Last Night’s "House" and Bad Advice

So last night’s dual storyline was dumb on a couple of levels. First, the team was split up. House and Cuddy were flying back from a medical symposium in Asia (I kind of zoned out there, as I tend to do when Cuddy talks, but I think it was a WHO symposium on pandemics. OK, 1) Isn’t the WHO (not the band, the World Health Organization) part of the UN? If so, then why wasn’t the symposium in either New York or Brussels? 2) I get it – Bird Flu, Asia, pandemic conference. But since the furthest west the Bird Flu has come is Turkey (hahaha) again, WHY? You are going to have a symposium of the smartest medical minds in the world smack dab in the one part of the world where the pandemic hangs out? Are you challenging the disease to a smackdown? Do diseases enjoy irony?)

Anyway, I think it was just part of building up the “why House and Cuddy are on an airplane heading back from Asia” thing. Sometimes I over think these things instead of going with the flow.

The other storyline had to do with the remnants of the team: The Three Stooges and Wilson. Their patient is a 60ish woman (who I swear was Ellen Travolta) who collapses at her home. Now, the person who called it in was apparently a lesbian prostitute that Ellen had hired. As they are trying to figure out what is wrong with her, she confesses that she went to Caracas recently (a crisis having to do with turning the same age her mother was when she died) where she not only drank the water and ate salad, she got a tattoo, got drunk, snorted cocaine off a gay man’s stomach and did the nasty with El Gordo. She explains that she never does stuff like this and it was stupid. Dr Wilson leaves, looking a little shell-shocked, and she says to the hooker, “It’s my fault I’m sick, isn’t it? I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

And the hooker says, “No, it’s not your fault.”

OK. First of all, if I were you, I wouldn’t take advice about whether behaviors have consequences from a prostitute. She’s not the best person to ask.

Second of all, it could be the reason. (Turns out it wasn’t, but still.) You don’t have to do stupid things constantly for 60 years in order for the consequences to bite you. Sure, sometimes you dodge the bullets. But other people are actually unlucky enough to get pregnant the first time, or get a disease. Or, like me, get mugged the one time they get gas after dark.

To my mind, the “don’t feel bad because you’re sick, even though you just acted like a drunken sailor. It’s not your fault” concept is really irresponsible. Bad things do happen to good people. And bad people. And indifferent people. But your choices can make a difference.

All in all, last night’s episode was a let down, especially after last week’s really thoughtful episode.