funnyborzoi - Tumblr blog

funnyborzoi · 5 days ago

Note

I would like to know the MCR lore please and thank you.

SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001

new jersey based cartoonist gerard way is commuting through new york city for an interview at a popular animation company

Uh Oh Sisters.

a few miles away from ground zero gerard watches the second tower fall and messages everyone he knows like quit your job join my band

bullies his little brother into learning bass

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE is formed. main players are gerard, his brother mikey, and two guitar legends named frank iero and ray toro

gerard has since gone on record saying that the powerlessness he felt in watching an attack happen on american soil inspired him to create something. he could not just stand by and do nothing. he had to find a way to connect with people and overcome that fear.

together MCR releases their first record:

I BROUGHT YOU MY BULLETS, YOU BROUGHT ME YOUR LOVE

the only album that isn't particularly concepty. very Hardcore.

skylines and turnstiles was the first MCR song ever written, the first lyrics of which spell out the message the band so badly wanted to communicate-- "you're not in this alone."

the entirety of the song is about 9/11

the biggest throughline in bullets is complicated & toxic relationships, often using monsters like vampires and zombies as mataphors and motifs

"vampires are a standin for alcoholism" is kind of a reocurring thing in MCR lore as a whole

the one thing about this album that is pretty definite story-wise is the tale of the demolition lovers, highlighted in the last song on the album

the demo lovers are on the run from the authorities, likely in some sort of bonnie and clyde sitch. in the end, they are gunned down in the desert and die in each other's arms.

this final note leads into...

THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE

it's 2004. MCR releases their second album, widely regarded now to be a cornerstone of the early 2000s scemo movement & aesthetic

black button downs with blood-red ties. red eyeshadow, nude lips, and THICK guyliner. catholicism.

you've seen it. i know you've seen it.

ignore the blonde guy back there.

three cheers chronicles the story of the demolition lovers. they are on the cover. you have seen them.

the man awakens in purgatory, searching for his lost lover. there, he meets the devil, who tells him that if he wants to reunite with her, he must bring him the soul of one thousand evil men.

Okay I Believe You.mp4

after all that killing, the man begins to lose sight of himself. he kills 999 evil men when the devil appears to him once more, and tells him that with all this blood on his hands, the last evil man he must kill is himself.

a few years pass. this album is a big hit with The Freaks but at the moment MCR are not exactly "big" outside of alt music circles. everything changes in 2006, but a little bit before that...

THE PARAMOUR MANSION

gerard fucking way, at this time severely mentally ill, believes wholeheartedly in suffering for ones art

posts the whole band up in a haunted mansion that has certifiably driven several past residents insane

gerard suffers from chronic nightmares in this mansion where he witnesses his loved ones dying over and over. he records himself recounting this and puts it in a song called sleep.

the band have designated "heavy rooms" where they scream and yell and cry and get out all their demons. gerard leaves deranged post it notes all over his. one of these notes reads "we are all a black parade"

mikey's mental health gets so bad in this place that he becomes violently suicidal and has to check himself into a clinic

allegedly, gerard writes "famous last words" about mikey's struggles.

before he leaves mikey is insane about a song they're working on called disenchanted. there are stories of him just whispering it into his bandmates' ears at night.

this whole experience just sucks for everyone, but unfortunately for me wishing better for them, we get one of the greatest rock albums of all time out of it.

THE BLACK PARADE

jesus fucking christ

chronicles the story of a dying cancer patient looking back on his life and realizing he was kind of an asshole.

he committed war crimes, drank his sorrows away, and treated his lover like shit.

as he lies there dying in his hospital bed he realizes he is burdened with regret and wants to redo everything and change.

a core tenet of this album is that death comes to you in the form of your fondest memory. THE BLACK PARADE is a manifestation of this--as you might have heard, when the patient was a young boy his father t

the parade he saw as a child returns to him, cloaked in black, and guides him toward the afterlife.

he maybe resists death and his allowed his second chance. up to you!

when MCR toured this show, they did not tour as MCR--they toured as The Black Parade. i was there. in 2007. they came on stage and said "we are the Black Parade."

remember this for later!

this tour was, i shit you not, a full theatrical performance unlike anything you would ever see in that era.

the album begins with the patient about to flatline. they wheel gerard out on a hospital gurney.

seriously, please watch this

youtube

just watch the first like minute if you don't wanna watch the whole thing. PLEASE.

you need to understand the above wasn't some special thing they did for this taped live show. they did this EVERY night. i saw this happen.

the show ended with huge amounts of black and white confetti falling from the ceiling, the same confetti from the music video for welcome to the black parade.

