#went from loving wilson to being overly critical and now i'm back where i started

[housemdork]

so. i know that fighting on the wilson defense squad is a little taboo around here...but i still want to share the germ of a thought that i've had, which i'll definitely expand on in the future.

does anyone hear me when i say that so much of wilson's work is silent and unseen?

i mean this, first, quite literally regarding his practice. it's a rarity, seeing wilson interact directly with his cancer patients without being called in for a consult. we hear about his patients all the time, just not often by name. but whether because we're in house's POV, or because the show aligns with house's belief that "cancer is boring," we don't see wilson practicing oncology that much in the grand scheme of things, even compared to the snippets of ER and surgery life that cameron and chase move on to, respectively.

house pokes fun at wilson's oncology all the time, and pretty definitively in 2x04 when he makes fun of medical specialists. to house, things are simpler for them; house views them as existing in a box, much smaller than his grand purview over things. wilson's work is relegated away from the main text of the show; he operates in isolation, which hurts in the long run.

wilson's own cancer experience is profoundly impacted by the pain of loss he's endured over the years, watching his patients die. he rattles off their names, their cancers, their ages, and the dates they died to house from memory. we never saw these patients. house probably never did, either, so we can only learn of this pain afterwards. we re-contextualize wilson's emotions and behavior after the fact.

finally, the work wilson puts into his friendship with house is often invisible. i won't ever paint wilson as the ideal friend - that would completely ruin any interpretation of his character - but i find it disingenuous to ignore the strain house puts on him, however self-inflicted. what starts out as trickles of jokes and subtle hints (the loans), evolves into the season 3 medical license debacle, which evolves into wilson's repeated responsibility for house's mental health (which isn't even mandated by house, but by those around wilson and house), which finally evolves into house attempting to control wilson's last wishes. repeatedly, wilson is nominated, especially by dr. nolan in season 6 and foreman in season 8, to be house's steward, and who else would do it, but him?

big example: we never see the decision for house to move into wilson's place, but all the energy in the world is put into wilson asking house to leave. it's first presented as a natural assumption, then a mortal sin.

unlike the other characters surrounding house, the origins of wilson and house are usually only hinted at. their history unfolds across the entire show, and that includes the good and the bad parts that are only heard about in passing and in retrospect. at the start of season 5, wilson, at his most honest, breaks the hardest news to house yet - that he's leaving PPTH because of him.

"i've enabled it for years. the games, the binges, the middle-of-the-night phone calls...if i've learned anything from amber, it's that i need to take care of myself."

again, we learn of this long-term pain afterwards, once house takes a beat to digest it. we re-contextualize wilson's emotions and behavior after the fact.

say what you like about what wilson asked house to do in 4x16 (it kills me, personally). i cannot completely fault wilson for telling house this ^. as much as house needs to change, wilson does, too. amber was right about that. we can gauge the strain that house has in his relationships based on how many work out long-term: one.

and later, funny as it is in the moment, wilson is the one to go to physically check in on house in 7x01 when it was VERY apparent that he should not have gone home alone (not to dismiss foreman's attempt in 6x22 to be there for him, though). house's fake voicemail message attests to this: "if this is wilson, i'm fine, not suicidal, not on drugs, coping very well with the loss of my last patient, so feel free to go about your day without worry."

i understand why he crawled through that window! after six seasons of this, i would have done the same!

i argue the same about house that i do about wilson - these 2, despite how messed up they are when it comes to human goodness and love - could not do what they do if they did not have the capacity to love. they're both rewarded in their own, twisted ways; house is gratified that, if nothing else, his brain sets him apart and preserves his sense of self, while wilson gets to feel loved in the way he can never quite fulfill elsewhere. does that cancel out the lives they save and soothe along the way?

all of this is to say that it's easy to brand wilson with a red "morally corrupt guy who pretends otherwise" stamp across his forehead because i think that's what house md tempts us to do by mandating how, when, and what we see of wilson's life. trust me - i'm trudging through season 2 right now and fast approaching his rendezvous with grace. but over time, i think the show invites us to treat him with sympathy and nuance in the same way it does house. if we penalize wilson too much for returning to house, and for needing his neediness, that may just imply that house doesn't deserve that sort of love. and we know that isn't the case.

isn't there more poetic irony than the oncologist getting cancer at hand? what about cancer as the silent-killer? what about cancer eating at every part of the body, slowly, over time? unseen and unheard?