House, "5 to 9": Cuddy class

As I've said previously, I've largely given up on writing about "House" because there's no point in my repeating the same complaints week after week after week, but last night's Cuddy-centric episode - like the Wilson-centric one that was the last one I previously wrote about - was of an order of magnitude so much better than most of this season that I felt it deserved mention. Some quick thoughts coming up just as soon as I get a prescription for breast milk...

The basic idea was the same as in "Wilson," which was to show the huge part of this character's life that's unrelated to House, and to show what typical House stories must look like from the perspective of someone not on the team. And even though it was coming relatively close on the heels of "Wilson," I thought the execution was really effective, in part because Lisa Edelstein is really talented (and only occasionally gets to show off that talent), in part because the day-in-the-life structure gave "5 to 9" its own distinct vibe. We got a great sense of just how overburdened Cuddy is as both single mom (even with a nanny and a helpful boyfriend) and administrator at PPTH, let alone how exponentially harder House makes her life just because he can. And I loved the use of two songs by tough female singers of a certain age (The Pretenders' "Break Up the Concrete" and Mary Chapin-Carpenter's "Passionate Kisses") to bookend Cuddy's story.

What episodes like this one, and "Wilson," and "Broken" show is that there are still really strong elements to this series. I'm just tired of the formula, and too much of this season has been hardcore formula.

I'll still watch it (or have it on in the background) most weeks, but until they go off-format again, or find some way to do a transcendent formula episode, it's back to not writing about the show again. But kudos on a job very well done last night.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Wilson": The Zeppo

Just when I thought I was out... Robert Sean Leonard pulls me back in! Some thoughts on the Wilson-errific "House" coming up just as soon as I stop thinking about German porn...

"I can handle it when things go wrong. You can't. And things can go very, very wrong." -House

I doubt "Wilson" is going to get me writing about "House" again full-time, because the things that made it so strong were (like "Broken") not something the show can do every week, or even ever again, period. But for one night, at least, "House" was compelling, and touching, and funny, and not really annoying at all.

"Wilson" was good because it showed us House's world through someone else's eyes - not in a gimmicky, Hey, look at our Very Special Episode! way like the Mos Def episode last year, but in a more thoughtful, organic way. We got to see what the cases we've grown so used to must look like when only seen in Wilson-sized bites (the overweight tennis pro on the popcorn diet, House appearing soaking wet), and we got to see what it's like for the sensitive, empathic to a fault Wilson to try to play House's game.

And, for that matter, we got to see what it's like for House to be the one on the other end of the differentials and the wrong turns and insane treatments.

And we got to see Robert Sean Leonard, who has said he likes the easy workload (and accompanying fat paycheck) of being in a couple of brief scenes a week, rise to the challenge of carrying the show for once, with Hugh Laurie gracefully, beautifully working in support of him.

An ongoing Wilson-centric series obviously wouldn't work. It was the contrast to what we've come to expect from "House" that made this hour so interesting, and, again, you can't go to that well more than once before it starts to feel as formulaic as the regular show.

But after being so frustrated with the last batch of episodes, "Wilson" at least reminded me why I keep watching this damn show even when I'm struggling to remember that I used to love it.

"Chuck" is back in this timeslot in January, and that's going to get my top viewing/blogging priority for the time being. But if this is going to be the last time I write about "House" for a long time, at least we're going out on a much higher note than "Ignorance Is Bliss."

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Teamwork": How to drink supplied worms

Some quick thoughts on tonight's "House" coming up just as soon as you get rid of my crow's feet...

Wow, that one angered me.

I will say upfront that I don't give a toss about Cameron. Didn't care about her attraction to House in the early years, nor her relationship with Chase. Wasn't trouble by her two years wandering in the Sinai while House assembled his new team. Wasn't ecstatic when Cuddy reassembled the original team early this season. Nor am I that bothered that Jennifer Morrison is leaving the show for a while, possibly forever.

My issues with "Teamwork" are entirely about how awkwardly the show strained to achieve the outcome, and how many characters had to act out of character in the process.

