’m a big fan of any case where Foreman gets to act like a human being, and this episode had human!caring!angsting!Foreman in spades. He just felt so guilty over the woman he was treating, and his scenes at her bedside as she died…wow. It’s not a side of the show we get to explore all that often, since, of course, House et al usually have POTW patched up by the end of the hour. But House did make an excellent point in his conversation with Foreman: they’re going to end up losing people that normal doctors would be able to save, simply because they won’t think of doing things the easy way. Tears from me.

 

And that was before we got into Mama Foreman. I’m sorry, but Alzheimer’s patients (at least on TV; I know little of the real ones) make me teary. I cannot imagine losing everything you were, every memory of who you had ever been, being unable to recognize people you’ve spent your life with. The thought that that may one day happen to me is the stuff of nightmares, and so when Mama Foreman said “My boy’s named Eric too”, I choked. Damn TV drama is playing me like an ORGAN.

 

The other personal stories: Why, why, why was Wilson ever married to this pushy, obnoxious woman? She got so deeply on my nerves. And, while she did serve as the writers’ attempt to explain why anyone would divorce James Wilson, I have to say I’m not buying it. “He’s there for you until he’s not?” So? So he’s not there to cater to your whims at every hour of every day. So occasionally he has to yoink Dr. House back into the same plane of existence as the rest of us. I hardly think that’s ample reason to divorce the guy. I mean, he’s Wilson.

 

Also, I’m deeply amused that Wilson named his dog (in a sideways sort of way) after House. We’ve gone beyond slashy subtext, folks. We’ve got slashy text now.

 

Also amusing: House’s bizarre obsession over Wilson and Cuddy possibly getting together. It’s driving him absolutely to distraction, this relationship is, and House driven to distraction is oh so fun to watch. I was, at first, a little confused as to why he cared so much about it, but on reflection I figure it must be like having someone move your furniture around while you’re not looking. Your stuff isn’t supposed to move around unless you know about it! What business does it have wandering back and forth without your consent?

 

I cannot be bothered to rage about Chameron this time. Chase, baby, please just find someone with fewer emotional hang-ups. It’ll be better for all involved. 

I don’t think Jim Brass gets the love he deserves. I really don’t. I mention this now because he was excellent in this episode. I love his sarcastic demeanor with the suspects, I love how satisfied he looked when he got them to confess, and I love the face he made every time Doc called him. Priceless. I started to laugh every time that cell phone rang.

 

More points of love: the “mom-and-pop” brothel was quite an interesting setting, and the proprietors were interesting characters – not at all what you’d expect from people who were, technically, pimps. Their double-take when they saw the microphone in the room where they were talking was yet another source of giggles, as were Grissom and Jim’s expressions when they heard their reaction. The other secondary characters were…interesting, of course (although Dreama and the guy with the crossbow struck me as almost too odd), but none of them were quite as memorable as the brothel proprietors. Except maybe for the old guy who kept insisting that his wife had been shot, if only because he made such a nice setup for compassionate!Sara.

 

Also, points for not wrapping this case up neatly. Every single one of the suspects turned out to be responsible for Happy’s death in some way, but what actually killed him was…a collapsed lawn chair. Granted, it was stretching credibility by the end that Happy could possibly have survived all that punishment, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for now. I wouldn’t mind watching that case go to trial. Should be entertaining.

 

In other news, the Gil Grissom Pimp Hat is back in action. And while that was a cute conversation between Grissom and Sara, Grissom’s end of the conversation felt a little bit weird. Was this the same guy who talked about how fascinated he was by deviant behavior in “Slaves of Las Vegas”? The views on sexuality he expressed here seemed bizarrely…normal. But I guess just because he’s interested in deviant behavior doesn’t mean he has to participate in it. Hmm. Things to contemplate.

 

Hodges’ and Greg’s conversation about street prostitutes was a work of brilliance, especially Greg’s increasingly weirded-out expression as the story continues. Poor Hodges. Figures he’d pick the undercover cop. XD I perfectly understand his reasoning, though.  

Holy cheesy crackers, CSI: Miami was good. It’s been far too long since I was able to say that. Far too long indeed. Telling, isn’t it, that what it took to fix this show was the return of Yelina Salas. So simple.

 

Welcome back, Ms. Milos. We’ve missed you. And welcome back, Yelina. Horatio’s missed you.

