bironic

Nothing surprising tonight in the non-patient-related plot; the ep mostly covered what last week set up and the spec fics have been exploring. Without the non-con, of course. Next week we should start getting into the juicy stuff. Oh, Wilson. What a choice to be forced to make: betray your friend or damn yourself. Of course he’d choose his friend, awful though House has been to him most of the time. You could just feel the sinking sensation in his stomach as he looked at that forged signature. Tritter must have seen through that subsequent oh-so-earnest assertion the way House usually does. Oh boy, is Wilson going to be in trouble. Tritter will start with the lie about the forged prescription and start digging up God knows what on him, like the secretly-rolled medical marijuana for a start. This sucks so much. Wilson wants to help his patients feel better, and he’s going to get caught up in the mess of a friend who’s notorious for treating his patients abominably. Will they both go down (as far as that’s possible on this show)? Will Wilson catch the brunt of it? Will we finally learn more about his derelict brother?

(Er, for those of you who read spoilers, please don’t answer any of these questions.)

Speaking of Wilson treating his patients well, not only was it nice as always to see him performing a procedure, he was also so careful and gentle with the bronchoscopy, sliding the tube down and slowly sliding his gaze up to the monitor. Lovely.

I expect there will be squee among the masses about House playing the electric guitar we’d only seen in magazine spreads about his apartment before tonight. I suspect he played (THE BLUES, GET IT?) the instrument in part to reclaim it after Tritter touched it.

Tritter lounging in the bathroom doorway in the violated apartment: sinister, sexy and haughty. Like I said last week, he's a bastard and he's in a position to do House some serious harm. And yet last week and tonight he also got some comic moments -- last week with his expression when House stuck the thermometer in, and this week when he and House did that synchronized gum-chewing/pill-popping, package/bottle-back-in-the-blazer-pocket thing. Cameron spent a lot of time talking about how George was similar to House, but Tritter also shares some of his (less savory) characteristics, the most blatant being arrogance, addiction and enjoyment of power over other people.

One more thing about Tritter: I noticed on a second viewing of “Fools for Love” that part of the reason he seems so menacing is that he’s taller than House, or the scenes are shot at an angle that makes it seem that way. He’s got a few inches on Wilson, too, obviously, which you can see when they shake hands at the end of tonight’s ep. And even when Tritter isn’t standing toe-to-toe with one of them, the setup is such that he’s still higher -- standing while House sits on a stool, for instance, or sitting on a table while Wilson gets a chair. So Tritter always has a height advantage. (And occasionally he invades personal space to put the other person off-guard; notice that Wilson backed away slightly when Tritter pulled the table in and leaned forward.) It’ll be interesting to see if the pattern continues and then begins to reverse when the tides of the power play turn.

Enough Tritter. How about the patient? Fat suit politics aside, I was surprised by how much I liked him. That’s something of a triumph, considering the man could hardly move or make eye contact. It was all in his voice, and the actor has truly marvelous delivery. Eloquent and intelligent and sophisticated. He had some excellent lines -- wish I could remember some of them. And further credit to the writers for not letting things devolve into a simple moral lesson about misjudging the morbidly obese. It could have gotten sappy, but the way the actor handled last scene brought pathos to the situation instead of cheesiness.

So Chase reasserted the prejudice for obese people he showed in “Heavy.” He brushed off this patient and House let him, maybe because he figured Chase would be useless if he were constantly searching for excuses to send the guy home. And then Chase never came back. Weird. I was so sure House would confront him and we’d have some sort of reveal about Chase’s troubled childhood, especially after Foreman needled him, but apparently that screen time went to Cameron. And as for the theory that Cameron had weight issues as a kid (though admittedly he was grasping at straws at that point), silly House -- only one Fellow needs to have that background.

But really -- where did Chase go?

