Hey, remember last week how cool that private detective character was? How he brought an interesting new dynamic to the show, and made a nice Wilson surrogate for our troubled hero? That really was swell.
I want him gone now, please. If he's destined for spin-off land, get him hence, or if not, well, consign him to the character graveyard. Maybe have him fall out of a balloon and die. That would seem to fit.
"Adverse Events" is an anomaly; for once the patient-of-the-week plot is the most compelling element of the whole show. Brandon (Breckin Meyer) is a mediocre painter suffering from visual agnosia. Unsurprisingly, it turns out this is in some way related to the multiple experimental drugs he's been taking. As House notes, he has a hot girlfriend, and in order to disguise his failures as an artist and keep her love, he's been selling himself as a guinea pig to various testing groups in order to earn money and maintain the façade that he's making a living through his art.
Nothing earth shattering, especially since once the whole "three drugs at once" truth comes to light there's not much mystery to solve; the team just spends the remainder of the hour trying to get the drugs out of his system, and figure out what's still giving him problems. (Spoiler alert: it's a bezoar, a clump of undigested material that grew in Brandon's stomach due to low stomach acids from an experimental antacid he'd been on. Which is kind of cool, especially since the last time I heard a bezoar mentioned was in an issue of Sandman.) But at least there's that familiar structure to fall back on. At least with the patient I can look forward to the usual beats.
Not so much with the B and C stories this week. The B story had some promise; House has been using his private detective to ferret out information on the members of his team, and in the process, discovers Taub's wife has a secret bank account. This leads to all sorts of hand-wringing on Taub's part, from assurances of contentment in his marriage to confrontations with House over privacy issues. When he finally talks to his wife about the account, she tells him she's been saving up to buy him a car. Which is very nice, but as House points out, Taub knows it's a present he doesn't deserve. So there are the trust issues again, and the question of whether or not he'll swallow the problem or meet it head on.
Bear with me for a moment, but–isn't it funny how the opening credits haven't changed since the first season? We still get Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer listed as main characters, despite Cameron being AWOL this episode and Chase relegated to his usual single scene cameo. Heck, the last dramatic shot has House and his team striding determinedly towards, well, some kind of medical problem I'm presuming; but it's the old team. Kutner, Taub, and Thirteen are nowhere to be found.
That's going to be a problem, I think. I like the actors for the new group all right, but I'm not invested in any of their characters enough to get caught up in side-dilemmas like "Is Taub's marriage a lie?" Thirteen has the most potential with the Huntington's diagnosis, but even that doesn't really register. Right now, the various psychological confusions and debating that have long been a series staple have become too much like going through the motions; routine is what procedurals are all about (I know every episode that House is eventually going to get his epiphany face, but that doesn't mean I enjoy the moment any less), but the trick is to at least keep the illusion of freshness. If Taub doesn't like House's games, he should refuse to play them. We've already seen underlings pretend to not care but ultimately fold beneath the Cane-man's cynicism. Give us something at least a little new.