As a simple, callow youth I was troubled by the popularity of Seattle grunge band Nirvana.
There they where, mixing it up in 1991, bringing us all down after the now suddenly less threatening and dangerous Guns and Roses, with their stories of depression and anti-psychotics, leaving me with quite the pickle. See I wasn’t necessarily a happy kid, but I was also not depressed….like all the time! Which was cool now. All the older guys in school liked Nirvana, one going so far as to grow his dirty blonde hair long like Kurt Cobain’s and taking to wearing a stripped jumper. So they’re all chanting along to Smells Like Teen Spirit and I’m left wondering…what the hell are the lyrics?
Then Tori Amos came along in 1992 and sang the song in a clear and legible manner.
Which brings me to my point. Oftentimes a song will be incredibly catchy, but the lyrics absolutely indecipherable (and anyway, I was also more of a Pearl Jam fan. Jeremy rocks!). Now you may have heard of a young man named Hunter Davis. He’s an actor, in fact here’s his website, and a remarkable impressionist. He’s become known for his spot-on take off of Ian McKellan. Lets have a listen.
Ain’t he great! Now bear with me for a moment….this was the original.
Whatwhatwhat!? What was that! Very catchy, great song from Disney, but I hadn’t the foggiest what the Duck Tales theme song was about.
Life is a like a hurricane, here in Duckburg? Racecars, lasers, aeroplanes, it’s a duck-blur? Might solve a mystery or rewrite history? DuckTales
Woo-hoo? I guess, right?
Thank you Hunter Davis for performing this important public service. You’re good people. You can find more of his videos on youtube here.
Yes it appears Michael Bay will be enlisting the aid of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes once more to wield their magic over his career and produce yet another megahit.
Already the cries of anger can be heard in the Uncanny Valleys of Fandom as the news has arrived that he will be directing Peter Laird’s napkin-creation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And I say…..so? It’s not as if the original cartoon and/or comic was Ibsen. Who cares, let the Bearded One fuck the frame one more time and blow up New York’s sewers.
EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon have brought Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form on to produce Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the live-action film that reboots the film series launched by New Line in 1990. Bay, Fuller and Form will produce with Galen Walker and Scott Mednick.
The producers will begin meetings with writers in the next few weeks. The deal puts Bay in the center of two Paramount franchises, as he started production May 17 on Transformers 3, and is zeroing in on Rosie Huntington-Whitely to replace Megan Fox as love interest for Shia LaBeouf. TMNT, a co-production between Paramount and Nickelodeon, is an outgrowth of the $60 million acquisition made by Nick last October for global rights to the entire Turtles franchise. Right around the same time, Paramount made a first look deal with the Platinum Dunes partners, who will generate genre projects but also want to expand their scope. While they’ve already set up several projects including a Rob Cohen-remake of Fright Night, the Turtles film puts them into new territory.
Yes I complain about Michael Bay an awful lot on this site. That’s because he’s a terrible film-maker. BUT he makes movies lots of people go see, so he’s doing something right. The argument goes that he’s rooting through the childhood’s of 30-something cinema audiences to find properties that their feelings of nostalgia will compel them to see. If that’s the case – stop placing so much value on nostalgia. Yes I watched the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon when I was 10. I remembering sand-papering my skateboard and drawing a crude picture of a turtle on it (see Peter Laird and I have a lot in common).
That was twenty years ago! So I guess the Underpants Gnomes won’t be sucking me into this one.
Ok, here’s one of my main objections to the Sarah Palin dominated wing of the Tea Party. Beyond the whole racist/fascist/revisionist agenda they’re spouting while tearing up the GOP and intimidating the fickle Democrat party (US politics is like a car crash in slow motion, eh?) one of their main bugbears is that the Media is run by atheist Jewish sodomites, or somesuch nonsense.
Which is patently ridiculous, as I find American movies and television shows are pathetically reliant on religious themes, particularly Christian ones. Y’know why Richard Dawkins is so angry? Probably because every time he turns on a tv, or watches a movie he finds yet another insipid depiction of ‘faith’ curing all ills. Himself, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens still have their work cut out if they’re to establish any kind of strong secular position.
