I’m probably overthinking this movie, but aside from the funny gag, I’ve always seen Abner’s hallucinations as him projecting his fear of his mother onto other people.
As someone who struggles to connect with people because of social anxiety and general weirdness, I feel like a lot of that comes from judging others through the prism of my parents? I think? Cause I'm afraid I'll be treated the same way.
So The Thinker trying to convince Polkie here that his teammates see him the way his mother really hits close to home for me.
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something I really love about all the moments where house will just randomly praise foreman in an oddly sincere way is how confused foreman looks after. because like. he’s not unused to praise, we know marty hamilton used to, but you know what he isn’t used to? having it mean something. having it come from a doctor like house who is so often so dismissive, which means that when he actually gets praised he knows that he must actually deserve it which ridiculously disorientates foreman and his imposter syndrome and his insecurities. and i think for all we know that house likes foreman best, i think he also knows that maybe foreman needs a little more encouragement than the others to not lose his nerve. this is a teaching hospital after all and i think that maybe this is a little under discussed part of him trying to teach foreman to stay confident. also my forehouse so yk
not a hill I'm willing to die on today but house didn't do All That to save amber just because she was wilson's girlfriend. cmon. it's obvious that he cared about amber beyond her dating wilson.
I think a big part of his motivation for risking his life multiple times to figure it out came from feeling guilty about it. Not only Wilson initially blames House for it, House also blames House for it - and isn't that why he's hallucinating her still, seasons later? Her and Kutner, because he feels responsible for both of their deaths, Amber's more so than Kutner's. That's my poor take on it at least, lol
i don’t think you’re wrong — he’s very guilty. but also: house likes amber. he cares about her. he wanted to hire her; he enjoyed fucking with her. he treated her like an equal and peer, where he tends to treat most employees (certainly in s4 the rest of the new team, 13 included) as underlings. as unequal. he respected her, he defended her to cuddy. he was attracted to amber, at least subconsciously; he saw her as himself, a version of himself, young and undamaged (and let’s not forget that this is also why he likes foreman so much, all the lines you can draw between the three of them).
yes he feels guilty. but it’s disingenuous to make it all about guilt, all about that one single night and wilson, when amber was a real living woman and someone house cared about. someone he liked before he ever had a reason for guilt.
Yeah I agree! Amber, for instance, is one of the very few people I think House actually reapected, exactly like you said. They were aort of on the same level so much so that they could headbutt over things (such as custody over Wilson) and both enjoy it. I guess that plays into the hallucinations later on as well? House respecting Amber and her opinion so he ends up hallucinating her giving him advice (obviously that's not the real Amber, and sometimes that advice is "kill Chase" but maybe on a basic level).
I guess it's a combination of all three things at the end of the day, his love for Wilson, his liking of Amber, and, connected to both, the guilt. And I definitely agree it's unhelpful to only focus on one of these three, especially with a show as nuanced and fascinating as House.
i think the fundamental difference between amber and house is in how they view the game.
this is not to say the game as in the hiring games specifically. The Game is more of a code for institution; for medicine, for society, for ability, for gender, for perception. but of course, the hiring games work as a microcosm of this.
house sees an institution, a system, and wants to break it completely. he sees the system and policy of hiring new fellows, and he makes a game out of it; hiring 40 fellows and eliminating them, rather than just hiring 3. he sees the expectation of a doctor — to be nice, to care outwardly — and he rejects it completely, opting to be as detached as possible.
amber sees an institution, a system, and wants to win at it. she wants to not only succeed in whatever the system aims to do, what it expects, but she wants to excel, she wants to be the best, she wants to win. the hiring games is a competition (and thus, another institution, within amber’s logic), so she not only wants to be a good doctor, but to be the best doctor (think You Don't Want To Know) — the best at the game. and as house tells her in Games, she played it better than anyone.
but that is exactly why house doesn’t hire amber. amber is a great doctor; she comes to many correct conclusions, she helps out greatly in getting the diagnosis, and she is incredibly dedicated to getting the answer. her firing has nothing to do with her competence as a doctor, but instead with her willingness to play the game.
amber has this line about “rebellion without a purpose”, so i think it makes sense to call what she’s doing rebellion with a purpose; the purpose being The Game. yes she does rebel — she lies, she withholds, she doesn’t act the way she is ‘supposed to’ — but it is all ultimately for the sake of playing the game, of winning the game. as she says, “Results are the only thing that matters.” she is ultimately serving the institution of the game, even if her methods may look rebellious from the outside.