The House of this episode bares zero resemblance to the guy we've been watching this season. It was like "Broken" never happened. He had something he wanted - in this case, keeping as many past/present team members close to the vest as possible - and even if you can ascribe that to his newfound need to make emotional connections, what we've seen this season is a House who's (slightly) less ruthless, (a little) less obnoxious, and (a whole lot) more compassionate as he's tried to do that. This was just House being a jackass, all so the writers could punt Cameron and bring back 13 and Taub.

For that matter, I don't buy Chase choosing the team over his marriage, no matter what kind of psych-ops House ran on him. I don't buy 13 going back to work for House, and/or with Foreman, under any circumstances. Nor do I buy that House would let Cameron rip into him about him having "ruined" Chase when Chase was a spoiled brown-nosing rich kid when the series began, and whatever growth he had as a man came as a result of working for House.

Couple that with Lucas mostly being a pod person since he returned last week, and what you have are a whole lot of creaky machinations by the "House" writing staff. n the best drama writing, the plot should be dictated by what the characters might d; here, the characters were doing things in order to support the plot.

And while I don't really care that Cameron is gone, there's a certain chemistry to the original recipe team that she's taken with her, and in her place are 13, who's still boring, and Taub, whose relationship with House overlaps too much with Chase's.

One bad episode isn't enough to overturn the goodwill created earlier this season, but I'm not feeling very kindly disposed towards the show right at this moment.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Known Unknowns": Truth and consequences

Spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I say raid the mini-bar...

I'm going to ignore the stuff that happened at PPTH with the patient and Cameron and Chase, because I don't much care about any of that if House isn't directly involved. (Unsurprisingly, the only part of that storyline I enjoyed was House solving the case on speaker phone.) The grown-ups at the convention, on the other hand? Very interesting, even if I didn't like every decision that was made.

Again, the hook for me this season is watching House attempt to grow and change - and watching Hugh Laurie play that growth and change - and so I was gratified to see House finally be candid about his feelings for Cuddy, and give Wilson a good pep talk while saving his career in the process. Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard both brought their A games this week.

(This being "House," of course, the progress has to come in baby steps, so we also got House leering at Cuddy's typically inappropriate work outfit, and House drugging Wilson in order to save his career. But the guy needs to retain some abrasiveness, or else the show becomes too flat, right?)

What I'm not particularly happy with is the return of Lucas the private eye as Cuddy's new boyfriend.

I like Lucas quite a bit and was sorry to see Michael Weston leave the show, particularly after the spin-off David Shore was planning for him didn't sell. So it's not that I don't want to see him.

Nor is it that I'm upset there's another obstacle in the inevitable House/Cuddy romance. As with most TV 'ships, I don't care one way or the other if the couple gets together; I just want things to be interesting along the way. And the writers did establish that Lucas had a thing for Cuddy when he was still appearing last season, so it's not out of the blue.

My problem is that this seems like a waste of Lucas, if they were going to bring him back. Weston and Laurie played so well together, and it was really charming to see House have a friend (albeit one he had to pay) who was largely on his own wavelength, that I don't particularly want to see them as adversaries. Yes, House is being mature now, and acknowledging that Lucas is probably a more reliable man to be in a single mom's life. But sooner or later, there will be shenanigans, and I'd much rather Lucas and House be on the same side (possibly going after some other random dude Cuddy's dating), not as rivals.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Brave Heart": Night of the dead living

Quick spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I whisper in my sleep...

What an odd episode. The random parkour opening made me assume they were going to reveal that some action movie was being filmed somewhere in the vicinity of Princeton-Plainsboro, only it was real. Then Jon Seda (who, despite playing a cop, thankfully didn't give me too many flashbacks to his awful role as Falsone on "Homicide") comes back from the dead, and his condition in the end turns out to be... psychosomatic? I think? Usually, I can keep up with the medical cases, but here, even as House was trying to spell things out, I completely lost the thread.

My larger concern, though, is that House is already starting to backslide into the prankster bully he was trying so hard to stop being in the season's earlier episodes. By far the most interesting part of this season has been seeing House try to balance his natural instincts with his desire to be a better person and make tighter emotional connections with people. For the most part here - particularly with Cuddy - he was edging back towards his old persona.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "The Tyrant": We stand on guard for thee

Quick spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I raise my hand...

Two episodes into our return to Princeton Plainboro Teaching Hospital, I still find I don't care about any parts of the show that don't involve House and/or Wilson.