Above I’ve posted the trailer to the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli. I watched it on a plane, having missed the cinema release. It’s set in yet another post-apocalyptic world that looks surprisingly like Fallout 3. Denzel Washington plays Eli, a lone wanderer who has in his possession a special book. He is traveling west across the remnants of the United States, left devastated after an unspecified event that scorched the Earth’s surface. Arriving at a town that’s ruled by Gary Oldman’s crime boss Carnegie, also searching for a certain book, he is discovered to be in possession of a King James Bible. Which of course is exactly what the villain is looking for, as its words have the power to sway men.
Now I’ll get back to the plot of this movie at the end of this post, but it’s extraordinary to have a dystopian action film that revolves around the importance of the Bible. When Clint Eastwood made Pale Rider there were hints that he was more than he appeared to be, but that interpretation was open to those who wanted to make it. The Hughes Brothers have set up an action film filled with Old Testament wrath and revenge, with Denzel playing a jesuitical knight errant who will kill to protect the book and is protected as a result.
Three long-running television series wrapped up recently that also featured heavy religious overtones. Ashes to Ashes a British cop procedural that flirted with time travel narratives concluded with the main characters discovering they were all in Limbo. Battlestar Galactica which initially pitched itself a show charting the conflict between the monotheistic robot race the Cylons and the polytheist/secular humans – in space – ended with series lead Starbuck being resurrected as a foul-mouthed angel and a final scene that shouts from the roof-tops that God literally had a plan for what had happened. Turns out that we the audience are descended from the characters in the show, having abandoned their technological advantages out of some misconceived Rousseaulian pretence. Lost, like Ashes to Ashes, also employs the “everyone’s dead and in Limbo”, story ending. Like BSG from the very first episode there were supernatural elements to the show, but creators Lindelof and Cuse had previously claimed the fantastical aspects of the Island had a scientific basis that would be explained. Yet in the finale we see a cast reunion in a church, moments before they’re all swept into Heaven.
Oh BSG. You used to be cool. That pussy Bryan Singer wussed out of doing a post 9/11 take on the Dirk Benedict fromage-fest that you once were, but you had balls! Hell, President Roslin had balls – big ones. You had fleshy Cylons that had blew themselves up assured of an eternal reward – getting to come back and blow up more humans! Your main scientist character, Gaius Balter, had an angel living in his head. The only conclusions he could draw were a) he had an angel in his head and b) he was batshit insane. God love him, he opted for b).
Yes from the very start there were religious overtones, but in a science fiction show, set in space, where the villains were genocidal machines that had been programmed by humans….many were surprised when it turned out there was a God. That the Cylons were more or less right all along (if a little too enthusiastic in their faith). And Starbuck was Jesus/Lazarus or somesuch. Actually we don’t know what exactly she was, but she seemed to be a manifestation of God’s will. Also Head-Six (who was in Baltar) and Head-Baltar (who was in Caprica Six) are in the final scene shown walking through Manhattan discussing mitochondrial DNA and how it relates to God’s will. See – science got a look in at the end! Even if it’s a botched mixture of evolutionary theory and intelligent design. In fairness writer Ron Moore doesn’t come out and say any one religion is right, but instead implies that we are caught in a kind of Nietzschean eternal return that will eventually succeed in producing the desired result – which is I presume some kind of Panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’.
But the entity responsible is for all intents and purposes God. Sigh.
Already the pundits are proclaiming Lost’s finale The End to be ‘not as bad as BSG‘. To wit, it also relies heavily on religious symbolism, but the argument goes it’s not as egregious as the final episode of Ronald D. Moore’s show.
To which I say donkey butter! This was offensive schlock of the highest order, laying the plinky plinky music on thick, with some dead daddy issues to boot (Christian Shepherd! Jesus….) that are sure to elicit a tear from the eye. As the episode ends you’re supposed to be thankful that you had some kind of emotional response, reward enough for the six years spent waiting for answers. No not where the polar bear came from, or why Walt appeared to Shannon, or any of that finicky crap – but WHAT DID IT ALL MEAN!
Was there any meaning to it at all? I don’t think so. Book titles and philosopher’s names are dropped throughout scripts like easter eggs, hinting at some underlying meaning, but in the end this was nothing more than a soap opera for nerds! Philip K. Dick was an expert on interweaving science fiction themes with Biblical apocrypha. This was not up to PKD’s standard. It liked to think it was, but really it’s all come down to hand waving and a musical score.