house tells cole, when he fires him in You Don’t Want To Know that “The whole point of this [the game of underwear stealing in that episode] was to subvert Cuddy.” this, really, is the thesis of The Games as a whole; the whole point is to subvert. what amber is doing isn’t subversion, it’s obedience to the highest level. ruthless obedience to a made-up, arbitrary, “game” of an institution, but obedience nonetheless. just because amber’s obedience is served on a cutthroat platter doesn’t mean that it isn’t obedience to the system.
house does not want this in a doctor. house wants people who, yes, are going to work for him and listen to him, but also are able to be wrong, to lose; to (when necessary) play the game and not come out on top. this idea is something that is terrifying to amber, because the way that she, as a person, works is by understanding the game; the system; the institution, and mastering it. it’s key to how she understands the world, not just medicine, not just the Hiring Games. she can’t understand how the patient could be happy, knowing that he’s ‘a loser’/purposeless; she can’t understand how her ruthlessness could be a detriment outside of the Hiring Games; she can’t understand.
ultimately, the reason house fires amber is because he wants people who subvert and rebel against the system, not those who master it — and amber has, definitely, mastered it.
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"how do you fix something if you don't look at it?" is one of my lines in this whole show!
happy season finale!!! stay tuned for my traditional season review/wrap-up post coming (sometime) after this one.
while this is no 2x24 "no reason," i think this finale is an unsung hero, and the scarce moments leading up to house firing chase never fail to put a pit in my stomach. AND what a hell of a setup for season 4!!! but i'll talk about all of that more below, along with more characterizations of house as a dethroned deific figure to the 3 fellows.
i think the heart of 3x24's conflict comes from the unique parallel drawn between house and the patient marina's husband, esteban. during her MRI with cameron, marina explains esteban's ethos regarding prayer: "he refuses to pray or worry. he believe if you don't have one, you don't need the other." she explains this after taking off her crucifix necklace for the procedure, implying that marina is deeply religious, but not her husband.
esteban believes that he can and should take temporal matters - like getting himself and marina to the US under horribly dangerous conditions - into his own hands. he treats prayer, as we see later in the episode, as a last-ditch and rarely effect resort. house has his own equivalent of this belief, too; he will puzzle out the case before he ever considers faith and prayer. i think this is why he can build such solidarity with esteban, and why house makes a rare visit to the chapel in good faith (LOL); he knows that this isn't what esteban wants to do, only that it's his last resort.
seeing esteban deconstructing his own beliefs in his time of need demands introspection of house, however. by this point in the episode, house has effectively alienated everybody - chase, foreman, and (soon) cameron. thinking back to 3x07, he has, in fact, pushed "till it breaks." introspection would therefore imply that he investigate the real "human error" afoot here: his own interpersonal failure.
this is why one of foreman's lines during the diagnostic process is so exciting to me: he announces that "it is possible to have the same symptom for 2 different reasons." just like house and esteban - a dissolution of faith because of their unique life experiences!!
and it's not for nothing that wilson is the one to formally announce the episode title to house. invoking another angel-over-the-shoulder moment, except this time house is watching wilson work, pestering his conscience for advice that he doesn't really want to hear in the first place: "of course it's human error. you don't want foreman to have made a mistake because...that would put a crimp in your brilliant plan of keeping him by having a breakdown and firing chase."
the human error wilson is harping on is how marina went into cardiac arrest during a procedure, eventually having to be placed on bypass and presumed dead. barring any other medical explanation, it makes sense that foreman messed up the test, until house disproves this by finding a congenital defect in marina's heart that explains her freakish resurrection.
contrary to wilson's insistence, it wasn't human error; it's a flaw in "god's" creation; it's certainly not house's error, either. this reminds me a bit of 3x01 and 3x02 where he did, in fact, cure the patient, but they kept this from him in order to deescalate his mounting god complex.
it's this deific revelation that, i think, gives house the vehemently false impression that he's ready for change at the end of the episode. marina's heart restarting is a clever way of implying a complete emotional transformation.
to continue with the season's long theme of "what is meaning?" 3x24 features the discovery of the answer, but the failure to uphold it. everyone leaving house highlights that it's those very people, those relationships, that give life meaning, yet house spends a lot of season 3 hyper-focused on himself, to his detriment, forgoing the lesson that cuddy and wilson intended to teach him from day 1.
house's decision to change isn't a bad or completely disingenuous one, of course. the guitar detail at the end is a lovely and understated way to close out a pretty bombastic season. but when house talks with esteban at the end about how he's just lost his entire team, esteban not only looks fondly on his wife, who he has NOT lost because he did NOT give up on her, but he also seems to understand what lurks beneath house's facade: worry.
