End-of-week braindeadness

[katallison]

There's a thing floating around about character archetypes, or which types of characters you're usually drawn to, etc. My own meagre contribution: the characters I *like* are pretty wide-ranging (e.g., Giles, Ray Kowalski, Frank Pembleton, BobbyHobbes!, C. J. Cregg, Krycek, Joe Dawson, etc.) but tend to have in common the traits of (a) competence and (b) a certain degree of painfully-acquired life wisdom (which is to say, they are not shiny kids, they've been smacked around by life and hauled themselves up off the mat and struggled on).

But the characters I *love*--the ones who've compelled me enough to make a serious effort to move into their heads and write from that vantage point--are three in number: Mulder, Methos, Fraser. And what these three have in common is -- they're aliens. Not the overt sort of pointy-eared or be-tentacled aliens, but rather human beings just like us (well, leaving aside the Immortal aspect, with Methos), who look like us, walk and talk and suffer like us, but who are essentially *different* in their understandings of life, love, work, and the various daily-bread conventionalities that hold most of us together. Their passions are not our passions, they're not about happiness or security or a reasonably fulfilling marriage or living a "successful" life or whatever. But their alienness is not about "Oh, I'm going to be an unconventional rebel, tee hee," it's just them being who they are, who they have to be. They are *different.* They're my people.



I'm late to the party here, having only just successfully torrented and watched the latest episode. And my problems with how the show handled the Vogler arc are pretty similar to thete1's; they could have done so much more here. *sigh* See, here's my thing; if they'd wanted to bring on someone who was House's Worthy Opponent, who really was on a credible mission to bring House down, the most effective way (I think) would have been to go to the weakness we've already seen in him, which is--for all his incisive brilliance as a diagnostician, he is really terrible with patients in many ways, and often acts very unprofessionally, unethically, in ways that do emotional harm. If Vogler had attacked him on those grounds--if he'd been a decent and principled guy representing, say, a version of the argument that Sherwin Nuland makes here, saying "For all your brilliance and acumen, you treat people like shit, you're arrogant and dismissive, emotionally abusive, and we will not put up with that"--it would have been much less a black&white matter, the viewing audience would have been forced to confront the monster that is part of House's makeup, and to make a decision about--how much does that really matter? Has House redeemed his assholedom by his competence? What's really most important, when lives are on the line?

And it would have given some genuine weight to Wilson's choice. See, my other main issue with House is that I've never gotten a real *sense* of Wilson as a character--OK, nice guy, good doctor, really bad luck with women, likes House, but who the hell *is* this guy? He usually feels to me like **placeholder for House's boyfriend**, and I usually go away feeling (as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland) that there's no *there* there. But if he'd had to make a genuine decision--not about my loyalty to House and his brilliance vs. the money, but rather I recognize the damage and the monstrousness in my friend's soul, that he has done harm to people while healing them, I *acknowledge* that, but--kindly people-pleasing guy though I am, I affirm that other things are more important, that his way of being a doctor is perhaps even more worthy than mine--I really feel like it would have done a lot to cut against the conventional niceness of Wilson's persona, raised the stakes in some really interesting ways.

And I realize this is whole argument is an odd one for me, Kat-the-realist, to be making, because I know that medicine in the 21st-century US is a business, all about the money; but House-the-show is really (I think) a backhanded morality fable, it's about when push comes to shove, intellect and competence trump warmth and empathy, but by detouring the storyline toward money and power they lost some golden opportunities to *push* that theme.

And it has been a very very long week, and I'm wobbling off to bed.

Comments

[sssenza.livejournal.com]

I'd amend that to: when push comes to shove, intellect and competence trump warmth and empathy for certain tasks, yeah?

But it's an important lesson, I think. There's so much inappropriate merging of the personal and professional spheres around me it makes me sick, and people mistake charm for competence, and even when they don't, they prefer charm over competence, or think charm makes up for incompetence. And sometimes you get a job that you think will employ your smarts and you end up being forced to sell your personality instead, and it's just wrong.

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

I think that if you wrote that show, I would probably watch it. ;-)

How odd is it that our character types overlap at Ray Kowalski, Krycek, and C.J. Cregg? I think I may have to ponder that for a while.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

See, my other main issue with House is that I've never gotten a real *sense* of Wilson as a character--OK, nice guy, good doctor, really bad luck with women, likes House, but who the hell *is* this guy? He usually feels to me like **placeholder for House's boyfriend**, and I usually go away feeling (as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland) that there's no *there* there.

You know, that's interesting. My feeling about Wilson has always been that there's a *lot* of there there, but we don't really know what, precisely, it is, yet. All those hints about the guy's neediness and how it does and doesn't dovetail with his tendency toward being manipulative, the infidelity, the investment in being considered charming and likeable...

On the other hand, it cannot be overstated that I've been *looking* for Wilson's character, if only to understand the appeal. I'd have to agree that, especially when compared to the other characters, there's a distinct lack of *definition* there for Wilson.

But if he'd had to make a genuine decision--not about my loyalty to House and his brilliance vs. the money, but rather I recognize the damage and the monstrousness in my friend's soul, that he has done harm to people while healing them, I *acknowledge* that, but--kindly people-pleasing guy though I am, I affirm that other things are more important, that his way of being a doctor is perhaps even more worthy than mine--I really feel like it would have done a lot to cut against the conventional niceness of Wilson's persona, raised the stakes in some really interesting ways.

On the third hand, *this* would've been pure PORN.

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

Your posts are intelligent and thoughtful, as always. I felt that Vogler was to obvious a villian. Why not give House a worthy opponent, one who can bend every rule with malicious delight and give us endless hours of TV fun. That is, when "we" aren't drooling over House. Who would have thought that Hugh Laurie - whom I remember as the blithering idiot Bertie Wooster - would be so dark and sexy?

Re: House. Well, ma cherie. Thee and me are into slash so we see or want to see the love. But that's not what the writers of the series are doing so if Wilson is too bland for our cranky genius, maybe we are (in their opinion), looking up the wrong tree. Or the wrong....

But, while I'm extremely impressed by Laurie, I'm less impressed by the show in general and worry that they will write themselves into a corner with the disease of the week.

But at a certain point my brain (what brain you ask?) just shuts down and I go into drooling fangirl mode. House! Wilson! The Brit and the blonde.

namaste SF Nancy

[liaison27.livejournal.com]

Arriving late to the commentary as usual, my apologies. I thought it worth worth being branded a cynic to ponder reasons beyond writerly creative lapse for the cartoonishness of the Vogel arc. Possibly McBride had other irons in the fire and signed on for a limited time period? Thus causing them to have to rush to get him "on" and "off stage", so to speak.

I'd rather consider that possiblity than that the producers (or Fox) are trying to [gasp!] dumb down the show to appeal to a wider range of viewers.