The final scenes in the Limbo-universe that the dead Losties find themselves in is especially insipid. They all reunite in a church, having been forced to remember their past on the Island by the dimension-hopping Desmond (a plot that copies the equally undercooked House of M from Marvel comics’ Brian Michael Bendis). Attention is drawn to the stained glass windows and religious idols within the building. There’s Christian, Islamic and Jewish iconography everywhere, suggesting that all religions are more or less the same and in the afterlife we can all just hang out, nevermind the misery and division that religion inspires.
In short, Lost sings the praises of Orson Welles’ Sugarcandy Mountain and ends with Jack Sherpherd smiling as the life bleeds out of him. If Kevin Spacey were to have suddenly narrated the end sequence, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Now remember the Book of Eli? I actually love how that film approaches religion. Carnegie sees the Bible solely as a tool to control. Hell I won’t argue with that. He’s basically an evangelist. Eli eventually escapes his clutches and meets Malcolm McDowell, here resembling Mark Twain, who is preserving the few remaining books that have survived the catastrophe. The film ends with him placing a new edition of the King James Bible on a shelf with dozens of other books – all of which are equally important! See, religion as a cultural expression is perfectly valid. It is aspirational at the best of times and can give comfort. There but for the Grace of God go I – give thanks for what you have and look to your advantages so that you can improve yourself as an individual, or help your community. That I have no objection to.
When screen-writers fall back on the Word of God to resolves dangling plot threads though? I find that lazy, cynical and offensive. Religion has been used to justify much evil in this world and should be challenged for that reason to be more meaningful, more relevant to our lives. When science fiction, the speculative imaginings of our present, past or future, uses religion to provide an ending, it’s a step backwards into unthinking dogmatism. “God did it”, is no better than “A Wizard did it”.
So Lost is done and dusted. Yes this is going to be another blog kvetching about the end of one of the most popular science fiction shows from the last ten years. I apologise in advance if you have heard this all before. I still got a beef with Lost, which is that I find it to be the most cynical and exploitative show in many years.
Credit where credit is due though, I have to admit creators Lindelof, Abrams and Cuse played the game very well. Charlie Jane Anders who writes for io9 has described it as the ‘ultimate long con’. Perhaps that is fitting considering the importance of con artists (Sawyer, Locke’s dad, Benjamin Linus in a sense) in the show. The thing about cons though is that they’re adaptive, they’ve a broad outline for a situation that the hustler uses to anticipate any possible surprises the mark might have in store. In the case of Lost though the creators were engaged in a strange battle with their own fanbase, attempting to maintain the mystery central to the plot of the show, while also frustrating the perceptive guesswork of internet message boards dedicated to it.
At base I think it’s a mistake for a hustler to think he’s a creator. The story of Lost was never written down from beginning to end. It was a broad narrative about a group of plane crash survivors on a mysterious island, inhabited by mysterious ‘Others’, a mysterious ‘Smoke Monster’, and containing mysterious features such as a hatch, a statue with too few digits and a glow in the dark cave. Characters were named after philosophers and thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Richard Alpert and Jean Jacques Rousseau, allowing the writers to pretend there was some underlying philosophical meaning to all of this. But there wasn’t. Turns out the fan sites with their theories about the characters all being in Limbo were right on the money.
The greatest disappointment about Lost is that it failed to surprise us after six years of tantalising hints and abrupt shock endings to episodes. Its use of sentiment often replaced any real dramatic development. Hell I cried when Charlie died. It was an amazing moment, but maybe I just get sad when hobbits snuff it. But the central mystery of the whole show turns out to be a centuries old conflict between a man in white named Jacob and a man in black, who is never given a name. All the deaths and strange phenomena the characters have endured are a consequence of this battle between kinda-good and maybe-bad, which for the viewers’ benefit is illustrated by the two primordial archetypes playing a strange game involving black and white stones.