THEATRICS. i called gerard a cartoonist at the beginning of this writeup. but at this time he had also written and published an original comic no one besides MCR fans had heard of or read.

that is certainly not the case any longer.

point: gerard way is a storyteller. and it shows in this tour.

at the beginning of this era, gerard sheared his long beautiful hair short and dyed it platinum blonde to give off the effect of being sickly. the people who don't know them from the revenge era usually know them from this one.

you've most certainly heard the song that skyrocketed them to stardom. i don't know what else to say about it. it is lauded for a reason. i did not know at the time of it releasing that i would become an anthem of my childhood heart and soul, and a whole generation of misfit alt kids with scars on their wrists. but it is The MCR Song for a reason, and that is because it is definitive--dark, heavy, black-coated music... about how you cannot lay down and die, motherfucker. the world is hell! your heart will break! GET THE FUCK UP! FIGHT, YOU BASTARD! YOU HAVE TO FIGHT!

that is, above all else, what MCR writes music about. remember that.

rather unfairly, this is also around the time the media started painting them as a suicide cult brainwashing troubled teens into suicide and self harm.

the (sort of) last song on the black parade contains the lyrics "i am not afraid to keep on living."

here is my show last night singing those lyrics. you should listen. skip to 2:40 for the good part. i am there amongst the sea of voices, my whole body shaking with sobs as i struggle to get the words "i am not afraid to walk this world alone" out.

beyond the Concerned Parents, much of the rock scene rejected MCR due to their unabashedly authentic, earnest, and yes, emo selves. at the time, MCR could not be defined as emo--but emo would eventually reshape itself as a genre around them.

MCR was also unapologetically queer in a time where it was not safe to be so. gerard and frank would kiss with tongue on stage and wear makeup. gerard would sing about kissing men and wearing dresses. they are all married with wives and children, and while gerard is nonbinary himself, they've said time and time again that this weaponization of queerness was literally to get dudebro homophobes to leave their show.

these people would shout the f slur at gerard and he would limp his wrist and say thank you honey. it ruled. it was 2006, that was not something you did.

the biggest and most important culmination of the pushback that came with MCR's stardom is coincidentally my favourite post-reunion MCR performance of all time.

here, they play reading & leeds, where an incredibly rowdy crowd of hard rock, hypermasculine dudebro types throw rocks and bottles on stage the whole time. all the while, gerard smiles down at them like a playful trickster god on high, singing i wouldn't front the scene if you paid me and give me all your poison and you're running after something that you'll never kill and fire at will.

god.

eventually, they would officially "kill" the black parade (the band) off at a final show in mexico. this would lead into another tour where they played as themselves, titled "the black parade is dead!"

things go quiet for a few years. and then...

DANGER DAYS: THE TRUE LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS

gerard: please let me write a comic. i have to write a comic. i need to write a comic. i must write a comic.

gerard writes a comic, and everyone is cool with passing it off as a rock album.

