Thursday, May 22, 2008

All that, and pretty too

Believe it or not, at one point the House finale post I wrote had yet another digression in there. I couldn't quite make it fit and while it was inspired by Chase's new talents in "House's Head" and "Wilson's Heart," it's really a light-hearted rant about the show as a whole:

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I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but it has to be said that Dr. Robert Chase has been slumming all this time. He's clearly even more talented than his former boss. It's impressive enough that he suddenly became a surgeon despite the fact that, as even House medical advisor Dr. Lisa Sanders has pointed out, "a very fundamental split in medicine is you pick medicine or surgery, period." Forget the hypnosis trick, too. Now he's apparently a neurosurgeon, performing that deep brain stimulation on his boss (though I suppose the seizures make Chase seem not quite adept at his sudden new specialty).

Then again, Cameron went from a fellowship where she encountered one patient a week for four years to heading up the Emergency Department. I can only hope that Princeton-Plainsboro has the slowest ER on the continent, or that Cameron is similarly a prodigy. With that career trajectory, she'll be Dean of Medicine by the time she's 35. Which is apparently not unusual, either. Poor Foreman is the one doomed to career stasis, but at least he has a reason to hang around House all the time.

Ahem, where was I before I started proving how adept I am at suspending disbelief? Right, expressing how none of that detracts from a show that knows what matters is the heart and head of its characters and stories, not how faithful it is to real life. I think I heard somewhere that it's a good thing TV shows don't represent the world exactly the way it is, because they would suck and be redundant.