"Known Unknowns" started off on a bad, heh, foot; the acting in the cold open was lousy, and freaky as the swelling hands and feet were, I wasn't exactly keen on spending the next forty minutes trying to solve "Jordan"'s problems. Little did I realize that her woes would be far from the most annoying thing about the episode. Once you get past the lackluster performance, at least whatever made her swell and lie and go all gray was life-threatening and, as such, somewhat interesting. Not so much the medical conference that House, Wilson, Cuddy, and Cuddy's daughter Rachel attended. Wilson wants to give a paper about euthanasia, to cover his own guilt about a patient? Okay, I can live with that. House drugging him and taking his place was fun, and it led to some nice soppiness and so forth.
But we also got to deal with the dreaded return of Chuddy, and even better, the writers found a way to somehow keep House and Cuddy apart at the end that was nearly as disappointing and creepy as if they had hooked up. Signs were bad from the beginning when our first scene with Cuddy has her wearing a blouse so embarrassingly low cut I assumed she was late for a wenching class; it didn't get better when the camera angle managed to look down her shirt at least three times in a row. And then give us a nice shot of her ass as she was bending over. I'm not entirely sure what was being conveyed here, but it might maybe have been that House was contemplating sexual relations with his boss again. Possibly. It was sort of a gray area.
One of the biggest problems with the attempts at putting House and Cuddy together is that the writers seem incapable of doing this in a way that makes Cuddy his equal. She's a character who, for a long time, was known entirely by how she affected our leading man, which already puts her at a disadvantage; she was the person who kept trying to hold him back or keep him from doing crazy things, the disciplinarian, the somewhat attractive but still stern nun in the church of healing. The last couple seasons, in order to make this relationship even remotely plausible, they tried to make her more than that, so we got the baby obsession. Generic, upwardly mobile career woman stuff. And now, whenever the two of them have romantic scenes together, she either endures his double entendres with a mild nod towards a reprimand, or gets all googly eyed at him and blinks too much.
I was talking to a friend while watching tonight's episode, and he said that at the core of this series is House's basic unhappiness. I think that's right, and as nice as it is to think that he can change and grow up and become part of society, that sort of change doesn't really belong on the show. Give us an ending with some hope, and then move on to something new. The current iteration of House, which tries to keep the sarcasm but tone down the misanthropy and sadness, is the kind of medical procedural that the first few seasons did so well to puncture, by suggesting that, okay, sometimes people really do suck and that it's possible to be broken inside and bitter and still do good without feeling good about it.