The scene where Yelina re-enters the show was, incidentally, the absolute best thing about the episode. Bar none. The look on her face as she steps out from behind the car hood is – I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s not a smile, but it looks like it could be. The expression love continues throughout the scene – the raised eyebrow, the half-smile, her interested look after he says “This is Anthony Bryant’s car”. And her WAVE! I don’t know why, but I love the little half-hearted wave she gives him after she walks toward him. See, this is why we needed Yelina back. Sofia Milos is just so much fun to watch.

 

*giggle* Although there are some interesting Horatio faces in this scene too. I’m a fan of how he just stops after he sees Yelina; he has this wonderful blank look on his face. You can almost hear the mental double-take going on.

 

Minor question: if Horatio has apparently been in contact with the Rayette (as I would hope he’d be, before the boy picks up some other toxic father figure), how has he managed to avoid Yelina all this time? Intentional? Or was he perhaps just not thinking about it? Hmm.

 

I managed to care about the case this week! Yaaaay! See, that’s another sign of a good Miami episode. Plenty of plot twists and false starts, and the victims/suspects weren’t morons. The survivor of the house fire was particularly nicely played; her immediate naming of her stalker ex seemed just a little convenient to me, but considering how much she’d lost I found it hard to believe that she’d done this all on purpose. On that note, stalker ex was appropriately icky. Made me uncomfortable all the way on the other side of the TV.

 

Since I’ve already seen next week and the consequences of Ryan’s general foolery, I’m not going to spend too much time commenting on that, other then to say OI. When did he get like this, exactly? Where has Season 3 Ryan gone? I want him back. I know it’s a legitimate character flaw and it improves his character on the whole, but…you know what, I’ll cover this phenomenon in more detail when I get to Mac in “Cold Reveal”, so just mosey over there if you’re curious.

 

Also, I feel like, if his gambling’s going to be played up as such a problem, we should have seen more of it before now. The only mention of it I can remember was “Death Pool 100”; I don’t believe we’ve heard of him gambling since then. And I refuse to believe that we wouldn’t have heard anything about it, or there wouldn’t have been some more minor “warning” problems, between then and now.

 

I didn’t realize just how much I appreciated Stetler until he was gone. Can he and Yelina both come back on a regular basis? I miss him. I love how brusque and no-nonsense he was with Ryan, and, just like in the promos, his “Now get out of the building” made me giggle.

Don’t really care enough to comment on the E/C whatnot going on in this episode, other than that this all feels way too sudden. Please, TPTB, don’t throw in a romantic subplot between the two just because you can. I like their old interactions better. Let’s not ruin a good thing. Oh, and ixnay on Calleigh’s “I cut myself; kiss it and make it better?” routine. Calleigh can take care of herself, and she does not need to dip into damsel-in-distress mode just to flirt with Eric (if that’s what this is even about). If indeed Eric likes her, he liked her even when she was swinging around a harpoon gun and chewing out S3 Ryan. Trust me, hun. He can handle you.

 

One last note; oh, Frank. The world just doesn’t like you this season. Really, what were the odds? XD Very entertaining opener there. And Eric, it’s just not nice to make fun of people’s ruined vehicles. *giggle*

 

Actually, this gives me a rather entertaining ficlet idea. I must be off.

I have to admit, I at first refused to care about the storyline involving Olivia’s long-lost brother. It sounded like bad!fic come to life, and I wanted no part of it, and by that point I still had the bad taste of “Burned” in my mouth and I had had it up to here with Olivia drama.

 

Perhaps, then, a break and some reruns were what I really needed, because I actually liked this episode. The last fifteen minutes in particular were very nicely done and very intense, and the Simon arc wrapped up well, particularly the truth about Olivia’s dad.

 

That was the most interesting part of the episode, really – finding out that Liv’s dad might not be a rapist. So much of Olivia’s personality and attitude toward her job stems from the fact that she was a child of rape; it’s why she joined the Special Victims Unit to begin with. If that had turned out to be false, the toll that revelation would take on Olivia would be huge. She’d have had to rethink so much of who she was. Of course, that didn’t happen, but what an interesting plot arc that would have made. I would have liked to see how her character developed after that.