"so, they all quit. it's very hard to lose your people. must be very upset...but you're not?"
esteban is disbelieving here, and i am, too. even without what i know about season 4, this sudden transition seems too good to be true, especially after the blow out between him and foreman. house is changing, alright, but it's hardly for the better. it's hardly in the name of what gives life meaning: other people.
that's why i highlighted esteban's line at the beginning: "how can you fix something if you don't look at it?" to avoid introspection, to avoid admitting that he cares about people, house shoves them all away. he won't look at the problem; he abandons it completely. he won't look at himself.
like i've alluded to, this refusal to look inward has disastrous consequences! house commits Many A Human Error in 3x24! in this "breakdown," to use wilson's words, house dethrones himself as the deity the show has positioned him as all along. this was already being majorly shaken (like in 3x09 and 3x10, especially), but one look at chase while he's being fired lets you know that things are fundamentally different now.
this is needless punishment and blatant favoritism. foreman mouths off to house all the time, as well as cameron and chase, but foreman having the favorite spot on lock undoes everything. not criticizing foreman here - they all should yell @ house to their hearts' content all day, every day. i can't help but think back to 2x08, one of house's most distinct moments of solidarity with chase, and how, through everything, chase still banked on that bond he assumed they had, one that would guide chase out of the darkest moments.
what's extra impactful about this moment of finality and alienation between house and chase for me is the record we have of chase's contentment with existential uncertainty. while he does everything and then some to preserve his temporal conditions (i.e., his self-preservation instincts in the workplace leading him to traitor behavior sometimes), he's expressed several times his fluidity in faith/spiritual and religious beliefs. he's such an interestingly syncretic character, and The Episode Of All Time (2x19, "house vs. god"), speaks to this.
if you'll allow me the several 2 dollar words lol - house was the ultimate meeting-point of temporal materiality and non-secular existentialism for chase. he represented both his work and his creed, something that chase always needs UNTIL NOW. he's without belief now. you'd think this would propel him into similar, symbolic atheism as house, but, with knowledge of future seasons under our belts...
does he or does he not look a little guilty here btw.
and what's extra impactful for me about cameron's departure is that she has learned the lesson. she has adopted the heart of meaning-making - relationships and love with the people around her - into her moral ethos, her unwavering compass, and removes herself from her search for goodness in house. she knows it's in there, but she also sees true love and goodness elsewhere (with chase and beyond). that she's the last fellow to formally leave is an unexpected gut-punch, and i think reaffirmed to casual audiences (i.e., people who aren't as insane as we are) that guess what?! she is, in fact, a fully-fledged out person, and she won't be molded by house.
"i've gotten all that i can from this job" = she's (rightfully) given up on house in this capacity.
"i expect you to do what you always do. i expect you to make a joke and go on. i expect you to be just fine."
twisting the knife with a refrain of "people don't change" coming from the fellow who was the most devoted to finding goodness in house is SO GOOD.
re: the wonderful chameron of it all, i don't have many intelligent things to say about them FINALLY being together. maybe none at all. but how chase says "hi" when she shows up at his door gets me teary-eyed every time. as far as we know with seasons 1-3 context, it seems like they can flourish now that they're out from house's thumb, which is wonderful for them and double-damning for house.
i fucking love tuesdays.
lastly, i want to break containment again in order to properly loop cuddy into this recap. i've already mentioned in other posts how crazy the 3x24 and 4x16 connections are (and i know 4x16 was unplanned because of the writers' strike), and this one scene in particular with house and cuddy looks and feels so much like the one between cuddy and wilson in 4x16. yet they both yield fundamentally different results based on the premise of "human error."
at the point of the episode where cuddy advises house to let marina die, she, too, has an injured sense of belief in him, though it's way kinder and sympathetic than the fellows'. she feels for him, which is why she insists that he give esteban the news. she, too, believes in the human error, but factors it in as an inevitable part of life. house's routine violations of her advice uproot this, much like 3x01.
