TV Review: HOUSE 8.2, "Transplant"

By Chris Swanson / October 11, 2011

rating: 4.5

So there is one slight problem with my choice to review episodes of House: I€™m not a doctor. I haven€™t gone to medical school. I have a slightly better than layman€™s grasp of certain things involving medicine and biology, but not by much. This can be something of a problem as I sit back and prepare to review the show. Our story picks up not too long after last week€™s episode left off. House (Hugh Laurie), is still in prison, still in solitary. He€™s awakened in the wee hours of the morning with a visitor who turns out to be Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps). Foreman needs House€™s help and has arranged for him to get paroled. House gets to the hospital and finds things have changed. He doesn€™t have his old team anymore, he€™s getting paid minimum wage, he doesn€™t have his old office anymore, and the patient in this case is a pair of lungs in a box. That makes for a fairly neat visual, but I would imagine in reality there€™d probably be a bit more blood and fluids and the like. There€™s something of a timer on this case, since the lungs aren€™t going to last much longer, and there€™s a patient Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), is treating who needs them soon, or she€™s going to die (and boy, does Wilson seem unimpressed when House points out that all he has to do is fix the lungs, and even if Wilson€™s patient dies, they won€™t go to waste; they€™ll just go to the next person on the list). House also meets Park (played by indie film darling Charlyne Yi), a neurologist who is in trouble for having hit her supervisor. That this happened after he grabbed at her backside is something she seems reluctant to discuss. As a result of this little altercation she€™s assigned to act as his assistant. House goes through the usual set of motions as he tries to solve the case. Motions that are, in this instance, somewhat complicated by the fact that he€™s on parole. This means when he goes outside the area he€™s allowed to be in (work and home), to investigate the house of the lung donor, the police take notice and pay a visit. As mentioned, I€™m not a doctor, so most of the medical stuff, though I find it interesting, is beyond me, so I€™ll focus instead on the story and €œsoap opera€ aspects of this episode, which I really enjoyed. It€™s nice to see House brought low and having to deal with the changes that have happened while he€™s been away. I really liked the fact that Wilson made it clear that he doesn€™t really like House at this point and has no interest in being his friend. This causes House more pain than probably anything else in his life, including his leg. Hugh Laurie has always done a good job selling the relationship between House and Wilson, and this was no exception. I also really like, at least so far, the character of Doctor Park. I think there€™s a lot of potential with her, especially in the moments where she stands up to House and pushes back against Foreman. I look forward to seeing what they do with her. What I like somewhat less is the €œreset button€ feel to this episode. By the end of the story, it€™s pretty clear that House is basically where he, and the show, were at the end of the last season, only minus Doctor Cuddy. This isn€™t horribly bad or anything like that, but it does seem to strain credibility and it feels like a lost opportunity to do more with the character and with the show. Despite that, I enjoyed this episode and House remains one of the best dramas on TV. Even if all it does is go back to what it was at the end of the last season, well, that€™s not really all that bad.