Yes the show which flirted at some cutting edge science and a dialogue between faith and reason boils down to that old mythical chestnut of humans being used as chess pieces by warring gods. Oy! I was reminded of this apt quote below -
In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. —––Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
Which brings us to the character of Hurley. Introduced as a monosyllabic nerd who says ‘Dude‘ a lot, Jorge Garcia’s overweight frame made him stand out from the assorted himbos and Maxim starlets. He quickly became something of a favourite character among fans for reason of his ordinariness, a scared young man stuck in a bad situation who at heart is a decent human being. His banter with Charlie the hobbit was often a treat and in a later season (after the junkie Halfling snuffed it) he even managed to describe the whole plot of the show to his disbelieving mother quite accurately -
While this scene does give a sly nod to the inherent absurdity of Lost, I find Hurley’s role in the show evolved into something a little more disturbing. In my opinion, he became a parody of the most impassioned Lostie, the fanboy who would post ridiculously contrived theories to explain the mysteries behind the show, who inadvertently may have trumped the creators themselves with his/her own conspiracy. Hurley is a cruel joke on the part of the writers, a mockery of their own fanbase. Paranoid, obsessed with the numbers, formerly an inmate of an insane asylum, unable to get a coherent sentence out on a good day and oh yes, grossly overweight. He is a product of the show’s frustration with their inability to satisfy the very audience they so successfully teased and fascinated with the intriguing first season. When it became clear there were no real ‘answers’, to the questions posed by the show, that pseudo-science and mumbo-jumbo lay at the core of its complicated metaphysics, viewing figures dipped. So the final season became a race to deliver on the questions fans had been asking since a Smoke Monster ate the pilot of flight Oceanic 815.
Hurley was an unlikely greek chorus to the show, commenting on the action as it happened. In many ways he anticipated the thinking of Lost’s own fanbase. For example, after time travelling back to the 70s he decides he’ll write the script for The Empire Strikes Back to save George Lucas the effort. It’s a cute joke, but also demonstrates the nature of this show, more concerned with setting up in-jokes and easter eggs than delivering on any of its promise. It’s an inherently cynical outlook on storytelling to my mind and sadly failed to produce something truly memorable. Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times termed it as ‘resolution rather than revelation‘, which sums up the box ticking exercise that the finale dissolved into, haze of empyrean light notwithstanding.
Hadley Freeman in the Guardian recently spoke about the phenomenon of ‘Hollywood Ugly’ as follows:
But to be honest, I find this and the whole skinny model shebang a lot less irritating than the tendency of TV programmes and films to feature an actor who is quite blatantly gorgeous and slim and talk about her as though she were the size of Canada. Tina Fey as Liz Lemon in 30 Rock is the most obvious example of this[..]
Not 'fugly'
Of course TvTropes has an article on ‘Hollywood Homely‘, and I advise you all to go give it a gander. Up to speed? Good.
“I pretty much just do whatever Oprah tells me to.”
Liz Lemon is certainly physically attractive, but she is also antisocial, crude, obnoxious and conceited. That’s ok though.
For she represents a real challenge to the notion that all Hollywood actresses have to be pretty, as well as conform to a moral perfection. Liz is a nerd and therefore outside the norm.
Here’s an example of what Michael Bay thinks a nerd looks like.
This is Australian actress Rachael Taylor, who played a hacker named Maggie Madsen in Transformers. Her introductory scene is hilarious, as she is sitting with a group of fellow nerds and hackers who are all male and to a man – ugly as heck. Yet in their midst is this beautiful blond Australian who, as I recall did not say anything memorable, but certainly looked pretty.
Yet this was a character who supposedly spent most of her time in-doors sitting in front of a computer and suffering from carpal tunnel. We’ll put the tan down to a judicious use of the sun-bed.
See to my mind, rather than be yet another example of Hollywood Ugly, Liz Lemon is an assertion of how nerds can be attractive – but still be nerds. Remember Chandler in Friends? Matthew Perry’s not a bad looking guy, but Chandler Bing was a neurotic obsessive with low self-esteem and a little too fond of Die Hard. So not a catch then.
Liz equally is unattractive for reasons of her social ineptitude – and I like that Tina Fey’s chosen to portray her character in that way. It’s somewhat more true to life, even if 30 Rock does flirt with soap opera conventions and a Moonlighting style will they/won’t they possible hook-up between herself and Jack Donaghy.
Plus there’s a strong possibility Liz is the devil….
Very amusing video up above. For one it reveals just how often we’re expected to support the careers of talentless husks in today’s culture, but talented creators often have to fight and claw their way to achieve a decent measure of success.
Joss Whedon is an example of this. He is not the Messiah, but he is a decent enough writer. What’s more he actually (prepare to roll your eyes at me) cares about the issues he raises in his stories.