Even the reunion of the original team didn't do much to boost my interest in the patient's story this week. I've come to appreciate Chase a lot more in the last two seasons than I did when he was getting more screen time, but The Cameron & Chase Hour was only slightly more compelling than The Foreteen Show we got last week (and for much of last season). Jesse Spencer did a good job in the scene where he explained himself to Foreman, but I kept wanting to get back to House vs. David Marciano.

It's been a while since I've seen James Earl Jones play an African ruler, but overall, the season premiere has had the effect I feared when I first watched it: rather than revitalizing my interest in the show in general, it's elevated my interest in House himself and made the other characters and the medical mysteries feel even more superfluous than before. And unless things change soon, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be writing about the show - only so many ways to repeat that point, after all - or maybe even watching it.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Epic Fail": First-person cooker

Spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I break my own toilet...

"I'm fine. Just not happy." -House

I was bracing for a let-down after the wonderful season premiere, and much of "Epic Fail" - specifically, anything to do with Foreman, Thirteen and the Patient of the Week - lived down to expectations. As I wrote in my "Broken" review, seeing House in a different context made me realize how unnecessary the hospital, the cases and, especially, the sidekicks (Wilson and possibly Cuddy excepted) had become. So a storyline where all of that existed largely apart from House was particularly dull. There came a point where I pretty much stopped paying attention to the case, except to wonder which was more incompetent: security at a software company where two random doctors could break in to play their still in-development game, or the entirety of PPTH that would let a patient suffer a delusional episode in the middle of the lobby without anybody but Foreman and Thirteen doing something about it.

That said, it was a pleasant surprise to have Andre Braugher still around as Dr. Nolan, as I had assumed his guest stint was one-and-done. (Braugher has a TNT show coming up later this season.) Also pleasantly surprising: that for at least one post-"Broken" episode, the writers were trying to do more than pay lip service to House's efforts to get better. We saw with the dog urine gag that he can still be the House we know and are amused by, but he seemed actually happy for a few minutes during the cooking class, and he sincerely dismissed Cuddy's concerns about narcissism. Given how quickly the show has tired of previous cures like the Ketamine, I still suspect House will be back to being a misanthropic bastard by mid-season. But at the moment, you can tell that Hugh Laurie is really engaged by the challenge of playing some different notes as this character - of playing a House who's tired of being quite so miserable. I don't have high expectations for his return to the hospital, but at least seeing the fellows adjust to a slightly kinder and gentler boss will be amusing for an episode or two.

After that? Well, maybe I can hold out hope that House gives the cooking thing another try. I would totally be into a show where he gives up medicine altogether and becomes the next Anthony Bourdain.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Broken": Greg flew over the cuckoo's nest

I had my say on the "House" season premiere in today's column - and I again want to emphasize that I loved it up until things got much neater and tidier with the other patients than Andre Braugher kept insisting they would - but I'm wondering what everybody else thought. Click here to read the full post

'House' season premiere review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review tonight's two-hour "House" season premiere, which I thought was a wonderful showcase for Hugh Laurie, and one that will likely have him making a trip up to the stage at next year's Emmys. Click here to read the full post

House, "Both Sides Now": You put your left hand in

Spoilers for the "House" fifth season finale coming up just as soon as I squawk...

"So, this is the story you made up about who you are. It's a nice one." -Amber
"Too bad it isn't true." -Kutner

I have no interest in letting my Twitter account overtake my blogging or column-writing -- I have trouble expressing an opinion in 140 words, let alone 140 characters -- and yet I'm half-tempted to just copy and paste what I Tweeted immediately after watching this episode, which was "David Shore and company need to lay off the M. Night Shyamalan marathons."

You get the point. It's not that I necessarily object to surprise twists -- it's that I object to the same kind of surprise twist, told over and over, by the same storyteller. Piling one hallucination on top of House's previous hallucination, on a show that already did a season finale where the main character was unwittingly hallucinating (and then did a season finale last year where he was having visions but was aware of it), well... that's too much. Sorry. When you go to that well multiple times, it stops being a cool trick and becomes just a trick.

