By Buzz Byrne
The search for the new team continues as Doctor Forman (Omar Epps) orbits in unemployment, waiting to get pulled back into House’s (Hugh Laurie) world by the sheer gravity of the diagnostic Sherlock Holmes’ ego.
This week a funeral home cosmetologist imagines she is raped and strangled by a corpse. Now if this were VIVA LAUGHLIN this scene would have had all that only done in a song and dance number. So much for the visionaries at FOX. Hugh Jackman’s swiveling hips and Melanie Griffith’s over-inflated lips mock your conventional pedantry.
The corpse primper, Irene (Azura Skye), get a battery of tests before the seven remaining candidates for House’s team figure out she is still having delusions. Well, she was having hallucinations but now she sees her dead mother and that is technically a delusion. See? This exactly what I tell my eleven month old daughter: TV is educational. I wouldn’t have made that distinction before tonight.
Dr. Cameron places a side bet with House that Dr. Cole (Edi Gathegi), affectionately nicknamed “Big Love” and “Dark Fanatic” for being an African American Mormon, can stand up to House’s abuse. When it’s revealed Cole is also a single father, you hope the bet will get fun. It doesn’t really, but House loses and that can be satisfying, if not fun.
Irene undergoes retinal scanning, vascular biopsies and liver failure before the team gets close to understanding her problem. Hell, the team robs a grave before coming close to solving her medical issue. At the suggestion of Henry (Carmen Argenziano), the old candidate that isn’t even a doctor, House indulges her delusions so he can interrogate the ever present, yet deceased mother about her medical history. This was the one clever House moment of tonight. Truth was the ultimate objective and the twists and lies to get there were inconsequential.
I wish the rest of the episode were this good. But this was definitely a placeholder as the writers move Forman back into position to rejoin (co-lead?) the team. The last installment of HOUSE MD, “97 Seconds” was a powerful piece. This one didn’t live up to that. You know there isn’t much investment in the mystery if the cause is moldy bread and the cure is a glass of milk.
The candidates left, after Henry got the ax tonight in a very funny BACHELOR parody, need to be fleshed out and differentiated from the first team. Especially since the first team is still hanging around. Forman might be interesting back in the fold but Cameron and Chase have to go. They serve no purpose. Aside from Cole, the only potential I see in the remainders is with the hot chick (Olivia Wilde) and the guy from Doctors Without Borders (Andy Comeau). None of the rest interests me.
In House I trust, but until Forman has the clout to become a true nemesis, which he might now that he was offered his old job by Cuddy, I’ll be wishing for more episodes like the one before, not more like the one tonight.