House: I’m Adverse to “Adverse Events”

I’m actually starting to get a little worried about the direction this show is taking. It seems to be more ridiculous by the week. The cases are OK, nothing spectacular, yet nothing ordinary, either. In last night’s episode, “Adverse Events,” the case involved an artist (played by Breckin Meyer) who suddenly was painting things in a rather abstract way, with faces looking all askew. There’s nothing wrong with a painter changing his style, but he didn’t seem to know that he was even doing it. I’ll save you the trouble of reading a lengthy recap – the painter was involved in multiple drug trials, and, coupled with antacids, it created a huge hairball-like mass in his stomach. The mass didn’t allow for the proper dissolving of the meds, and they sometime would up being released all at once or in incorrect dosages, as the hairball let them loose. Frankly, I am still trying to figure out how House (Hugh Laurie) came to the diagnosis, because it just seemed to drop out of the sky.

An Odd Couple
There are a few odd things with the show. We see Jennifer Morrison’s and Jesse Spencer’s names in the opening credits, but we never see Dr. Cameron and only get a quick glimpse of Dr. Chase. Why are these people given star billing if they are virtually invisible lately?

And why are they making Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) to be so stupid? Really now, if you were in charge of a hospital, would you just let anyone get away with trying to break into your desk drawers? I would have called security immediately. But no, they make Cuddy out to be so desperate for male attention that she’ll let anyone just walk all over her. In fact, her response to someone rifling through her desk drawers is to meet him outside of the hospital on an informal date. It’s just not a normal reaction – she should have been leery of him. I find her character is becoming even more annoying and frankly insulting to women everywhere. How she can run a hospital is beyond me.

And House also seems to have let this weird private investigator Lucas (Michael Weston) into his life too easily. In fact, it looks like the PI is just a mirror image of House – both in his being a nosy SOB to his stubbly beard, which doesn’t fit his face as well as Laurie’s does. PI guy is creeping me out.

House has become too consumed with the personal lives of his staff, almost as if he wants to blackmail them with their secrets. Dr. Taub (Peter Jacobson) almost did the right thing by staying out of it, but he ultimately didn’t. It’s a shame that they can't have ONE person on the show that is strong enough to stand up to House and be his own person.

One question I had – was this the first time that they referenced Thirteen’s (Olivia Wilde) real name of Dr. Hadley, or had they done it before and I just missed it? It seemed like it was just dropped in there. It’s another annoyance – I guess not only is Cuddy becoming a full bimbo, but Dr. Hadley doesn’t even deserve a name. Women get no respect on this show.

The whole issue with the old cheerleading photo of House seemed to be a non-issue with me. Is this the best secret on House they can offer? I was underwhelmed. In fact, I’m becoming undewhelmed with the show altogether. It’s lost the originality, the drama, and the spark. It’s like a running joke that just keeps running even when it has ceased to be funny. I think it’s time for the joke to end and for the show to “grow up” again.



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