 

Also, “Florida” finally gave us a real, solid explanation for why Olivia kept protecting Simon. That was the major thing that bothered me in “Philadelphia”; why would Olivia protect a rapist just because they had the same father, especially if she’d never met this guy before in her life? “Florida” made it all a little clearer; she protects Simon because she really, really doesn’t want to believe that he did it. Olivia has struggled with the idea that her father had passed his “violent genes” down to her, that having a rapist as a father has somehow doomed her. If Simon turned out to be a rapist as well, it would confirm her fears that this man had left them both a legacy of violence. No wonder she wanted to think he was innocent.

 

I’m glad he was, by the way. Captain Milfield (spelling?) struck me as iffy from the beginning, and while she was obviously wrong to frame Simon, she emerged as a more sympathetic character here, given what she’d been through. The standoff scene, as I mentioned, was well-played and tense. I didn’t think that Simon would actually shoot, especially once it was revealed that he was not a rapist and probably not a violent person, but the quickly shifting situation and his accusations to Olivia that he’d lied to her kept me interested. Olivia’s the only person he’s trusted with anything because she was the only one who believed he was innocent; I wasn’t sure what he’d do once he learned she’d betrayed that trust.

 

Five-minute rant on the non-presence of Munch and Fin goes here. Sorry. I just have to.

Seriously, NY. How hard can it be to go back and check your own timeline? You’ve got a whole team of writers for expressly this purpose. Stella graduating from the Academy ten years ago flatly contradicts almost everything else we’ve been told about her timeline, including but not limited to how long she’s worked with Mac.

 

That wasn’t the only thing wrong with Stella’s case this episode, though. For starters, while I’m not familiar with Cold Case, Danny Pino got to do almost nothing in this episode, except tag along with Stella. I never got a real impression of his character; he might as well have been some random detective who wandered in. And he dismissed her as a suspect way too early. I mean, Stella had no real, solid proof that she was unconnected to this murder; her ‘argument’ that Valens should drop the case was basically “I’m Stella Bonasera, stupid. Quote me the last time I did anything wrong.”

 

And the sequence where she warns her friend about her upcoming arrest was…I don’t know. It bothered me. How in-character it was is up for debate, but I just don’t see Stella jeopardizing her entire career for someone she was friends with ten years ago but hasn’t seen since. I could see her arguing that the charges be dropped or trying to get her off on a justifiable homicide, but letting her go completely? Something did not taste right about that scene.

 

Also, given the single drop of blood in that locket, what are the odds that that was in the blood sample they picked up? Like I said, I don’t know Cold Case. Maybe they run every drop of blood on the victims’ clothes. But it seems too farfetched.

 

The “fallen angel” case was equally meh. I was interested, simply because of the unusual premise, but I wasn’t invested in the case the way I was with, say, the dead Suicide Girl in “Oedipus Hex” or the dead knight in “What Schemes May Come”. It was more a matter of simple curiosity than anything else. And it gave us the precious few moments of Flack in this episode – the precious few moments, at least, when he wasn’t getting blustered at by Mac.

 

About that. Look, in principle, I like what they’re doing with Mac. I like that they’re making him human by making him wrong. He’s never been wrong up till now. In making Mac so stubbornly convinced of his own moral superiority, they’re giving him a real, convincing character flaw, one that you don’t typically see in a TV hero. The writers are taking quite a risk here in making the show’s main character not only flawed but unlikable, and that risk pays off with a more real, well-rounded character.

 

But that doesn’t mean I’m enjoying sitting through all this sanctimony. Mac, Mac, Mac. You can throw all the accusations you want at Gerrard, but that’s not going to get him to drop the investigation. And your good name does not come before that of the entire department. Yes, maybe the people investigating you are concerned about the public image of the NYPD. And why shouldn’t they be? Regardless of what you did or did not do on that rooftop, it looks like you pushed that guy off the roof. And if Internal Affairs doesn’t investigate this, it’s going to look like the NYPD’s closing ranks, protecting one of their own at the expense of public safety. And that leads to people not trusting the police, which means that people won’t be as willing to cooperate in investigations or (worst-case scenario) will start taking justice into their own hands because they feel that their public servants cannot protect them. So yes, in conclusion, they do have the right to investigate what you did on that rooftop. And your constant tirades are just making you look really, really guilty.

 

Yes, yes, I know why Mac’s doing that in character – he’s always right, he’s always been right, he needs to be right, and he’s throwing out every possible reason he can think of to convince himself that he is right. But as satisfying as it is to have a flawed hero, it will be even more satisfying to see Mac taken down a peg. If nothing else, I want to see how he’ll deal with it.

 

How much you want to bet that absolutely nothing will change, though.