Now, we all pointed out the phoniness of House's instant detox and clean-up last week, and the Hollywood improbability of Cuddy being willing to kiss and have sex with a guy she'd just seen puke and reach into toilets. So it doesn't feel like a cheat that that would be phony. But I don't think having House enter rehab after this hallucination feels any more powerful than if he'd done it when Amber wouldn't go away. It just feels like Shore and the other writers (in this case, Doris Egan) are just scratching for new games they can play with the audience, and I'm tired of it. Just tell the damn story, tell it straightforward, and trust that you have one of the best actors on television to make it interesting.

And yet, for all of the many problems I've had with this season, and for all the cursing and grumbling I did after House had his epiphany in Cuddy's office, I still find myself looking forward to next season. Some of that's obviously on Hugh Laurie -- the guy's brilliant enough that the show would have to fall much, much further for me to want to stop watching him in it -- but some of it's on where this conceivably takes House.

I complain a lot about Shore's reluctance to follow through, and to restore the status quo whenever possible. But there was a finality to the look on House's face when he looked back at Wilson while entering the rehab hospital(*), that, coupled with all the build-up of the last few episodes, suggests this isn't something Shore intends to scrap like the Ketamine cure or many of the other "Nothing will ever be the same again!" cliffhangers. Maybe he's just fooling me again (though, in fairness to Shore, he never did re-assemble the original team like I thought he was going to do, however much that enrages the Cameron/Chase fans), but if he's not, I look forward to seeing what the show's like when House isn't a junkie.

(*) And boy am I glad I still had "24" buffered when I got to the end of my "House" recording and found that it cut off before the end. For those of you in a similar situation, all that happened after 9:00 was Cameron and Chase walking back down the aisle as a married couple, and House looking back at Wilson as he was being checked into rehab.

And before we got to the dumb "Sixth Sense" twist, there were a number of strong moments, from the patient's rogue left hand stroking his girlfriend's face with affection, to House being human for once and realizing that Carl Reiner(**) really needed someone to be with him as he dealt with the news of his cancer. So even when the show's doing straight-up Patient of the Week scenes, it can still get it done.

(**) I said it after seeing "Ocean's Eleven," and I'll say it again here: who woulda thunk that Reiner would be such an effective dramatic actor?

I'm not giving up on "House," no matter how much I grumble. But if we discover that the admission to rehab was another hallucination, well... that's a dealbreaker, ladies.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Under My Skin": A moment like this

Spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I get my best friend to oversee this blog entry...

Okay, that's two really strong episodes in a row. I'm just skeptical about the bigger picture.

Hugh Laurie, Robert Sean Leonard, Lisa Edelstein and Anne Dudek were all terrific as House realized he was so far down the rabbit hole that he had no choice but to admit his weakness to his closest friends. The case was interesting; it was nice to see the team solve the problem without House, and the last few episodes have made much better use of Chase as the one guy in the hospital who has no problem saying no to House.

But what, ultimately, are the implications of House's Vicodin detox? The Amber hallucination may have gone away, but the leg pain will be worse than ever, and House is enough of an addictive personality that I can see him going back to the pills (albeit maybe in smaller doses) just as easily as the show abandoned his various cures for the pain in the past within an episode or three.

"House" as a series has a mixed track record about major change. The disbanding of the original team took, though it's taken the writers nearly two seasons to figure out what to do with Chase and Cameron. None of House's major life changes or epiphanies ever stick, however, and David Shore has been on record as saying he doesn't believe House can really change.

And if that's the case, why are we bothering to play around with this? Just to finally put House and Cuddy together romantically for a while? I like the two actors together -- especially in an episode like this where Cuddy isn't acting like a lovestruck middle schooler -- but if I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop, I can't really invest in it.

I know some of you will say -- because you've said it before in the last few weeks -- that Shore can't win: if he doesn't change anything, he's accused of predictability, and if he does, we all assume it's a fake-out. But those accusations and assumptions also come from our knowledge of what the show's done before. If they had spent more time on the ketamine cure, for instance, I'd have more faith in this storyline's long-term viability. But they abandoned the idea as soon as it was expedient, and so I'm skeptical.

Again, I don't want to take anything away from "Under My Skin" itself. I'm just going to be casting a very wary eye as I watch next week's season finale.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "House Divided": The case of the strawberry stripper

Quick spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I set a corpse on fire...

