TV Review: House 8.19, "The C Word"
This episode’s medical mystery was a snoozer and the Wilson/House story wasn’t anything like what it should have been...
rating: 2
(WARNING: Significant spoilers follow!) So here we have an episode for which I had very high hopes. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) has cancer and House (Hugh Laurie) is going to help treat him in a fairly illegal, or at least very improper, fashion. I had visions of many good, strong, perhaps even honest, conversations between the two and high hopes for one of the best episode of the series. Instead what I got was a bit of meh. The medical case this week left me supremely disinterested. We have a little girl who has a genetic defect. This defect is likely to kill her before she turns twenty. She suffers a fall from a carousel and the team gets involved, as does the girls mother, who is a doctor herself. When the team investigates, they learn that the woman has been treating her daughter with an experimental drug, they learn that the parents fight a lot and they learn, eventually, whats killing her. Im not sure why she was even allowed onto the case, given that Im pretty sure thats a huge ethics violation, and once the team learned she was experimenting on her daughter it really stopped making sense that shed be involved in anything beyond the realm of a normal, non-medical professional parent. But regardless, all of this really failed to hold my attention. Neither the girl, the parents nor the case were even remotely interesting to me and were stealing time away from what should have been the primary focus of the episode. Sadly, when the episode did turns its focus to that would-be primary story, it also failed to deliver, suffering from, if anything, a lack of ambition. What should have been an examination of exactly why these two men stay by each other, and how they really feel about one another, especially from Houses point of view, justwasnt. There really wasnt much there at all beyond a little banter and then Wilson throwing up. It was nice to see House risking it all to save his friend, but it felt greatly like a been there, done that, sort of thing. Basically everything we saw, really, was just a rehash of what we already knew about the two. We learned nothing new and that was very disappointing. Normally I try to go the distance on these reviews and do at least 600 800 words. But here (right at the word here, in fact), I hit the 400 word mark and realize that I have nothing further to say. This episodes medical mystery was a snoozer and the Wilson/House story wasnt anything like what it should have been, and thats a pity give that, as they like to remind us, theres only three episodes left.