CALIFORNIA: IN THE DISTANT FUTURE YEAR OF 2019. five years prior, the analog/helium wars decimated the landscape and shifted control into the hands of Better Living Industries (BLind for short) a dictatorship localized into the bounds of futuristic Battery City. resisting this monochromatic, controlling government are the Fabulous Killjoys: colourful outlaws in sick ass sentai costumes that roam the desert and fight for liberation.

the sound is completely different. gone are the emo/gothy undertones and romantic, dark aesthetics. we are punk rock as shit, now, and we're going to blow up the government.

gerard dyes his hair bright red. he does this a month after i do the same. that has nothing to do with the lore, it still just makes me lose my mind to this day.

asshole stealing my drip. we even had the same fucked up haircut.

anyways, here's where we are now:

the music videos tell a cohesive story. the album tells another one. a comic releases alongside it all, telling a third one. they all kinda sorta interpret the story in different ways, but it is still the most high concept and well-built world that MCR canon has. this era's aesthetic was so delicious that mentally ill transgenders on tumblr are still RPing it and writing fic to this day.

at this point, MCR reaches a strange kind of impasse where they are simultaneously at the peak of their career and less relevant than ever. they're entrenched in celebrity culture. mikey is cheating on his girlfriend. gerard is anorexic and drinking. shit's not the greatest.

at the same time, a lot of their former fans are not crazy about the new sound / aesthetic

an MCR song gets on glee. this is, in large part, considered The End for a lot of people.

US politics are important here: Obama's in office. things are looking up. the culture of the country is shifting. and that begs the question... why did the world need MCR?

the world needed MCR because the world was at war under a republican president. the world needed MCR because the twin towers fucking exploded into flames. the world needed MCR because the future was bleak and scary, and they had to do something. and they did something. and the something was done.

it was done.

it was over.

MARCH 23RD, 2013

It's over.

They break up.

They work their solo careers. They live their lives. They have kids. Gerard becomes a pretty legendary comics writer.

The end.

A year later, on an album containing some unreleased music / b sides, they release their final song, on an album titled May Death Never Stop You.

"Fake Your Death."

It's the only song MCR has ever written where the message could not more clearly be "Give up. It's done."

I choose defeat. I walk away.

I can't listen.

I don't listen.

It hurts too much.

Life goes on.

LIFE GOES ON

as gen z grow up and discover music, a beautiful second wave of my chem fans enter the space. overwhelmingly, we learn in time that MCR's greatness is not a product of the cultural moment or nostalgia--i begin to see hundreds of tiktoks of teenagers in the mid 2010s lamenting being born in the wrong generation because i missed seeing MCR live.

the elder emos comiscerate. the g note meme is born.

watch a couple compilations. notice how all the teenagers are wearing the same MCR shirt? that's because it was the ONLY official merch available for ages after they broke up. whenever i see that shirt, it's like an arrow in my heart. it's a signifier of someone who came in late, and there is nothing more beautiful than that to me. the music is good. intragenerationally, you understand that, too.

the way brothers have cited one of their biggest inspirations ever to be the smashing pumpkins. mikey went on record saying once that the smashing pumpkins is everything they wanted to be.

people begin to overthink this.

the timeline of the smashing pumpkins is as follows: they were together for 12 years, broke up for 6, and then got back together.

mcr was together... for 12 years.

if they got back together after a 6 year hiatus, the year would be... 2019.

2019, the year that the killjoys raised up their lasers toward the oppressive and fascistic government.

WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING

2019.

45 begins his 3rd year in office.

This is, in case you didn't know, going very poorly.

Halloween. The MCR socials... change their pfp.

more symbols trickle in on their insta story. something is being teased/promoted. we expect it is likely just a re-release, or some more unreleased music, or a merch thing for the spooky season.

some people can't help remembering a little while back, though... when one of the jonas brothers said that he heard MCR rehearsing in the same venue as them. how odd that was, considering MCR broke up.

when frank was confronted about this, he rolled his eyes and answered in the same negative he always did, obviously tired of hearing it all these years.

"man, that rumour's like a broken clock."

YES. YES IT IS.

out of fucking NOWHERE, the MCR reunion is announced.

they do this on halloween night--when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest. remember this.

i don't want to try to put into words what the energy of this show is like. all i can do is BEG you to watch the multicam cut of it. i am begging. i am pleading.

six long years of no MCR. six long years of new fans mourning what they didn't get.

and look. just LOOK at that sea of fingerless gloves and black t-shirts. look at that sea of people dressing like they did when they were teenagers, alongside teenagers who weren't there to see it but are now living their dreams of doing so.

look at gerard's dad getup. look at how much healthier and happier he looks. look at how overjoyed everyone is to be there.

the medley at the beginning. the curtain falling. im not okay (a secondary emo anthem to wttbp) heralding the dawn of a new era.

the audience chanting mikey's name as he plays the final bassline of the kids from yesterday.