In addition, as the video points out, he has created some notable female leads. Man ten years go by with no one but Sarah Connor, or Ellen Ripley and then out of the blue we’re knee-deep in Buffys, Willows, Faiths, Inaras, Kaylees, Echos and Sierras.
Now that’s all well and good as far as having a collection of poster-girls for that feminist edition of Loaded that you’ll never see….but feminism isn’t just about women. It’s about men too. I’ve always thought the real goal of feminism is not only to empower women, but to change the way men think about their roles also.
In that line of thinking, Joss has also introduced us to a number of male characters that were a refreshing change from the morbid machismo of the cartoonish action hero (see here for example). The chicks kicked ass, despite being dainty size zeros, but the male leads had a tendency to be goofballs, or wry adventurers instead of emotionless Austrian hardmen.
Hardly a copernican revolution in terms of what a male action hero can be, but lets call it a sly inversion anyway. Remember when we first met John McClane? Bruce Willis lent a certain degree of wit to that performance as a beat cop trapped on the roof of Nakatomi Plaza taking out well-armed terrorists. Then the sequelitis killed off whatever trace of that there was, so that by Die Hard 4.0 (ugh!) he was jumping on top of jets and self-censoring bad language with gun shots. Anyway my point is, Joss took an aspect of that action hero as comic persona and refined it so that John McClane turned into ….Xander Harris of all people! The muscleman learned to feel emotion, act like an idiot and yes, fuck up every now and then. It’s not too much of a stretch, there’s even a Buffy the Vampire Slayer parody of Die Hard, titled School Hard of course. Xander is that everyman hero that McClane could not be allowed to remain. He survives desperate situations by a combination of luck and plucky determination. Plus he makes you laugh.
Remember ‘bitca’?
Here’s a few other male characters that Joss created, with a little twist on the familiar format.
Rupert Giles
Buffy fangirls have their Spike and their Angel shipper fantasies, but to my mind it was the librarian-cum-Watcher Giles who was always the most interesting character. Introduced in the first season as an obvious paternalistic figure to the rebellious Buffy Summers, a child of divorce looking for direction and guidance in her bizarre life of dating boys and vampire kung fu, he seemed so….well British for one. Anthony Stewart Head claims to have based his performance on Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant and there’s a certain colonial condescension there that fits in with the male authority figure he appears to represent.
Then Buffy started to challenge his authority and guess what? He backed down. When he did disagree with her it was often as an equal. This had a double effect – it led into the empowering of Buffy as a young woman, but also freed up Giles to be a more amusing, offhand character, noticeably more relaxed than the subsequent Watchers that appeared on the show. It is made clear that his relationship with the Slayer is considered shocking, despite their successes as a team. The Watcher order is greatly disturbed that Giles has abandoned the controlling behaviour used to bend the supernaturally empowered Slayers, who are always young women, to their will. Furthermore Rupert, or ‘Ripper’, as he is nicknamed by former associates, is discovered to have something of a past. He was the Sid Vicious of the magic scene it would appear, dabbling in the dark arts for thrills and excitement. So when we meet the buttoned down librarian in the first season of Buffy, we are actually seeing someone who has spent a lifetime repressing his wilder instincts.
It’s a fascinating evolution of a character.
Malcolm Reynolds
When Joss cast Nathan Fillion as Mal, former rebel fighter and smuggler by trade, captain of the star-freighter Serenity, he really struck gold. Firefly fans are notorious for their devotion to the prematurely cancelled show and I would argue that that is due in no small part to Fillion’s performance as the rakish Mal.
Here’s the high concept. He’s Han Solo, but better written and morally complex. He would always shoot Greedo first and then afterwards, quip about it.
What’s more, buried beneath the bluster and career criminal pragmatism, he also cares about desperate causes, much like Joss. There’s a sense that having been on the wrong side of a civil war has broken him badly and it is not until his encounter with the Tam siblings, fugitives from the law and in need of shelter, that he rediscovers a cause worth fighting for, or indeed a purpose to life beyond putting food on the table for his crew.
Firefly and Buffy share the theme of choosing your own family and in many ways Mal’s character arc over the meagre half season that was broadcast, as well as the spin-off movie Serenity, describes his acceptace of the role of father to this motley band of criminals and outcasts.
