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'House': Ethan Embry guest stars as 'House' returns for the new year



By Liz Pardue | January 11, 2010 9:07 PM



"House"
can be smart and moving, but it also has the potential to be ridiculous
and irritating. Tonight we were treated to a little bit of both, with a
well-acted, interesting A-plot, and B- and C-plots that I'd probably
have fast forwarded through if I weren't tasked with writing about them
for you lovely folks.
The episode was carried by great guest acting from Ethan Embry and Nick Chinlund (who fifteen years later I still
picture as Donnie Pfaster on "The X-Files," and am accordingly creeped
out). The writing, well...maybe they were burned out and ready for a
holiday break when this one got dropped in the hopper, because the tank
must've been empty when they decided to devote a significant portion of
the episode to House pretending to be gay in order to seal the deal
with his cute neighbor before Wilson does. But I'm getting ahead of
myself - let's focus on the good stuff first!
The Case - Nick Chinlund and Ethan Embry play Eddie
and Mickey, drug dealing partners in crime. Mickey collapses during a
particularly...exciting...deal, an event that's repeated when House
bangs his cane on the hospital bed. That's a pretty cool magic
trick. It's called noise-induced vertigo, apparently.
House is thrilled with the challenge of getting personal information
out of a patient who won't talk, to the point of bugging his hospital
room and interrogating his partner (who confirms that they sell
"culottes," ha). They even manipulate Mickey into discharging himself
(dangerous, much?) so that Thirteen and Chase can follow him home and
test for environmental factors. But Thirteen runs a light and gets her
car impounded, leaving Mickey to come back from his day on the town
with a fever of 105.
When he treats a lumbar puncture like a gentle massage, House
figures out that Mickey is taking beta blockers to control the stress
from his job. "Job" meaning doing bad things to good people. But don't
worry, House ensures that Chase isn't planning on putting a pillow over
Mickey's face before leaving them alone together. Good thinking.
The interference on House's bug leads them to discover another
bug in Mickey's room. Seems he's a cop, preparing after 16 months of
undercover work to bust a huge deal going down the next night. A deal
that will get called off if the doctors start poking around the area.
Mickey, used to risking his life for his job by now, insists that they
hold off for 24 hours.
Luckily, Eddie is a much better friend to Mickey than Mickey is to
him (though yes, there is the small matter of his being a murderer and
all), and he takes Thirteen to the dry cleaning facility that's serving
as their HQ. But the visit doesn't accomplish anything aside from
proving that Thirteen can think on her feet: when another dealer showed
up she pretended to be a prostitute.
As Mickey begins to develop pulmonary embolisms and cough up blood,
Eddie sweetly wipes his mouth, and shrugs off the fact that he risked
his life bringing Thirteen to the facility - he had to do it, because
Mickey is his friend and would've done the same for him. He even offers
to skip the big deal and stay with Mickey, but Mickey insists that he
go. He apologizes, and not just because he can't go, too. Two thumbs up
to Nick Chinlund for this scene.
The final diagnosis, unfortunately, is terminal: Hughes-Stovin, an
immune disease that will kill Mickey in the next day or so. He finally
calls his wife, who's with him as he dies. At the same time, the big
bust goes off without a hitch and Eddie is arrested along with the
other dealers. I really liked the complexity of both Eddie and Mickey's
characters - this plot worked for me.
Hilson: So close, yet so far - Wilson meets a cute
neighbor at his new building, and asks her out to dinner. Neighbor:
"Sure! As long as you bring the cute-looking guy with the cane." Ha!
Also, snap. Wilson: "You mean House?" Neighbor: "Your boyfriend's name
is House?" Double snap. She doesn't even believe him when he corrects
her. Which seems a little rude, honestly.
House's reaction: "We're two tigers away from an act in Vegas.
They'll figure it out eventually." Though not before he tries his best
to get into cute neighbor's pants by pretending to be gay (and
thus nonthreatening) in order to lure her in. Sigh. Really? A "Chorus
Line" poster and an "Evita" listening party are apparently all it takes
to get into backrub territory, much to Wilson's dismay. And the louder
he protests, the less she buys it.
Finally, he crashes a romantic dinner where House just convinced her
that he was having relationship problems with Wilson and needed to
sleep over at her place. And giving up on the denials, Wilson instead
declares his love and proposes to House in front of the whole
restaurant. Awkward pause, and cute neighbor excuses herself.
Of course, it was kind of a scorched earth move since Wilson can't
date her now, either. Especially after House confesses to the whole
thing, convincing her that they're both jerks. (One more than the
other.) We close the episode with Wilson's lovely rendition of "One"
from "A Chorus Line" as he tries to annoy House into getting rid of
their couch. Just one word for this plot, really: Why?
Team shenanigans - Thirteen, Taub and Chase decide
to take Foreman down a peg by convincing him that they all make more
money than him. When Cuddy won't give him a raise unless he has a
competing offer, Foreman tells Taub that with no competing offer, he'll
just leave the hospital when the case is over rather than beg for the
raise. And did anyone at this point NOT realize that Foreman was
messing right back with them? They confess to Cuddy, even offering to
take money out of their paychecks to give him a raise and keep him
there, she busts Foreman, he gives them a big "Who's your daddy?" and
we all go on our merry way.