4x16, meanwhile, features the inverse in almost every way. cuddy appeals to wilson because wilson's keeping of amber on bypass is cruel and useless. unlike with marina, there is no medical secret to uncover that will make everything undo itself. what kills amber is a fact of the universe's cruel random chance, like marina's congenital heart problem, but this one can't be undone because it's out of house's purview. there is human error afoot - wilson's - and yet, even if he'd solved those errors, it didn't matter. cuddy assures wilson of this while she advises him to do what's right.
wait actually my final real point is house's insistence that he doesn't care about marina. that he doesn't care about the outcome of the case. that he has no reason to NOT pull the plug apart from the puzzle. this begs my favorite wilson question about kindness and ends/means: if house's puzzle solving is based in a selfish need for the truth, but engenders medical miracles and life along the way, is it so bad? and doesn't this imply that he does, in fact, care, to cuddy's point?
fake misanthrope. in that way, house hardly ever changes.
i'm a little ashamed that i didn't remember this finale as much as i should have! i really enjoyed it, even if it's outshined by its predecessor a bit. above all, i think it's confirmation of what meaning is, its affirmation that house is still struggling with/to change, and its springboard quality make it an excellent season send off.
this shouldn't be a hot take but i think it is: if house was asked, point blank, "you cannot run this department anymore, pick someone to take over," he would absolutely choose foreman.
he might also say no one and want it closed forever out of spite, or not answer because he doesn't care if he can't be the one running it.
but house isn't weighing points and solves and pros and cons and who deserves it more. and even if he was, he'd probably still pick foreman, because he's been doing that since season one and never fucking stopped. foreman is the one house calls team leader and trusts to run things, foreman is the one house lets walk over him and take over cases, foreman is the one he praises and likes having around and tries to shape and mold into himself.
house has never been trying to play a game of who gets the diagnostics department. he's truly never been remotely protective or possessive of his department: house wants it for himself, it is the job that he wants, but he's perfectly happy in s2 when foreman is in charge, or in s6 when... you know... foreman is in charge, house has no problem with that, only that he's no longer getting his mystery fix. he doesn't give a shit that it's been shut down in s5 or s8; he only cares when it prevents him from working. house isn't possessive! he's not trying to see who gets to inherit his baby, because it was never his baby at all, it was a job that let him do what he wanted. but even if he was invested in the department's future and wanted to make sure the best person and heir received the prize, it still wouldn't matter, because he chose foreman.
between cameron's inability to tell a joke in s1 and her inability to think of metaphors in s3, i feel like we're all sleeping on the fact that she is in fact a huge dorky loser
The “Why Aren’t People Writing Wilson Character Analyses” Analysis
When you ask someone who their favorite House M.D character is, there are three incredibly common answers: House, Wilson, and Chase. All three of these answers make sense; House is the protagonist, Wilson is the best friend to that protagonist, and Chase is one of the original deuteragonist's with the saddest, most fleshed out backstory. While, of course, there are political, societal reasons that these three are the common favorites—all three of them are white men, who we have been conditioned into feeling more empathy for than their non-white, non-male counterparts; Wilson and Chase are both able bodied and conventionally attractive; House, while disabled, is the protagonist, making him far more sympathetic than he would be otherwise—there are just as many solid, textual reasons for this happening, including how the show itself handles the other characters. I am not making this post on a high horse; I got into House because of Chase-centric fanfiction, and Wilson is my current favorite character in the cast. But it has got me to think about something… odd, with these three characters, particularly in the fandom.
House, being the main character, is an infinitely interesting character to dissect. We follow his perspective for most of the episodes, and understand (or are made to think about) the decisions he makes on a more intricate level than most of the other characters. We know far more about Chase and his backstory than we do almost everyone else, and he’s around on and off for a majority for the series, so of course people will pull apart the things he does and why he does them. While I am upset that these two get far more attention than some of the other people in the cast, I get it. I understand why there are so many people out there talking about House or Chase and why they were written the way they were.