ADDITIONAL LORE: MCR more or less always plays the same song for their encore--helena. this is because the last line of helena is meant to be their parting words to their audience, so long and goodnight.

they do not do this here. the final song they play, aptly saved for last, is welcome to the black parade.

the final words of which, are, of course

WE'LL CARRY ON

take a good look at gerard's california 2019 getup

any witch worth their salt will tell you that's a sigil on his arm. specifically, it's a witches' wheel, which can be translated.

the way a lot of witchcraft works is through intention. you put an intention to an object, and the magick flows through that intention.

when translated, this wheel spells out my chemical romance.

another part of spellcasting is the idea of 'charging' a spell. there are many ways to do this, depending on what you're trying to manifest, but to put a sigil on your body with a clear intention and wear it to a massive gathering of energy, like, say, a room full of people all singing the lyrics to that intention in perfect unison...

well. that's damn near ritualistic, in fact, i daresay it's...

A SUMMONING

after several smaller teasers throughout the week, the official MCR youtube releases this video. i will not explain it to you. i am demanding you watch it, given everything i have just explained.

youtube

this is the video that announced the reunion tour. a 13 minute long love letter to the fandom, told through the eyes of one of us. rife with easter eggs, theatrical as can be, and, most notably of all, ending with this:

the sigil, charged. glowing with energy from the fandom in that california venue, who used their passion and power to revive my chemical romance from the dead.

my chemical romance will tour in 2020. barring extenuating circumstances, there is nothing that will stop them from playing their music for us one more time.

YES THERE IS

it turns out being in a fascist government means that sometimes a deadly infectious disease will spread unmitigated and shut down the world.

it turns out that when the killjoys said "die with your mask on" they were a little too on the mark.

OKAY, REDO.

2022.

it is still not safe to go to concerts, but the world does not care about public health or disabled people, so they keep doing them anyways.

mcr reunites, and releases a new song called the foundations of decay. it could not more clearly be about their legacy.

the branding for the new tour is themed around this concept of decay and rot. flies specifically are a huge theme. before each show, the beating of fly wings in massive numbers echoes like static throughout the stage speakers. the fans collectively name this "the swarm"

what this tour lacks in cohesive theming it makes up for in sheer fun. gerard wears a different outfit every night. he does a lot of drag. they spraypaint messages on the drum head--some nonsense, some sentimental. you should watch the strange aeons video about this where she goes through all of them, as well as all the funny shit that happened on the tour.

youtube

the vibe of this reunion was very much 'let's have as much fucking fun as possible.'

it was. it was fun. and it was fun enough that they took all the money they earned from these massive reunion shows, put their heads together, and said let's fucking do it again.

PRESENT DAY: THE GLORIOUS NATION OF DRAAG

you are here.

randomly one day in november 2024, MCR announces A FUCKING STADIUM TOUR, appropriately named "long live the black parade"

curiously, the theming of this tour looks decidedly... not black paradey.

the strange, not-quite-russian lettering is a fucking conlang unique to this era. it starts showing up in all the various promotional videos they release.

"It has been seventeen years since The Black Parade was sent to the MOAT. In that time, a great Dictator has risen to power, bringing about "THE CONCRETE AGE”; a glorious time of stability and abundance in the history of DRAAG. His Grand Immortal Dictator wishes to celebrate our rich and storied culture, fine foods, and musical entertainments by welcoming you to these great demonstrations of power and resolve. And lending voice and song for the first time in six thousand two hundred and forty six days, their work privilege ceremoniously reinstated, will be His Grand Immortal Dictator's National Band... The Black Parade. Long Live Draag"

here in the nation of Draag, the Grand Immortal Dictator has revived The Black Parade from the dead, forcing them to play their album in its entirety, wear their silly little outfits, play their silly little nostalgia anthems.

all the while, intending to use them as a mouthpiece for his pro-war, oppressive propaganda.

the stadium show is HIGH THEATRICS. only one venue knows the storyline of it so far!

