Creator David Shore says he originally sold his hit medical drama, “House,” which returns to FOX on Oct. 31 after a four-week break, as something like with germs as the suspects.
But there can be no “House: Miami” or “House: NY.” There is only one Dr. Gregory House, and the third season is all about getting inside the head of this cantankerous curmudgeon, arguably the most interesting and complex character on television.
For two seasons, House, played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, has amazed viewers with his witty, acerbic ways. He cures patients whose illnesses would confound other physicians, all while displaying some of the worst bedside manner imaginable. House regularly insults his patients and their families, never mind his colleagues, and thanks to chronic leg pain, he’s addicted to Vicodin. But his penchant for nailing the diagnosis each week has forced others to let everything else slide.
The third season promises to challenge the pill-popping protagonist, turning “House” into something more along the lines of “Deconstructing Gregory.”
It started with a gunshot at the end of “House’s” second season. A blast to the gut and a second to the neck put the doctor dangerously close to death and beckoned a virtual school of sharks over which the show threatened to jump.
In the bizarre second-season finale that employed the risky it-was-all-a-dream premise, the injured House was left to share a room with his shooter. Their dialogue — really a little chat between House and his subconscious — gave viewers insight into the doctor’s deepest hopes and fears.
The highlight: House feared that his boss, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) surreptitiously gave him a treatment during surgery that put him into a coma and provided a 50-50 chance of alleviating his leg pain. At the end of the episode, viewers learned that this hadn't actually happened, but House asked his doctors to give him the treatment with the hope that it would cure him.
In the season opener, House jogged eight miles to work and, this time, it wasn't a dream. Physical defect solved; House’s anger and bitterness gone, right?
Hardly.
Dissecting the doctorIt was just the start of what is turning into a remarkable dissection of the doctor’s motives and quirks. What makes this man who seems to loathe people want to save them? The easy answer is that he’s an egomaniac, aiming to prove that he’s better than everyone else via success in an extraordinarily difficult field.
But there's something deeper going on, and now House's colleagues are set on figuring it out. In the first episode of the new season, Cuddy and Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) teamed up to dupe House into believing that he’d incorrectly diagnosed a patient. Withholding the truth was their misguided attempt at teaching him that he’s not always right.
But, of course, he is. So now what?
It didn’t take long for that leg pain to return, soon to be followed by the Vicodin and general unhappiness. And while this season is more of a psychoanalyzing of House, it hasn’t strayed from the trademark medical mysteries that provide the doctor with his weekly puzzles.
An alien abduction, an aging cancer expert who wanted House to kill him, and an autistic boy with parasites obtained from eating feces-infested sand are among the cases presented to audiences thus far. Toss in a teenage girl's inappropriate crush on House, and you’ve got yourself a fine season.
But instead of taking a break for the baseball playoffs with another round of fireworks and an insanely dramatic cliffhanger, the last new "House" episode before the break opened a new series of questions about the doctor and closed on a more introspective note.
The episode focused on House’s realization that his patients never give him gifts, as they do Wilson and others. At the end, the autistic boy made eye contact with House and handed him his beloved portable video game, a Sony PlayStation Portable. It was a potentially sappy moment turned poignant as House, for once, was left speechless.
But his realization that Cuddy had replaced the carpet in his office offered even more insight. It isn’t clear if House liked the old, blood-stained carpet better; he just wanted it back.
There was even a brief suggestion that House might have Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism that can cause people to become focused on and obsessed with unusual things. But in the end, that claim turned out to be just a ruse to coax Cuddy into putting the old carpet back in his office.
And she did.
“House” may not be undergoing an extreme home makeover. But it looks as if the writers are beginning to break down some walls.
Victor Balta is a writer in Philadelphia.