The Moralities of House: Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2

House M.D. is back! And with it's return, I'm resuming my series on "The Moralities of House." I'm not the only Catholic who thinks that House M.D. is good television. Recently a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life praised the show in an interview with Zenit.

House is not only good television, it's becoming a phenomenon:

The return of the charmingly arrogant Dr. Gregory House on primetime television was a rousing success for the FOX network. House ran away with the highest ratings Tuesday night with its fourth season premiere.

House came away with 18.1 million viewers and a 7.7 rating/19 share in the 18-49 adult demographic for the 9pm to 10 pm time slot. The Hugh Laurie-led ensemble medical dramedy surged on despite competition from ABC's Dancing with the Stars and NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which opened its ninth season.

House's impressive numbers made it the highest-rated premiere in the pivotal age bracket, for any network thus far in the 2007 fall season. It was FOX's highest rated drama series premiere in almost seven years. [- House M.D. Fan Blog.]

With so many folks watching House, it's important that someone, somewhere on the internet take a look at its content from a Catholic ethical and artistic perspective. And until someone better comes along, I'm filling in. You can read my own essays from last season here. Needless to say, spoilers ahead - so be careful!

Season premier - Alone - 9/25/07:

Last season ended with House losing or firing his three staff doctors. Each of them decided, in their own way, that the medical knowledge and experience they gained by working with House did not outweigh the personal cost they were incurred in terms of their psychological and ethical well-being.

More importantly, they felt themselves beginning to approximate House's own standards in disconcerting ways. They were each becoming more like House, and that's the last thing they wanted to happen. Given this situation, they chose to pursue other paths in the medical profession.

(quicky: the humorous subplot of Wilson's abduction of House's guitar was brilliant. Resuming:)

House, the title character, is now "going it alone" in this first episode of the season. And deny it as he may, he isn't doing very well. His self-sustained solipsism won't allow him to admit to Cuddy or Wilson that he misses his old team, to whom he had unknowingly become attached. More importantly to his medical decision-making process, he now lacks the balancing factors that used to be provided by his more altruistic staff. As a result, his cynicism about the young lady he is trying to treat receives no questioning and it takes him far longer to discover his mistake. He presumes the worse, and has no one around him to presume the best. The ultimate solution to the dilemma - a non-medical one, in this case - is beyond his impressive empirical ability.

The main ethical question in this premier episode of the fourth season is a continuation of the first season's primary theme: "everyone lies." House's primary insight into fallen human nature, however, serves him in good stead only when it operates within the backdrop of his support staff that can reply to him: "no one likes to lie; everyone prefers truth." House is a master of the counter-intuitive, especially when he can prove his ideology through medical facts. At the same time, he is often a slave to the medical findings, and when given a choice, he prefers a medical finding that condemns the patient's virtue rathen than trusting in human goodness.

The boyfriend, for his part, does a good job standing by his girlfriend. He does waver from time to time, but on the whole he trusts the intuitions he has gained from his relationship more than the accusations that House brings into the situation as the case progresses. The mother, on the other hand, is not nearly so trusting. And it's clear from the drama why she isn't: she's had a falling-out with her daughter and no longer knows her well enough to trust her character. Of course, one has to think that a husband probably would have had more confidence in his wife. The boyriend and mother are both, in some sense, guilty of not being close enough to the young women. Her death is somewhat caused by her isolation from a true human community. This fact is dramatically brought out when the audience learns the boyfriend misidentified his own girlfriend when he was trying to rescue her. Neither did her mother notice the mistake.

The final scenes of the medical drama are quite poetic, with the mother and boyfriend tragically discovering that in the midst of their distrust in their daughter/girlfriend, that she had in fact died in another part of the hospital - alone. And in an instance of "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away," simultaneously a previously-forgotten character is given back the girl he thought had died. That's good writing.

Second episode - The Right Stuff - 10/2/07

This episode is split between two overlapping narratives - House trying to hire a new team (and weeding-out the applicants "American Idol-style") and the medical drama of a future NASA pilot with a rare disease that involves her suffering from synesthesia.

I found the applicant review process very witty because it showcases House at his controlling, arbitrary best. His applicant pool is a microcosm of Darwinian selection, ruthless backstabbing and intellectual jousting. But while House does act "outrageously" at times, the general criterion for whether an applicant survives or gets the boot is again ... objective medical fact. Your best chance for success, in the end, is being right. Everything else is a matter of taste. And those with inferior knowledge (who are also less qualified for the job) are forced to compensate for that defect with verbal games and clever trickery (good lucks don't hurt either). I don't think it's too much to claim that this is how much of the world operates, generally speaking.

House does, I think, seriously compromise the best medical interest of his patient. For once he seems to respect his patient's autonomy - and I'm sure the $50k helped. His final defense for not turning her into the NASA medical authorities is I think defensible, but hardly prudent. But more on that soon.

I'm not sure what to make of Wilson's attempts to trick House into thinking he's having visions of his old team, as if that will somehow convince House that he misses his team and had, despite all his claims to the contrary, established a human connection with them. Frankly, I don't think more trickery will help. Reality, not manipulation, is what will get to House in the end. And after all, if it's a game, he'll win it. He's good at every puzzle except his own life.

Speaking of human attachment, House displays a rare moment of kindness at the end of the episode when he allows the older gentleman to stay on as his assistant - even though he is not a licensed doctor. Though House has do to it in his own way, he helps the man fulfill his dream of working with doctors. Similarly, in his encounter with Cameron, House cannot avoid the fact that his primary purpose in hiding the pilot's illness from NASA was his desire to preserve the young woman's dreams. Embarrassed as he may be, House finds fulfillment in good acts. He still tries his best to cover them up, and rationalize his motives as utilitarian and "rational", but there it is.

There's always hope, even for House. He can't help being human, and humans like acting well.