But do you know who I don’t see getting these character analyses written about them (at least on Tumblr)? Wilson. If they exist, they are very few and far between, and are never enjoyed enough to show up on my dash. This to me, is very, very interesting. It’s not for a lack of content, a lack of things to talk about when it comes to Wilson; I have gone on multi hour long rants and tangents to my friends about his character, about the things he does and why he does them. And neither is it for a lack of people interested; he is one of the most popular characters in the show, after all. So why is this? Why do people not talk about Wilson?
To me, the answer is obvious: because Wilson is seen as accessory to House, both by the show itself and the fandom.
Of course, every character in House is seen in a similar light; everyone has some sort of connection to House, and since we rarely ever follow a perspective that isn’t his own, we really only see them the way House sees them. But with Wilson, it’s far more apparent. There’s a reason I, despite his importance to the narrative, described him as the “best friend to the protagonist” rather than the solo descriptions I gave House and Chase.
There are so, so many episodes and plots surrounding him and his life in comparison to the rest of the cast—a large portion of the Tritter arc in s3, the end of s4, s5ep17, s6ep10, the latter chunk of s6, etc.—and yet we still know so, so little about him as a person. Cuddy, while having a somewhat mysterious backstory throughout a large portion of the series, is a character we become incredibly familiar with familial-wise during the House/Cuddy arc, and we also follow her life adopting and taking care of Rachel as well as her relationship with Lucas in seasons 5 and 6. We meet Chase’s father; get two whole episodes surrounding him, and learn about his mother and his sister, his life in seminary, his love life with Cameron, etc. We see Foreman’s mother, father, and brother multiple times throughout the series, and he, like Chase, has a whole arc surrounding his relationship with Thirteen. We meet Kutner’s parents following his passing, and Thirteen’s parents are often alluded too—hell, Taub has entire episodes centering around his personal relationships. Sure, we see Wilson’s relationships with Amber and Sam, we meet Bonnie in s3, and we learn about Danny throughout the series. But his unnamed parents and his unnamed brother, or any friends he may have outside Tucker (who we only meet because he’s relevant to a medical case, in the episode that centers Wilson)? We know nothing about them.
And this lack of knowledge, in part, is why I believe Wilson is treated the way he is by the fandom: as accessory to House. I can name on two, maybe three hand the number of Wilson-centric fics I’ve read (as someone who has read maybe over a thousand House M.D fics at this point) that don’t have House actively in the narrative. The only ones in that list that don’t mention House are the ones where Wilson is too young to know who he is. With fanart, it’s a lot easier to draw just Wilson on his own, but the moment he’s put in a scene with another character, 9 out of 10 times it’ll be House. And this is, in and of itself, not a fault of the fans, or even a fault at all; but this insistence on including House in everything Wilson does, in everything Wilson is, has become a problem.
There are many, many pieces of fanfiction that center around Wilson and his issues (in part to patch the fact that the show almost never addresses them) but I’ve noticed that so many of them always wrap back around to House at the end—usually with the two getting together romantically. Which leads me to the second part of my hypothesis as to why Wilson is treated the way he is in fandom spaces: House/Wilson. As someone who has written works surrounding this ship and has actively talked about it ad nauseam to people, I am not bringing it up to bash it. I love Hilson. But I’ve also had direct conversations with people about this show, trying to talk about its contents, only for them to tell me they’re not watching the show for the medical content, or for the direct premise itself; they’re watching it for Hilson. They skip scenes; episodes; entire arcs and plot points, just to see the dynamic House and Wilson have. And that, to me, shows exactly why Wilson is treated the way he is: he’s not his own character with his own agency in a narrative, but the less interesting, less important, pretty boy half in a hollow “old man yaoi” carcass, devoid of plot or importance.
To the fandom, Wilson doesn’t really matter. He’s pretty and he’s tragic, but there’s no reason to think about why he’s tragic or what it means for the narrative, what it means for him and his actions. The only traits people care about are the fact he’s attractive, he’s attentive, and he loves House. Why would we need to treat him like his own character?
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very sweet (and surprisingly still useful) relic of the 2010s house md fandom - a fandom project counting and categorising different aspects of the show.
for example in the show: House had 133 epiphanies, smoked 4 cigars and 5 cigarettes, made 89 visits to wilson's office, only wore a lab coat 9 times, said 223 insults, said the word "idiot" 113 times
video w/ alllllllll of the statistics is at the top of the page