20 Vicodin: Does House’s Personal Solitary Confinement Suit Him?

Well ladies and gentleman, welcome to season eight of House and to the new format for my blog. As I said in my introductory article, I will be exercising the same format in terms of character analysis but now I am solely focusing on House. There will be no reviews on my blog, just pure hypotheses on how Dr. Gregory House’s world defines his character. With that being said, let me take you into this year’s introductory blog article on the season premiere, “Twenty Vicodin.”

When we last left House, his rage and frustration over his break-up with Cuddy caused the pent up anger to manifest itself in the form of House taking his car and using it as a bulldozer to Cuddy’s dining room. After the act, he took off to the islands, satisfied with himself and relieved to….well…..let it all out.

Now, as the season opens, we find House turned himself in after three months and is up for parole.  Question is….how has he been surviving? Does he really feel remorse for what he did even though it isn’t apparent at his parole hearing?

For a man as brilliant as House, incarceration has to be boring. But in his own way, House has found ways to exercise his mind both medically and in general. Medically, he allows himself to be accosted by prisoners for medical advice. He may not be leading the pack, but in his own way he is a somewhat prison celebrity due to his medical genius. Additionally, he find the time to wait in line for his meds while making sure inmates are getting the right dosage of theirs. It’s only when a patient falls ill that the thrill of the medical mystery weaves its way into House’s life again and returns him to familiar territory. I’ll get to that in a minute.

As for House exercising the non-medical part of his mind, he passes by an inmate friend to hear him playing chess and offers the next move for checkmate.  House’s clever survival skills come into play when inmates start taking advantage of House’s impending early release by taking his things right in front of him. Since House can’t fight them or tell on them, lest he get pummeled or branded with a “snitch jacket,” he has to be clever. House takes the stereo one inmate (Stomper) wanted and plants in the cell of an inmate who took food from him (Rollo). Then, House instigates a false war of words that pits Stomper and Rollo against each other. House’s ruse gets both inmates solitary confinement while House gets his things back.

Unfortunately, the amount of tricks House can implement on the lesser intelligence of inmates cannot compete with a scary gang of Nazis who rule the prison. When it’s discovered House is getting an early release, gang leader inmate Mendelssohn demands twenty Vicodin from House by his release. Otherwise House may face some dire consequences. It’s probably the first time we really see House’s bravado get knocked down several pegs, since death is not an appealing option. Therefore, House faces some true fear here, fear in which sarcasm and cleverness would be more of a curse than a blessing.

His mind is easily soothed for the time being by the thrill of the medical mystery again as he tries to help diagnose a fellow inmate, In the case of Dr. Adams, House utilize his talent of manipulation easily with just his medial brilliance and displays to Adams his keen ability to “read” people.  She’s falls under House’s spell and, like many of House’s fellows, this only leads to trouble for her. He most certainly grabs her attention when he’s able to conduct a chest exam by old school doctor techniques rather than technology. It’s actually a practice Lisa Sanders says in her book, Every Patient Tells a Story, which falls by the wayside as most young doctors rely mostly on technology to help with a diagnosis. In essence, House adopts his former role as teacher explaining to her how it can be done.

In an odd sense, House also teachers Adams his famous mantra that “everybody lies,” especially when it comes to the specifics of his incarceration. I think in House’s own way, he was testing her to see just how far her trust runs. As for Adams, she wasn’t aware that House was a step ahead of her, as he usually is, every step of the way. But House knows her potential and how her job is boring her. He becomes impressed that she comes up with the idea of a clotting test to prove lung cancer in the patient. This is the point where House discovers she’s not an idiot as he suspected and thus earns his medical stamp of approval. But can she earn House’s ethics approval in doing everything she can to save a life even if it means her job? The answer is to that is “yes.” In the end, she trusts House’s judgment over that of her boss Sykes. House never discovers that he’s right about the patient diagnosis until the end of the episode. Then again, who really thought he’d be wrong? Incarceration hasn’t made him a total medical idiot and House made sure of that. He even went do far as to do everything he could to help treat his cellmate’s sick cricket. Of course, that was mostly so the cellmate wouldn’t kill him for not doing it. House deduced that the cricket had pesticide poisoning. In an ingenious use of both his medical and chemistry skills, House whips up a concoction of baking soda and water as cricket medicine. It’s one of the things I love to see House do and give credit to the writers for that piece of ingenuity. Making this character a genius must be a difficult task on a daily basis.

But it wasn’t just the medicine and the clever ways House tries to outsmart inmates that mattered in this episode. It was what House was going through underneath the surface all this time that caught people’s attention. Although ambiguity played a part in revealing House’s emotions, you got a sense of what he felt through conversations. For example, Dr. Adams questions why House would want to leave medicine. For House “divorcing” himself from humanity by studying Dark Matter seems a better fit. Although House doesn’t say it outright, isolating himself from the world will essentially lead him to engage in a mystery that appeals to him without having to deal with life and all its problems and issues. It’s a safer choice for a man who tends to cause so much pain and is indeed in pain on a constant basis both physically and emotionally. But nothing is more compelling and revealing than House’s speech to the ailing inmate, intent on being more focused on his girl. House says the following to him.