LUCKILY FOR YOU I WAS THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

last night, me and 30 thousand other emos watched as the black parade danced for us, corpses reanimated. gerard shambled and slurred his way across the stage, all the while being watched like a hawk by an imposing government agent who handed him documents and told him what to say and do.

every audience member was given a sign that said yea or nay. at one point, we were asked to vote on if we should allow 4 new elected officials into the government.

the audience overwhelmingly voted yes. gerard commanded their execution, and they were shot on the b stage in front of us, their corpses dragged off by the MOAT.

throughout the setlist, the band begin to fight back. gerard resists the government in increasingly big ways, refusing to be their zombified mouthpiece. when this reaches a head, they pull the band off the jumbotron and start playing quiz shows and ads for groceries.

during mama, the curtain pulls back to reveal military tracking & specs. blueprints for a missile launch. the whole stage flashes red and begins to burn. new lyrics are added, and gerard presents the imposing suit man with a dagger.

during disenchanted--which had not been played live in 17 years--the stadium was bathed in a sea of blue light from fans taping paper to their phone flashlights in tribute to the underloved song. all the while, a Draag politician speaks of duty and justice and obligation to one's country.

we're taken to a launch station in the middle of a wheat field. as famous last words is playing, we watch the missile be fired.

the carnage that ensues is the sole background to a lone acoustic guitar that's been on stage the whole night, untouched. ray comes out and begins to play it, and it's hard to tell what it is at first until the rest of the band joins in--

an acoustic version of The End. the first track on the album, which we have already heard. it is a funeral procession, and gerard understandably always sings it bombastically and high-energy to welcome the audience. this time, his cadence is mournful and slow, desperate and wailing.

the show begins anew. we listen to the same song, once more.

the suit man has, for reasons unbeknownst to me, changed into a pierrot-looking clown costume. sensing resistance, he gives chase to gerard, who at this point in the song is singing the lyrics SAVE ME! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!

all the while, there has been a chalk outline ominously carved out in the middle of the stage.

the clown and gerard fight. the dagger from before stabs gerard, punishing him for his insolence. bleeding out on hands and knees, he drags himself to the chalk outline, singing lyrics to another song--we'll carry on. We'll carry on.

he collapses into place, freed of the dictator's control, allowed to finally rest. the rest of the band members are dragged offstage by uniformed men. subversively, mikey--who has thus far been the kenny mccormick of MCR lore--escapes. ray is dragged off, shredding wildly the whole time. he refuses to stop playing until he cannot any longer.

the clown dances around to Blood, which is a hidden track that was at the end of the black parade. it is a perfect fucking song for a clown to dance to, especially when that clown is covered in the blood of the guy he just murdered. at the end of the song, he rips his shirt open to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest, and kills himself in a satisfying blaze of glory.

all the while, that same confetti from the original black parade tour is falling down around us all.

when i saw the black parade tour in 2007, i cannot explain how i knew this, but i had this feeling... they're holding back.

my father said to me that night, commit to memory everything you just saw here. you will never see anything like that again.

my dad was fucking wrong.

thanks for listening!

#mcr #amazing read #the urge to send this to all of my friends as if they even listen to mcr #or are as abnormal about them as i am

1K notes · View notes

funnyborzoi · 5 days ago

Text

1x1 — PILOT (everybody lies)

welcome to the start of my house md episode by episode rewatch/recap/analysis series. i’ve never met a bandwagon i’ve not wanted to jump onto i guess! (SPOILER: THIS IS INCREDIBLY LONG. LIKE 7000 WORDS LONG.)

