Girl Detective

I no longer subscribe to Warren Ellis’ mailing list Bad Signal. To use one of Ellis’ own favorite phrases, the list had a high signal to noise ratio. Ellis one of those strong personalities that inspire a lot of fans to think he’s a guru. He’s a smart, funny writer with a well-developed–perhaps TOO well-developed–dark side. My friend Blogenheimer, though, forwarded me Ellis’ review of the Dead Baby episode of House, which I will print below, because a lot of his commentary is spot on. If you’re interested in reading more by Ellis, go to warrenellis.com, but it’s not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

I continue to have some lurking doubts about House, but I continue to watch it. House is definitely an Ellis-y protagonist. Smart, pissed and unafraid to let you know about it, but not without occasional glimmers of soul, conscience and humanity. What’s good about House is that there is some dark stuff, and they don’t usually drive home every point till you want to vomit. It’s also got fast, funny dialogue. What’s not good about House is that it’s yet another medical diagnostic show and sometimes requires the viewer to do some pretty strenuous sustaining of disbelief.

For example, in the Dead Baby episode, Dr. House was the first person to cry epidemic when babies started getting sick. As in most House episodes, they have no idea what the patient has, so they have to make a guess, treat it, see if it works, (it never does, and it’s often gruesome like a spinal injection, or claustrophobic like a long MRI), learn from their failure and still (in most cases) save the patient in time. As Ellis notes, the baby episode hinges on their best guesses being two types of bacteria, each of which requires a different treatment. So they treat the baby of the blond, American looking parents with one antibiotic, and the baby of the ethnic lesbian couple with another, and the lesbians’ baby dies. I was more than a little disturbed by the implication, and surprised that Ellis did not remark on this. The writers pulled their punches a bit by immediately making blond baby get sick anyway. The upshot was that it was a virus, not a bacteria, and they eventually figured out which one and were able to treat it, saving blond baby and the others.

The end of the episode aggravated me when it was revealed that the source of the virus was an elderly candy-striper handing out teddy bears to the new parents. Even if most people don’t know that nearly all stuffed animals contain choking hazards for infants (the ones on the show had button eyes AND a neck ribbon–double whammy) and are labelled “for children 3 and up”, ALL health care professionals know that stuffed animals are unsanitary breeding grounds for dust mites and other allergens. So even if a hospital would’ve had a person with a persistent cough doing the rounds of VULNERABLE NEWBORNS, she wouldn’t have been handing out stuffed animals, much less ones with ribbons and bite-off-able eyes. At the end of the episode, the only one so far in which one of the patients dies from the hypothesized treatment, I was left with fatigue from having to hold up my disbelief for so long, and annoyance that they’d killed the lesbians’ baby. The writers tried to show they were serious by killing a baby, and at least with this viewer, it backfired.

> bad signal
> WARREN ELLIS
>
> So Adi Tantimedh says to me, you
> should see this new series on US TV
> called HOUSE, because the
> protagonist could be one of yours.
> So I downloaded the fourth episode
> the other night, and watched it
> before bed last night.
>
> Two surprises: the lead is played
> by British comedian Hugh Laurie,
> and the credit sequence uses the
> excellent “Tear Drop” by Massive
> Attack with Liz Fraser.
>
> Hugh Laurie’s only done a little
> straight acting that I’m aware of –
> some light stuff in a Ken Branagh
> fillum and a quick thing in SPOOKS.
> Here, he wears a near-beard, an
> American accent — not perfect, I
> suspect — a limp, a cane, and a voice dropped an
> octave into an earthy croak as
> Gregory House, a nasty medical
> consultant in a nice hospital.
>
> House is a cranky genius with the
> social skills of a wild boar. He is the
> Unpleasant Doctor we’ve all met.
> I like stories about clever people,
> but I like some intimation of method,
> and House appears to be psychic
> in his apprehension of an epidemic
> in the hospital based on two babies
> getting sick. It’s a bit, you know,
> this man arrived at the morgue with
> two sticks of dynamite covered in
> his own prints lodged in his lungs, but
> it was Moider and I Resign and Dr
> Quincy You’re Amazing.
>
> Naturally enough, a bunch of babies
> get sick. And the hook of the episode
> is that they have two possibilities
> as to the disease, with two different

> treatments. Which means that
> some babies will be given one treatment,
> and some the other, and obviously
> one method or the other will lead
> to dead babies.
>
> Which, for US TV, is kind of
> interesting. I mean, it’s squeezed
> dry of emotional milk, and naturally
> enough one of the young and
> pretty supporting cast (including
> a wasted Omar Epps) has a dead
> child in her past and blah blah —
> but for soft American entertainment,
> that’s actually kind of hard stuff.
>
> House isn’t jagged enough to be a
> complete bastard, although one of
> his troops names him such, but
> that’s less Laurie’s fault than the
> script’s. Long and crooked, Laurie
> stumps around the place like a
> wounded spider, a murky fog of
> Hate trailing behind him. Standing
> in the maternity ward, another
> doctor comments that it’s unusual
> to see him willingly be in the presence
> of patients.
>
> “Patients don’t bug me until they
> get teeth.”
>
> The actress — I’ve blanked on her
> name — who did that turn as Sam’s
> Prostitute Friend in WEST WING
> appears here as the hospital
> administrator, a thankless role in
> this kind of show (the person who
> has to tell Quincy it’s not Moider
> and therefore be Wrong every
> week), and pulls it off with some
> charm.
>
> Clever Scumbag shows tend not to
> have a great lifespan in American
> television. VENGEAANCE UNLIMITED
> and PROFIT come to mind. They
> do better over here in Britain, where
> it’s something of a tradition. HOUSE
> isn’t a great Clever Scumbag, but
> it’s nice to see US TV trying it again.
>
> — W
>
> —
> Sent from mobile device
> probably from the pub

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Watching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.