House always leaves us with a moral. In last night's episode, “The Down Low,” it was “you can’t always get what you scheme for.”

Drug dealers Mickey and Eddie seemed like good friends and stand-up guys—you know, except for the whole selling-cocaine thing. But as we eventually learned, Mickey was a cop who was trying to arrest his pal Eddie. He wouldn’t tell House’s team where he lived because—why, exactly?—oh, right, because it might have endangered the investigation to which he’d devoted the last 16 months of his life. The big bust was coming up, and he had to be there.

But all his secrecy was for nothing, because after many false diagnoses, Mickey turned out to have an advanced and fatal case of Hughes-Stovin Syndrome. The drug bust went fine even without Mickey’s presence, and Eddie was marched at gunpoint to a police car as Mickey died in his wife’s arms.

How to reckon the moral calculus of the situation? On one hand, Mickey screwed Eddie over. On the other hand, Eddie was a snitch-murdering drug dealer. And on the other other hand, Eddie was the one who was willing to take a risk—taking Thirteen to the Dry Cleaner of Doom—to save Mickey’s life. Also, he cared enough about his child to read the free parenting magazine in the waiting room. So maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. In fact, maybe we were meant to think that life is fair in the end, since relatively straightforward Eddie lived and sneaky Mickey died.

Once again, we saw in this episode that Princeton-Plainsboro has the world’s most judgmental doctors, with Chase and Taub browbeating Mickey for his drug-dealing ways during his spinal tap. Worse still, Thirteen tried to comfort Mickey with the empty words “You did the right thing”—right after he'd learned that he had only days left to live. What ever happened to doctors who just want to heal the sick?

Enough with the patients. Let’s move on to our favorite couple, House and Wilson, who are totally NOT GAY. Seriously. Even though Wilson knows what culottes are. When cute new neighbor Nora wouldn’t believe he was straight, Wilson—with Charlie Brown-like optimism—appealed to House for help. Wasting no time in pulling away the football, House concocted an evil scheme to keep Wilson miserable and get Nora for himself. He told Nora that he and Wilson were both straight, then made sure she saw their giant A Chorus Line poster and invited her to an Evita-listening party. His plan, as he explained to Wilson, was to become Nora’s best gay friend, then allow her to convert him to heterosexuality.

It almost worked. So it was a great pleasure to see Wilson get the better of House for once by walking into the fancy restaurant where House was dining with Nora and asking House to marry him. (Could there be anything cuter than an elderly lady urging one middle-aged man to “Say yes!” to another? I don’t think so.) Even House’s evil schemes don’t always work.

Or do they? I suspect House just wanted Wilson all to himself—even if that meant listening to Wilson sing show tunes.

On to the last and most lightweight of the schemes. Fed up with Foreman’s attitude, Thirteen, Chase, and Taub conspired to humiliate Foreman by making him believe they were all earning more money than he was. That Foreman would figure out their scheme and turn it around on them was fully predictable. But it was almost worth it for the sight of the three MDs standing in front of their boss like naughty schoolchildren, confessing their crime and begging her to reduce their own salaries and increase Foreman’s.

Almost, but not quite. It’s not clear to me why they cared so much about keeping Foreman around. “He’s a good team leader”? Please. He’s overbearing and obnoxious, he’s wrong even more often than House is, and he almost never gets the last-minute flash of insight that leads to the life-saving diagnosis. How exactly would the team be worse off without Foreman? I guess there’d be one less person to share House’s abuse.

“The Down Low” had more than its share of great lines, among them:

House to Chase, who was sporting a clean-cut new look: “Did Cameron get your hair in the divorce?”

Taub to Foreman on his job strategy: “That’s what I’d do. But I’m a coward.”

Best of all, the words we’ve been waiting to hear Wilson say to House for five years: “Greg House, will you marry me?”

What did you think of the episode?