This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Superlagg: Am I the only one who finds nearly everyone on the show who isnt House or maybe Wilson to be rather annoying, yet still find the show to be one of the best shows on TV because of how awesome Hugh Laurie is?
rp2knight: This will be deleted soon, but I am wondering if there is another Princeton troper or if the person who made the comment about Princeton-Planesboro just read wikipedia.
Madacaek: Can I or someone else PLEASE remove the blueness of all the Houses? I would've done it in a heartbeat but apparently some people think it's goddamn hilarious so I figured I'd ask.
Rissa: I'm on it. It's cute and all, but I think doing it on the House of Leaves page and all the House of Leaves examples is enough.
Grimace: Little, tiny, unimportant thing - I deleted the AnyoneCanDie reference as this show doesn't seem to fit the criteria. Having one pseudo-main character in four years snuff it isn't the same as, say, 24, where they probably have an express line at the pearly gates. If I'm wrong, feel free to add it back.
Ununnilium: "killed a baby in an illegal medical experiment" What.
Gareth In the fourth episode of the first season, "Maternity". Several babies were dying from an unknown infection and he was having difficulty trading off the side effects of the antibiotics with their effectiveness. So he randomly assigned one baby to get one antibiotic, and one baby to get the other, not bothering to get any consent from the parents. The baby with the wrong antibiotic died, while the other survived and led to him curing all the babies.
Ununnilium: Ahhhhhhhh. Eesh.
Neon Fox: Except that it turned out the antibiotics weren't really helping anyhow, and the kid that lived needed a completely different treatment in the end. Nonetheless, his intent was...not entirely pure.
Meocross: *Grips eyeball* AND THIS DOC STILL RUNS FREE!? *shudders*
Hiru: Of course, if he hadn't tried it, ALL the babies would be dead. So there's a case to be made for his intentions. He did not know for sure whether the antibiotics were helping or not, so it wasn't exactly an illegal operation, merely a gamble. He was also the person to figure out there was an epidemic in the baby ward, and tried to diagnose it on hs own when the other doctors weren't convinced, and therefore saved the babies who weren't infected as well.
Shahai: Would the show count as having both a Running Gag and constant Red Herring, considering the amount of time they've devouted to showing us that it's "never Lupus".
Big T: Yes. It was even subverted (I think twice, but I'm not sure)
Andrew, passing through: Would the Fake American still count, since the series producer apparently thought Hugh Laurie was a real (US)American?
Big T: Yes. Just because he was able to fool the producer doesn't make Laurie's American accent any more real.
Ronfar: Have they done the "We Want Our Jerk Back!" plot yet?
Shale: They did a brief subversion in the latest episode. House is "diagnosed" with syphilis, which the team assumes is the root cause of his jerkiness. He goes on antibiotics and starts getting nicer but also apathetic - letting the other doctors make diagnoses, not pushing them for quality like he usually would, etc. Then it comes out that he's faking the whole thing to mess with them.
Big T: That's also the whole Foreman plot, as he finds he actually enjoys working with House.
Jay: Alas Poor Scrappy - No, just no. To qualify for Alas Poor Scrappy, the character who dies has to BE the Scrappy to begin with, it's right there in the bloody name.
h_v: I changed it to an example that everyone should agree on.
Everybody Lies: Wasn't the patient House sliced open without anaesthesia the one who couldn't feel pain because she had CIPA?
Ryan: Did Not Do The Research? Apparently this trope is so widely and egregiously abused in the show that no subcategory of it has yet been created to document the practice. On the few occasions that House is mentioned in the Did Not Do The Research tropes, it's positively and generally as an example of subversion or aversion. The premise of the show is such that it would be impossible for it to maintain the level of praise it receives without doing the research, so I have to ask what the author of this addition had in mind.
Clerval: You mean the show is accurate? ... AHAHAHA. Well. Let's see. The show routinely shows people making full recoveries from diseases where the best-case real-life scenario is not deteriorating. It shows the immunologists performing surgery. It showed ketamine not merely temporarily curing House's pain (which is possible), but cured his disability to the point where he was running eight miles within a few months despite him having been established to be missing a chunk of thigh muscles. And when the pain started coming back, so did the limp. And no one thought of trying the ketamine again. People get into great states of "Oh Noes! The ethics!" over things they don't need to and and don't over things they do. Then there was the Tritter arc, in which one lone police officer is channels police resources into trying to nail someone he doesn't like for something, with no evidence a crime has even taken place, and is able to freeze the bank accounts of said suspect's colleagues to put pressure on him. Oh, and in the latest season they basically made up an illness that makes you psychic. (Well, it was very slightly based in fact. Very slightly.)