Cameron, meanwhile, continues to grow more and more like House, though we still haven’t been shown how or why. And she’s still flirting, no matter that she’s switched tactics from Season One’s “do you like me?” and Season Two’s waistband-money-slipping to this coy nonchalance, teasing House with puzzles she knows he can’t resist trying to solve. I’m not sure what to make of her attempts to follow in House’s footsteps and bully George into cooperating, but it’s comforting that her tactics failed to achieve the desired result. She can’t be a mini-House -- or at least not an entirely successful mini-House -- within a few episodes. That she slipped the guy some drugs to make him dizzy to keep him under observation seemed out of character until I remembered that she’d tricked what’s-her-name into taking antibiotics last season to prove her diagnosis of Munchausen’s.

Right-o. Random slashy stuff and other enjoyable moments:

- Of course Wilson paid and picked House up from the police station and brought the Vicodin. (He did bring the Vicodin, right? which House immediately took advantage of? I didn’t see whether House got the bottle from Wilson or his own recently-returned personal belongings.) I’d been expecting that Wilson would have to go inside and talk to Tritter, though. Either he did and we didn’t see it, or else Tritter didn’t have a problem releasing House back on the street on his own. Probably got a kick out of it, actually, knowing House’s bike had been impounded. And I thoroughly enjoyed the almost-simultaneous shutting of the car doors as House and Wilson prepared to head off.

- Wilson has been eating beets since he was five, give or take some exaggeration. I’m actually sure this can be useful in filling in his backstory. For instance, regarding the theory that he came from a broken household, he probably wouldn’t have been eating healthy foods so young if he grew up under truly neglectful parents. Even if one or both of his brothers took care of him, I can’t imagine that they’d have fed Jimmy beets.

- House likes cherry tomatoes. I like people who like tomatoes. It’s true though. The first shot of the squirt (*cough*) didn’t look anywhere near powerful enough to splatter (*cough*) Wilson’s lab coat, but according to the second shot the juice and seeds struck home. And Wilson, who is I’m sure used to much worse from his chemo patients, just wiped it off with a metaphorical eye-roll. I love that he didn’t try to stop House from stealing bits of his salad for a change. Guilt or sympathy over House’s personal drama, perhaps?

- Three gleeful cries of “butt plug” from two characters. Interesting.

- House almost laughing as he left the differential room because he ran out of names to call the patient. It didn't look scripted, but rather as if Hugh Laurie just lost it. Yet the editors left it in, so either it was done on purpose or they thought it was amusing too.

- Anyone else notice and enjoy how in the first, I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes of the show, all the differential/inter-Fellows dialogue was moderately paced instead of rapid-fire? By the end they'd returned to the usual rushed delivery and dramatic background music, but it was nice while it lasted.

- Of all the signs tonight that House was distracted and worried, no matter how he tried to pretend otherwise, the most telling, I thought, was when he accidentally let it slip about Cuddy’s sperm donor hunt and couldn’t come up with a decent cover-up. Also interesting for its implication that he knows she isn’t pregnant.

- I wanted to punch House when he crumpled up the paper with the lawyer’s information. Such a relief when he changed his mind and went over for a visit. I want to root unequivocally for House, but he makes it so hard sometimes.


Really randomly, the potential of a trial in this arc does create an easy opening for some House/Boston Legal crossover action. Not that there’s any time to pursue it.


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ETA: Commentaries – daasgrrl, firestorm717, Pru (v. short), karaokegal, noydb666

Post-ep fic – "The Easiest Lie" by nightdog_barks (Wilson gen), "Everybody Lies" by theninth (Wilson angst), "Cold Water" by noydb666 (Wilson gen w/brother flashbacks), "One-Night Stand" by nightdog_barks (Wilson/Tritter non-con, hard R), "Ass" by deelaundry (Wilson/Tritter consensual, NC-17), "Rough Justice" by daasgrrl (Wilson/Tritter dub-con, NC-17), "The Hanged Man" by usomitai (Wilson/Tritter consensual, R), "Transference" by kribban (Wilson/Tritter consensual, adult)