TV Review: HOUSE 8.6, “Parents”
Six episodes into what may be the last season of House and everything is pretty much back to normal after the premiere.
rating: 2
Six episodes into what may be the last season of House and everything is pretty much back to normal after the premiere. House (Hugh Laurie), and Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), are friends again, Chase (Jesse Spencer), and Taub (Peter Jacobson), are back and the new people (Charlyne Yi and Odette Annable), have settled in. Everything is as it should be, and that grants a certain sense of comfort, I suppose. But with comfort comes predictability, and in many ways, this episode was about as predictable as they get. Our story begins with a teenager working as a fairly inept party clown. We later learn he wants to be one because his late father was a clown, and he likes the idea of making people laugh, which means that clearly hes never actually seen clowns perform in real life. Anyhow, as mentioned, he sucks. Which doesnt excuse a young boy punching him right in his balloons. This causes the predictable reaction, but then an unexpected one as he suddenly cant move. He ends up in Houses tender care, and the team begins their usual set of diagnostics and wrangling with the family. This wrangling mostly centers around the boy wanting to be a clown and his mother being horrified by the notion. Things get complicated when Houses team pick up on the fact that the late father is not quite dead, and go to have a chat with him. Then we have the usual sort of thing where they go from one wrong conclusion to the next, until, basically by pure luck, they stumble onto the correct answer. House is, of course, also attending to clinic duty, and in this case we get a man who is convinced that hes diabetic. Hes apparently not, from all the tests that have been done, but he thinks he is. This leads to the usual level of House antics in dealing with the man, and eventually his wife, to prove that, no, hes not diabetic. Meantime, Taub is dealing with the fact that his ex-wife and her new beau want to move across the country. This would leave him without access to the daughter he has with her (as opposed to the one he has with someone else. Hilariously they are named Sophie and Sophia, something which shows less wisdom than the names might imply). House, as usual, finds this sort of thing fascinating. He also believes that parents always screw up their child, all the time, every time, and sets out to prove it. He runs up against a roadblock with Adams, who seems to be fairly normal and well-adjusted and says that her parents treated her just fine. This results in the usual level of House antics as he tries to prove otherwise. In the background to all of this, we have Wilson getting tickets to a major boxing match (or boxing game, as Park puts it, in one of the better moments), down in Atlantic City. House is, of course, still on probation and cant go without permission. This results in, again, the usual level of House antics as he tries to get permission to attend. There were some entertaining moments in this episode, but really it just felt like a big paint-by-numbers. The eventual resolution to the illness was odd and more than a bit creepy under the circumstances. It felt like no one was really trying on this episode. Aside from the bits centering around Houses probation, it could have aired in any of the previous seasons, and given that we have a significantly shuffled cast, one would think at least some things would have to be different. But it seemed like everyone, from the writers to the director to the actors, were just phoning it in, and thats never a good thing.