Inkblot: Wait, I thought ketamine was an anesthetic for dogs...
Klon: But it's far more accurate than lots of other medical shows. ...Or So I Heard...
Haven: Took out a little bit of potential natter to discuss here. From under No Ontological Inertia:
- Um, unless you, like this troper count "he's going to need a lung transplant"
Removed the following:
- Jerkass Stu: Dr. House. His diagnoses are always right. Even if he's wrong several times at first, and his treatment makes the patient worse. (It's not like House cares.) Everyone else's diagnoses are always useless, so in the end, the script sees to it that House can swoop in and save the day with something bizarre he comes up with at the last minute. Or sometimes after the last minute. His diagnostic skills are cited as the scriptwriters' excuse why House hasn't been fired and sued ten times over... because everyone is so dependent on him. And House knows it, and rubs it under the other characters's noses.
- Neutral Evil: House. He whines, he pouts, he's only interested in his own needs, he uses emotional manipulation and tries to guilt Wilson into not resigning from his job. He insults people needlessly, he makes fun of ill patients, his very presence poisons the work atmosphere at the hospital. He openly admits at several points (recently, in the first episode of Season 5) that he doesn't give a rat's ass about the patients, worse, like a stalking abuser who emotionally blackmails an abused girlfriend into returning to him, he refuses to treat a patient who is dying until Wilson cancel his resignation (and he tells Wilson that the patient's death would be on Wilson's conscience).Wilson finally grows a spine, tells House that House spreads misery everywhere, and then leaves the hospital for good.
House's diagnoses are based on his best judgement based on all available facts about the patient. The fact that patients lie to him and otherwise limit the availability of information to him frequently causes them to get worse before they get better. There have been numerous occasions on which his subordinates have made meaningful contributions to solving the patient's illness. House always has a good reason for insulting patients. House tried to prevent Wilson from making a stupid decision that he will inevitably regret, and that patient was never in any real danger, since it has already been pointed out that House has magical diagnostic powers that would allow him to save the patient's life whenever it became necessary. There's a definite case for him being Neutral Evil, but the first episode of season five isn't it.
Broken Chaos: Ask a real doctor what they think of House's diagnostic 'technique', if they've ever been able to sit through an entire episode (I'm in a family of several doctors - their opinion of it is not flattering). At best, what you just described makes him a plain old Marty Stu instead of a Jerkass Stu.
GG Crono: Ahahah. Some House Of Leaves fan thinks s/he's funny, does s/he.
Mr Onimusha: Possibly. All I know is that seeing the forest of purple nearly gave me a heart attack. I finished reading House of Leaves two weeks ago and haven't been able to sleep properly since.
Haven: Some House Of Leaves fan was correct in that analysis, then, that was hilarious
One the most recent episode, House says "medical mystery meets Penthouse forum", essentially describing a portion of the episode. What would the trope for that type of self-reference be?
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Painting the Fourth Wall.
- Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan (again): No, Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
KJMackley: There has been a lot of discussion about the Five-Man Band on YKTTW, people seem to think that any group of four or more that you can see a Hero, Lancer and a girl nearby automatically makes a Five Mand Band. And they do so by squeezing in the other characters into the other roles. The important thing is about the team dynamic: The Smart Guy is the groups go-to guy for Smart Guy things, The Big Guy is the one they leave the heavy lifting to, etc. A rule of thumb is that if everyone is in the same profession, like say medicine, then they are likely not a Five-Man Band. So that's why I cut this...
- Five-Man Band: Multiple flavors. Originally:
- The Hero: House
- The Lancer: Wilson
- The Big Guy: Foreman
- The Smart Guy: Chase
- The Chick: Cameron.
- More recently:
- The Hero: House
- The Lancer: Foreman
- The Chick: Thirteen
- Tagalong Kid: Kutner
- The Smart Guy: Taub
See Four-Temperament Ensemble.
Willbyr: Is there some reason why the House image keeps getting linked to the image in House Of Leaves?
Does anyone else notice that a lot of the information listed in the House M.D. entry is blatantly wrong? Under "tropes in this series" the "above the influence" trope has the wrong episode name (it should be "Hunting", not "Insensitive"; they aren't even in the same SEASON), and it also lists Chase's parents as being "abusive" which is not really even implied: his mother was a drunk and his father abandoned him.
