Polite Dissent

Tonight’s House is a repeat from last season. Just like Fox repeated the baseball player episode during the playoffs, the week leading up to Christmas seems to require the episode featuring the nun.

Reposted below is my original review of the episode. It’s a great deal shorter than the reviews I do now, but on the other hand, it does little to spoil the story. I’ll post a more extensive re-review later tonight.

I wasn’t as enthralled by this week’s House as I have been previous episodes. It was still an engrossing medical mystery; the character elements just seemed superficial this week. First, I was misled by the TV schedule which suggested that the mystery was going to involve stigmata. That sounded intriguing and I was looking forward to discovering what diagnosis Dr. House would pin on bleeding palms. Unfortunately, the episode did not deal with stigmata, although it did focus on a nun. This particular nun had a wide variety of puzzling symptoms which some of the other nuns at her monastery (and I always thought monks lived in monasteries while nuns lived in convents) thought she was simply a hypochondriac. For the second week in a row, lessons learned in previous episodes were forgotten as the solution to this week’s mystery involved two separate and unrelated diagnoses — which violates the principle of Occam’s Razor.

The main character moment involved Dr. Chase, who was revealed to have been studying for the priesthood at one time. Other than that, the character moments were few and far-between. Sure, there were nuns, but that was pretty much a shortcut the writers used to suggest a deeper meaning to the episode instead of actually writing a deeper meaning. On the plus side, there was at least one Sound of Music joke.

originally posted 14 December 2004