“She’s not your girl, you idiot! She was the girlfriend of a loser drug dealer. Think she has the self-control to wait around three years? You think she should? There’s a reason we’re locked away from nice, normal people. Your life outside is over. Your friends, your girl, everyone you’ve worked with, they’ve moved on.”

Here I believe that House is trying to tell viewers that he views himself as a loser drug addict whose problems cause him to be almost a reject of society. No one should wait around for him or be associated with him. He believes his actions warrant everyone isolating themselves from him and moving on, because he is essentially nothing but trouble to them all. He’s forgotten as well he should be in his eyes. We discover that he hasn’t taken any phone calls or visitors while in jail. Then again, we don’t know yet if any came to see him. For House, he doesn’t deserve anyone and can only rely on himself at this point in his life.

Yet, it’s not only in this conversation that House’s feelings are made known. Adams discovers that House never hired a lawyer and took the first deal he received when he turned himself in to authorities. He was essentially punishing himself for what he’d done because he felt he deserved it. It was reminiscent of season six’s “Baggage” when House gets into a bar fight, because he felt he needed to be punished for his personal actions. I imagine that any rough ups he received in jail were also justified in his eyes as well.

House has another interesting line where he isn’t really lying to Dr. Adams. She assumes that forging prescriptions or stealing drugs was the cause of his incarceration. She feels he has a gift that he shouldn’t relinquish so fast. House says to her.

“Well, if that gift is related to what brought me here, you’ll understand if I want to check the returns policy.”

Essentially, he wasn’t lying to her. Cuddy was responsible for him getting his job at Princeton and he fell in love with her. When things took a turn that resulted in their breakup and House bulldozing her dining room with her car, he felt his life ended in that one act. It’s what got him in prison…his love of medicine and his love for his girl.

There’s a point in the episode where House seems as if he’s throwing the towel in all together on everything. He gives up on the inmate claiming he’s done with “medicine” and “fixing people.” He’s even ready to go into protective custody when he feels he cannot get the allotted Vicodin to Mendelssohn in time. After a night of writing a DDX on the underside of a bunk bed, House’s is ready to move on himself. The words from Sykes that House was “done just like every other place he’s set foot in his life” was not a morale booster either.

This feeling suddenly passes when the ailing inmate goes into anaphylactic shock and House is forced into a position to really be a doctor to save his life at that moment by performing an impromptu tracheotomy. It’s the first real time House stakes the claim that he is a doctor. I think this is the moment where House realizes what his calling is. His skills are far beyond that of a regular doctor and the rush cannot compete with anything else. This also seemed to boost House’s alpha attitude.

After being bullied and threatened by Mendelssohn, House engages in one final battle with him basically to end Mendelssohn’s false hierarchy. When House coms to Mendelssohn with the twenty Vicodin Mendelssohn requested, Mendelssohn’s arrogance that House learned his place by falling in line sparks the old House’s battle with authoritative figures. In his own last laugh, House throws the Vicodin up in the air in defiance, letting Mendelssohn know he won’t be owned by anyone no matter what the cost to him may be. Inmates go grabbing the Vicodin like candy from a piñata Mendelssohn issues the order to take House out. What Mendelssohn didn’t count on was an ally for House in the form of his cellmate. House saved his cellmate’s crickets life, now his cellmate saves House’s. Naturally, House had other ulterior motives than to prove to Mendelssohn he can’t be owned. The punches House receives land him in the prison clinic where he solves the case, but at the risk of losing his parole. In that moment, House wanted to prove his medical prowess more than he wanted to be free. As he said repeated Adams words to him earlier he did it because he “has a gift.” In the process, he earns Adams’ true trust in his abilities to a point where she follows House orders rather than her boss’s. House is sacrificing his freedom for the answer and Adams sacrifices her job for the same reason. House ends up in solitary confinement and loses his parole but Adams sends him a note stating that he was right. In that moment, House gained his confidence I feel as was evidenced by the smile on his face.

We all know House will be back at Princeton Plainsboro soon, but in a new environment. There are questions that will remain. What happened between he and Wilson after House injured Wilson in his driving act of rage? Will House still be accepted as a medical genius or an unhinged outcast? What happened to House’s department in his absence? Who will House have to answer to now, since Cuddy is gone and where did she go? (That’s just a storyline question.) Will House be redeemed and will his actions be carried with him forever? Lord knows he obsesses about some of his past actions. Can House move on?

House’s life seems to be growing even more complicated and he has to do a lot to win over the people in his life. Can he win over fans in the process as well? It’s hard to say right now, considering all that has happened, and how House’s character is perceived by many fans. It’s going to be up to the writers to restore this damaged character.

There are many miles to go and will have to wait until Monday to see what the next turn has in store for House. Until then, we’ll see you back here for the next edition of Diagnosing House.

As always, thanks for reading!