So, anybody out there seen Dark Passage? I, sadly, have not, but I do know the big gimmick; the first hour of the movie is filmed through the eyes of its lead, Humphrey Bogart. (See, the guy doesn't start off looking like Bogart, he just gets plastic surgery so that he ends up looking like Bogart, which posits a weird world in which looking like Bogart, while the real "Bogart" doesn't actually exist, is a good thing. The whole "subjective camera" gimmick is a nice way of ensuring you don't have to hire two different actors, or one talented make-up artist.) Passage isn't the only movie to have used this trick, but it's probably the most famous for it; it's similar to "Locked In," in the sense that both film and the episode realize you can't spend all your time in first-person. It works in books, but as a visual, it eventually gets old.
It made for a nice change of pace in this week's House, though. Mos Def appeared as our Patient of the Week, and does solid work in a role that's as much about off-screen voice-over as it is about on-screen performance. After crashing his bike into an open car door, the PotW, Lee, wakes up in a hospital where everyone is assuming he's brain dead and ready for organ-harvesting. Luckily, House just checked into the same hospital after a spill on his motorcycle, and happens by Lee just long enough to realize that something's up; his brain waves are too active, and his eyes too responsive, for him to be a vegetable. There's some discussion between House and the Bearded Doctor who actually works at the hospital (I know we're supposed to take into account how annoying House can be, but man was BD an ass), Foreman brings 13 and Kutner over for a consult, and after some manipulation, House manags to get Lee transferred to Plainsboro. And that's when the real fun begins.
Story-wise, having roughly half of the episode take place (literally) through someone else's perspective worked two ways: it gave us an opportunity to get an outsider's take on our lead characters, and it forced us to identify more with Lee's essential helplessness. "Locked" wasn't all that innovative in the comments it made on House, the New Coke players, and the rest, but Lee's various observations (wow, even paralytics think Foreteen is boring!) were funny even when they weren't particularly insightful. Same thing, roughly, with Lee's interactions with his family and his growing despair—it was all fairly predictable, but worked okay. Lee is scared of his kid's seeing him, but can't keep his wife from bringing them into the room; Lee gets caught in a lie, and can't explain himself to his wife because he's stuck in his own head. I wasn't much moved by the content of his angst, or his struggles with the existence of God (really? do we have to trot the God-problem out every episode now?), but the thought of being so frozen that you can only control the most rudimentary aspects of your life was convincingly unsettling.