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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

House ‘Here Kitty” Fit for the Litter Box

Image from Fox
The title of this blog may make one conclude that I thought this episode of House(Fox), 'Hello Kitty" was cr*p. I didn’t think it was horrible, but it wasn’t one of their best.

The story surrounding the patient of the week was interesting enough – a woman felt she was going to die because a nursing home cat, who correctly predicted the death of several nursing home residents by laying beside them, had decided to lay down next to her. Since she took that to be a sign she was next, she decided to fake an illness to gain admission to the hospital. Doesn’t she know that House usually nearly kills his patients before he cures them? That alone would give death kitty a reason to lay beside anyone who is nutty enough to believe it cold predict his or her death. What was horribly silly was that when the episode opened, before Dr, Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) brought death kitty patient into the examining room, that House (Hugh Laurie) had constructed an elaborate race car track inside the room. Now really, that was quite a stretch, even for House.

After Taub (Peter Jacobson) correctly concludes the patient is faking, House decides to find a reason to keep the patient in there. He conducts own test with death kitty, who seemed to predict the death of one of the hospital’s coma patients. By the way, didn’t that seem like a lot of coma patients for what seems like such a small training hospital? I wonder if all of those people in comas were at one time patients of House. After all, he nearly kills a patient each week, I wonder how many wind up in comas? Anyway. the patient eventually begins to develop real symptoms of something, and after quite a few pointless tests and some tests that actually help, like using a pill camera, they discover she has a problem with her appendix, the one place the pill camera couldn’t go. Death kitty was only laying down next to people who were warm, some had fevers, some had warming blankets, and the patient of the week was likely warm from her illness.

Behind all this, we see Taub finally getting up to his ears with House, especially after House asks him to clean out death kitty’s litter box. After meeting up with someone who he thought he knew from the past that offers him a job after Taub twists his arm, Taub gives his notice. House chides Taub that he will be back, and sure enough Taub has to return to work the next day when it turns out this so-called friend who he really didn’t know was just a scam artist. Luckily Taub hadn’t given him any money to invest in his scam venture.

In addition, we also get House trying to play with Kutner’s (Kal Penn) head, by bringing out every superstition he can think of. Kutner is trying not to let this bother him, although House does catch Kutner walking around a ladder rather than walking under it. When death kitty blocks Kutner’s exit from House’s office, Kutner exits out the door leading outside, leaving it open for death kitty to also leave that way as well. House’s immature response the next day is to pretend he is also getting ill, and he spits up what is supposed to look like blood all over Kutner, but House admits it is cranberry juice. Kutner later gets back at House by peeing on his office chair and leading House to think that death kitty did it. What kinds of people are at this hospital anyway? The only person with any semblance of maturity is Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard).

Thankfully we got very little Foreman (Omar Epps) and Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) in this episode. But we still got too much of Cuddy, and it seems that we can’t go one episode without having some of her anatomy being thrust into our faces. I think this show is being written by 14 year old boys.

The one star on this show who deserves an Emmy for this episode was the cat. It was perfectly cast and very well behaved, even despite the scene where House tries in vain to stuff the poor thing into a duffel bag. Any other cat would have been scratching and clawing. We need an Emmy category for animals, I say.

The only thing that was even remotely funny was House doing his impersonation of the James Bond villain “Blofeld” with the cat on his lap, and uttering the line “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die” – which is really a line of Goldfinger’s, not Blofeld’s, if I recall correctly. Like his diagnoses, even House can’t get his movie references right all the time.

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