Last week, I complained that the return of Amber just made me sad that the "House" writers made the wrong call on dumping her and keeping any of the other three. But in "House Divided," all I could do was enjoy how well Hugh Laurie and Anne Dudek play off each other. As Liz Friedman & Matthew V. Lewis's script made it clear early on that Amber wasn't a heavenly apparition, but just a weird manifestation of House's sleep-deprived brain, Dudek even got to have a blast more or less playing House. In a way, it reminded me of the short but glorious tenure of Scooter, the older not-quite-a-doctor who got cut for thinking too much like House; while House might not want someone like that on his team, it's fun to watch as a viewer.

While the rest of the cast seems to have already moved on from Kutner's suicide, I thought "House Divided" had a nice balance of comedy and drama, not only with Amber turning out to be a far crueler imaginary playmate than House expected, but in the way they intercut one of the better-drawn patients in a while with the shenanigans involving Chase's bachelor party, with Chase embracing it and Wilson trying to run from it (without his pants).

I've complained a lot lately about "House," but I enjoyed this one.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Saviors": Amber on my mind

Quick spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I start eating healthy...

"People only change after a trauma if they wanted to change before a trauma." -House

Well, they paid more lip service to Kutner's death than I was expecting, but for now it still feels like lip service and little more. David Shore has already said that he doesn't think Kutner's suicide is going to change House at all, so while I welcome another fantasy return by Amber(*), nothing's going to come of it other than some fun interplay between Hugh Laurie and Anne Dudek. And aside from Cameron, kinda sorta (in that she didn't want Chase's proposal to be related to Kutner's death), all the other characters already seem to have moved on from an event that should have a much more profound effect on the series.

(*) As soon as I recognized Dudek's voice as Cutthroat Bitch, all I could think about, again, was what a bad decision Shore and company made in dumping Amber in favor of any of the other three. Yes, she could be one-note at times during the competition part of that season, but from her elimination episode onward, she was the most vibrant and interesting character on the show other than House himself. Dudek and Robert Sean Leonard were brilliant in the season finale, but I'd rather give up that episode if it meant we'd had Amber around all this time. Her elimination is even more frustrating than the writers' non-use of Kutner for the last two years.

Well, at least we got to hear Laurie rock out on "Georgia On My Mind" on both keyboard and harmonica, and the Chase and Cameron fans don't have anything to complain about for one week, but "Saviors" didn't do a lot to change my opinion about the suicide as yet another potential-laden "House" storyline that's going to be ignored as quickly as it's convenient to do so.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Simple Explanation": No such thing

Spoilers for tonight's "House" stunner coming up (and by that, I mean immediately, so avert your eyes, RSS readers) just as soon as I put on my sunglasses to the strains of a Who song...

"Sorry for your loss." -Cuddy "Thanks. But it's not my loss." -House "Then I'm sorry you don't think it is." -Cuddy

Well, dammit. Rest in (fictional) peace, Lawrence Kutner. I'd have been slightly more shocked if I had just put on the episode live, instead of buffering it like I usually do, which gave me a chance to see hints on the web that Something Big was happening on tonight's "House." But still... whoa. This is now the second show I blog regularly where a regular character has been bumped off in the opening 10 minutes (*). One more and we've got a trend. (Assuming that, in this day of Twitter and insta-punditry, you still need three for an official trend.) (*)No talking about who the other one is, or what show it happened on, in the comments; either you know and can discuss it in the appropriate post, or you don't know and then we're violating the No Spoilers rule. On the one hand, I'm upset that they had to kill off Kutner instead of Thirteen or Foreman, and that they did it after barely giving Kal Penn anything to do for the better part of two seasons. On the other, I think this story only works because they never did anything interesting with Kutner. If Thirteen kills herself, we know why (fear of a slow death from Huntington's). Foreman has enough angst in his life to make it make some kind of sense. Even Taub can be explained to a degree: not only is his professional life a wreck, but the show had just established a that he attempted suicide when he was younger. In real life, there so often is no rational explanation, no simple cause-and-effect for suicide. But for dramatic TV purposes, there usually is some kind of ready-made excuse of the kind that would satisfy people's morbid curiosity (House) or help salve their guilt (everyone else). Here, because Kutner was such a relatively blank slate, you could read anything and everything into his death, and it might be true or it might be unrelated. Still, it feels like a waste -- or like the writers realized they hadn't done anything useful with Kutner in all this time and decided to make suicidal lemonade out of superfluous lemons. The performances tonight were uniformly great. Robert Sean Leonard was his usual brilliant self in the moment where Wilson realized House's true motivation in going to the apartment, as was Hugh Laurie at showing House experiencing a rare moment of shame in front of Kutner's parents, but you expect that from them. But "House" often provides good showcases for its cast. What concerns me is a flaw that's been present in the series for a long time, but in particular during this past season, wherein nothing has any kind of long-term consequence. Obviously, Kutner's dead and he's not coming back, so on that level there will be consequences. But based on how the show's been operating for a good long while now, I don't see his death having any real impact on House, and only slightly more of one on the others. And if I'm right, then Kutner was sacrifice for the sake of a Very Special Episode -- and for an incredibly creepy cross-promotional website (that I'm not going to bother linking to, or else it might help encourage future sites along the same line) -- and that's a waste of a good actor, if not a memorable character. What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Locked In": Up-down solution