Possibly my favourite scene that illustrates Mal’s nature is this moment from the conclusion of the episode Shindig. Having just defeated the conceited fop Atherton in a fencing match, Reynolds stands over his rival’s prone body:
Sir Warrick: You have to finish it, lad. [Mal doesn't move] You have to finish it. For a man to lay beaten, yet breathing? It makes him a coward.
Inara: It’s humiliation.
Mal: It would be humiliating, having to lie there while the better man refuses to spill your blood. Mercy is the mark of a great man.
[He lightly stabs Atherton.]
Mal: Guess I’m just a good man.
[He repeats the poking.]
Mal: Well, I’m all right.
Victor
Ah Victor, Victor, Victor, Victor. The thinking woman’s crumpet this one. See here Joss was covering his bases quite nicely. Try explaining the concept behind Dollhouse to the average person and they’ll probably (and with just cause) react with horror. Isn’t this a show about institutionalised rape and human trafficking?
Well yes. Yes it is. That is the point Joss is making, that there are those in society who exploit and use the poor and defenceless without scruples. That frequently this will be justified as legitimate ‘business’, or a mere commercial exchange. After all, isn’t the customer always right? When the vendor in question is a prostitute, even a high-class one, their rights are not really all that important.
Which is what the Dollhouse is, an exclusive and very sophisticated brothel for the captains of industry. It hires out ‘Dolls’, men and women whose memories of their former lives have been erased and can quite easily be programmed to be whomever you want them to be. Now if this were anyone else but Joss, I imagine that previous sentence would end ‘….with sexy results’.
But this is Joss and frankly, he seems angry. Victor is a product of that anger. At times the most innocent of the Dolls, in his wiped state he is childlike and troubled by the pain exhibited by others. When on assignment, all traces of doubt and unworldliness disappear and we are treated to a series of fantastic performances by actor Enver Gjokaj. In one episode he essays an David Niven-esque British lover to Olivia Williams’ Adelle DeWitt. In another an Italian art agent. He also takes on the role of a blank-faced intelligence agent, but then blink and he’ll become desperate low-level Russian mobster. It’s a showcase to the talent of actor Gjokaj and Joss gives him every opportunity to display his range. In keeping with the theme of my post, Victor is a broad canvas of male behaviour, running the gamut from sheltered boy to amorous lover and then switch to shell-shocked veteran, or crazed genius.
Victor is in a sense the best example of Joss’ challenge to broadcast television. In keeping with his feminist principles, he demands that character come first, not product, themes that matter, not cliches.
The girls kick arse, but the guys are pretty awesome too.
I was going to add Doc Horrible, but frankly that’s a whole other post.
It’s a comedian’s faithful standy-by routine – Jessica Fletcher is a murderer! There can be no doubt. A serial killer of massive proportions, she criss-crosses the Americas on ‘writing tours’, with countless bodies left in her wake. Sometimes these victims are her friends. More interestingly, sometimes her friends are the culprits. Did you see what she did there? She frames the people in her life for her own murder sprees.
Michael Shanks inherited the role of Stargate’s Doctor Daniel Jackson from the film’s James Spader. Jackson is apparently an archaeologist and linguist, whose specialist field just happens to cover the possibility of alien intelligence being responsible for the creation of the Egyptian pyramids.
In short he’s a crank.
Ok it just so happened that in Stargate aliens are responsible for the majority of human civilization, so he was lucky. But here in the Real World, if you meet someone who espouses similar beliefs, run and hide friend. Run and hide.
This one might seem obvious, as Dr. House doesn’t even pretend to be a nice person. Frankly he’s an utter jerk. Also he’s on drugs.
Yet the show House, known for its formulaic storylines, offers one consistent promise. The doctor will save the day. He is the only medical professional who can join up the dots (yes, that includes Cuba) and offer the correct prognosis. Also, it’s never Lupus.
However, I reckon the good doctor is a complete monster. Herr Frankenstein has nothing on this sonovabitch. He probably has no moral qualms with the Tuskegee experiments.
See every episode the same thing happens. A patient arrives with mysterious symptoms. The characters vacillate and debate the possible cause of illness. House continues to pressure the team of doctors who follow him about like pack rats to come up with alternative suggestions. Then one of the patient’s organs explodes like a blood squib.
See what he did there? Complete bastard. Once the patient is partially blind, or paralyzed, then House reveals it was, oh I don’t know, a nut allergy.
