House “Lockdown“ Recap & Review, House Enters The Twilight Zone

Photo from Fox

Last night’s episode of House(Fox) “Lockdown” was one of those episodes that left me wondering what show I just watched. I felt like I had stepped into an episode of "The Twilight Zone." It didn’t feel like an episode of House, and worse yet, it didn’t LOOK like an episode of House, with weird and dark colored lighting throughout. This was Hugh Laurie’s’ attempt at directing the show, and while Hugh is one of the finest actors on television these days, it may be best he stick to that day job. It felt as if this episode went on forever, and when my clock hit 8:30 PM I felt like I had already been watching it for an hour.

Main characters pair up in odd combinations and scenarios as the hospital goes on lockdown to find an infant that appeared to have been kidnapped from the hospital room where its mother, father, and brother lay dozing. While the hospital has an alarm on babies that will sound if the baby is take out of the hospital, this seems to be no help in actually locating the baby (it’s not like a little baby GPS finder). When the hospital goes on lockdown, everybody is order to stay in place until things check out and/or the baby is found.

It seems odd that during this whole time the only person who seems to be searching for this baby is Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), and while we see police cars in overhead shots of the hospital, we don’t really see the police being involved in the investigation or search. The people who are ordered to stay in place are also not being checked out by police. What is the purpose of the lockdown if no one is going room by room, person by person, to check for the whereabouts of the baby?

Trapped in the hospital in one room is Dr. Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), who has come to the hospital to have Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer) sign divorce papers. He pressures her to tell him if she even loved him, and she finally admits that she does not know. They wind up having sex, which seems like an illogical conclusion to the whole scenario.

Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and Dr. “Thirteen” Hadley (Olivia Wilde) as stuck in the cafeteria playing “Truth or Dare” which turns out to be less truth and more dare, with Thirteen getting Wilson to steal a dollar out of the cash register, which sets off an alarm. (Thirteen makes good on her dare later on in the episode.)

Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Dr. Taub (Peter Jacobson) are in the file room, where they both decide to look into confidential files starting with House’s file –which he had conveniently already tampered with – and then move on to comparing their own files. Foreman suggests they should both try the meds that House used to take, and they both get very drugged and stoned. They end up chasing each other through the file area (trying to get their hands on each other's file) and end up punching each other while giddy with laughter. I was somewhat amusing to see these two stoic people lose their control, but all we got out of their time together is that Foreman has a sketchy record and he envies Taub’s spotless one. Taub, on the other hand, envies Foreman as Foreman’s career is heading upwards and Taub's is heading downwards. Upon leaving the room at the end, and without Foreman's knowledge, Taub shreds part of Foreman’s file that is the not so good part of Foreman's record. Taub is later rewarded in an odd way when Thirteen flashes her breasts to Taub upon leaving the hospital, part of her “dare” with Wilson.

House (Hugh Laurie), meanwhile, is stuck in a room with a dying patient, Nash (David Strathairn), a man whose case House had previously declined to take. Even the acting skills of Laurie and Strathairn couldn’t save this dull and boring scenario, which seemed to have no purpose but for House to make a confession that he connected with a woman while in the mental hospital, and for Nash to finally admit that he wants the drugs that will help him to slip away into death in a painless haze. Was he supposed to be the image of what House would have been had House continued his drug addiction – a life ending with no family at his side and in a drugged out haze? I have no idea.

Cuddy, meanwhile, is lucky when she goes into the bathroom of the patient’s room and notices there are 8 towels there instead of four, realizes that the nurse who delivered them had been having seizures which allowed her to still work while in her seizure state, and the nurse took the baby and put it in the laundry cart. I find myself wondering had there been actual police and security searching each room if someone would have heard a baby cry at some point. But no, that would be too logical. More strange was that Cuddy didn’t do anything to keep the baby warm after taking it out of the laundry cart and seemed to pause a little too long for an emotional bonding moment with this poor newborn, who was likely very hungry and cold.

While I will admit that there were some enjoyable moments in this episode, I will likely remember it for seeming more like a trip to The Twilight Zone than a real episode of House. Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital is weird enough as it is.


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