I've been wanting to do an episode about the team dealing with failure for a long time. Yes, in television we all buy in to the central conceit that the main character will always be right, and always in the nick of time, and I like that as much as anybody. But to really appreciate what they do, you need to see a rabbitless hat at least once. At least once, Edith Keeler must die. Otherwise, you're living in a world too far removed from reality, and you begin to take the characters less seriously -- at least, I do. And having seen our team deal with success, I was curious as to how they coped with its opposite. The first two thoughts I had were: House, the answer-man, can only cope with the emotional freight by obsessively finding the answer. He's going to do an illegal autopsy without waiting for the family's consent. And, hmm, maybe Cameron seems to be the only one of our characters handling the death in stride, supporting everyone else; and then at the very end we see her crack -- maybe she gets pulled over for speeding and loses her temper with the cop.
Those were the two places I started from. After the Tritter arc, we couldn't go back to "pulled over for speeding," so I needed something else. Meanwhile, I had to find the medicine to support the character story; usually this is one of the toughest parts of the job, but in this case I was very fortunate, in that one of the doctors we work with laid it out for me.
You can read her description of the choices of building the episode here. (With this caveat: you really have to have seen the episode first.) EDIT: the link doesn't work because Egan is in the process of transferring a lot of her posts from LiveJournal over to her own site --at some time in the future you'll be able to search "House Training" and get the full post.
1 comment:
That was fantastic - thank you! I watched that episode thinking, "Holy shit, they're not actually going to kill somebody, are they?"
This is why I'm a non-fiction writer.
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