Pop Culture Thursday

Today I'm catching up with one of my favorite TV shows: House, MD. I missed a lot of episodes last year, due to a scheduling conflict so my loss has turned into DisabilityNation's gain, hopefully.

The reality-show type competition that House has his team of "ducklings" on as Season 4 opens is both a send-up of unscripted reality TV and a meta response to the writers' strike that foreshortened the 2007 viewing season. Some people hated the storyline, but I found it in keeping with House's love of junk television and his generally devious nature.

Tonight's viewed episodes were the following:

Whatever It Takes
This episode actually featured more than a few of the ethical questions this show likes to present, in addition to beautiful, but wooden, show-killer Michael Michelle as a CIA doctor. Even Hugh Laurie's brillant performance couldn't convince me she was carbon-based enough to have sexual chemistry, even with him.(How sad is it that the most famous disabled person isn't a disabled person at all? But he is still incredibly hot, and I envy him for not having to suffer fools gladly.

Ugly

Probably my favorite in this series of episodes. Drama ensues at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital when a disfigured teen, the subject of a documentary about his reconstructive surgery, suffers a cardiac arrest. House and one of his team wannabes who was a plastic surgeon, disagree about the case and the importance of "normality."

You Don't Want To Know

It's science versus magical thinking as the team treats a magician, and one of its members believes she is a genetic ticking timebomb. Interesting thoughts on how this motivates her to live life fully, even as she dreads the grim prognosis.