I more or less had my say on tonight's "House" in today's column, but fire away with your own thoughts on whether you wanted more gimmick, less gimmick, etc. Click here to read the full post

'My Boys' review, 'House' goes POV - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review the return of "My Boys" on TBS, which seems much improved over the previous disappointing season, as well as tonight's point of view gimmick episode of "House," which very much echoes the famous episode of "M*A*S*H" that Ken Levine co-wrote. Click here to read the full post

House, "Here Kitty": Death cat for cutie

As mentioned in my previous state of the blog post, I'm too swamped to say much of anything about last night's "House," save that I'm always glad to see Judy Greer, that I appreciated a spotlight on Taub, and that it was interesting to see House spend most of the episode chasing his own metaphorical tail, for reasons even he didn't quite understand.

Also, I really wanted to use that subject line, though I doubt I'm the first.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "The Social Contract": Lie to me. Please.

Brief spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I come up with a long list of Jewish sports stars to add to Taub's predictable Sandy Koufax reference...

Well, that was a pretty good one, wasn't it?

I don't mind the sledgehammer parallels between doctor and patient so much when the doctor is house, and when the patient is played by a good actor like Jay Karnes (Dutch from "The Shield"), or when the patient's story turns out to be so tragic even after he's cured. That guy's relationships with his wife and daughter will never be the same after this.

This was also the first big House/Wilson episode in quite a while, and one that, for once, was more about Wilson himself than about Wilson's friendship with House. (Though there was still some of that, of course, including House conducting the witch hunt with poor racquetball-impaired Taub.) I like that House made the attempt to shut out the team in order to be there for Wilson, even though he failed, and I like that Wilson seemed to let that go because House tried, and because House was there for him again the next day. A fine showcase for Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard.

All that, and we got a very low Foreteen quotient.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "Unfaithful": Father McPoyle, I presume?

I've been wondering all morning what I have to say about last night's "House," and I think I've plain run out. It's the same issues every week: boring Foreteen, too on-the-nose parallels between patient and doctor, and a general formulaic quality to it all. The show isn't quite at That's It For Me! levels, but increasingly it's become this thing I have on in the background while I pay my bills and clean the living room, as opposed to something that engages me the way it used to.

What does everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

House, "The Greater Good": The worst period ever

Brief spoilers for last night's "House" coming up just as soon as I get my vision back...

Some TV shows make a big deal out of a milestone episode like the 100th. They bring in big guest stars, or feature life-shattering events, or feature a look back at the significant events of the previous 99.

Other shows, though, take the route "House" did last night, and just try to put out another episode that's very much in keeping with the previous 99. That makes more sense to me: if people have been tuning in for one thing all this time, why would you try to celebrate that by giving them something else?

That said, "The Greater Good" wasn't particularly strong, milestone or no. Outside of a few individual moments, like Kutner standing up to House and Wilson contemplating Amber's mug at the end, I can barely remember any of it, little more than 12 hours after I first watched it.

And because of that, time for the inevitable: what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post