i’ll start by acknowledging the elephant(s) in the room: in a lot of ways, this episode, well as the episodes immediately following it, don’t exactly feel like the rest of the series. the basic formula is there—cold open with a patient mysteriously being struck down, house being browbeaten into taking the case, clinic duty subplot, various trial and error diagnoses and treatments that fail on increasingly serious levels until a last minute third act revelation and Correct diagnosis—but tonally things feel a little…off, and not just because of the orange filter. house comes across as more earnest and serious, there are far fewer one liners-per-minute, cuddy seems distant and almost distinctly antagonistic, the patient is the absolute focus of the episode as opposed to a backdrop.

i think you can go back and forth as to the point in s1 where the formula becomes standardised and the episodes start to feel like the rest of the show (or at least, like they could be from s2-3)—i personally think this happens no earlier than 1x11 detox, and no later than 1x13 cursed, but i’ll save my reasoning for when i get to that cluster of episodes—and you can probably brush a lot of this off as generic ‘early episode weirdness’ and the show finding its feet, but controversially: i don’t dislike these things about the pilot. i think things feeling so alien in this episode serves, unintentionally or not, as a great metaphor for how it feels to be chucked into princeton-plainsboro somewhat in medias res, both for foreman (who serves as a secondary protagonist in this episode and in s1 more generally) and for us as an audience. if a pilot episode’s success is defined by how accurately it tries to give a sense of what the rest of the show will look and feel like, then i think this fails—but i think it’s perhaps more fruitful to think of the pilot as an introduction, and not a ‘first episode’. this is a very long way of saying that the pilot is weird, and i like it anyway, and i won’t be criticising it for not matching the tone and feel of later episodes. this will also likely be the longest out of all my recaps just because…well, it’s the pilot. are ya with me? ok cool.

INTRODUCING REBECCA ADLER

controversially, i love the long establishing shots of adler on the bus/running into work at the start of this episode. there’s something to be said for the power of suspense here—who is she? why are we following her? what’s going to happen?—and the subversion at the end; adler is not going to be our main character. there are a lot of establishing details here that i really love: starting a new relationship (only for the payoff later on in the episode: three dates, and he left after she started getting sick), her gossipy relationship with her coteacher melanie, the first ever mention of lying and lies in the series (MELANIE: You’re lying, aren’t you? REBECCA: I wouldn’t lie to you) and the immediate follow-up of how adler twists the stayover story into a lesson about making new friends to her students. i think this level of detail and time would be tedious on EVERY patient of the week, but there’s something to be said about getting to know adler before the shock symptom reveal. we are invested in her wellbeing separately from simply rooting for house’s team to solve the case. i think a lot of the better episodes in s2 and s3 do something similar—getting to know the heart donor in absentia in sex kills, the back and forth between house and coma guy in son of a coma guy, foreman and his patient in house training—and again, i wouldn’t want this to be the case every episode…but for a pilot, it works.

GETTING TO YES

i’m actually not a huge fan of this introduction of house and wilson—i think a lot of the dialogue and exposition is fairly clunky (‘Hey, you’re the oncologist. I’m just a lowly infectious disease guy’)—but there are aspects of it that i really like. we don’t see a lot of wilson in s1 (there’s a reason why his fandom catchphrase is ‘i too am in this episode’ lmao), but when we DO see him he’s almost exclusively with house, and this is a great way of introducing that dynamic: even though hugh laurie is the only name that gets a special fade to black sequence, house and wilson arrive on the scene together. i’m also weirdly fond of the fact that neither of them refer to one another by name in this scene (more on names/character introductions more generally in a bit); it feels like we as an audience are stumbling in to a very habitual conversation, and i think it goes a long way in terms of establishing their friendship and degree of intimacy and familiarity with one another.

as an aside, wilson does two things in this scene that fascinate me:

1) his mention that house has ‘three overqualified doctors working for [him], getting bored’. this is something that crops up a couple of times in these early s1 episodes—the idea that house’s team spend a lot of time sitting around listlessly, and have been for a while. it’s never clearly spelled out why this is the case, other than the implication that house is generally workshy and finds most cases boring, but i do wish this got a bit more attention in fandom spaces in conjunction with house’s first conversation with cuddy and the reveal that he’s been shirking all responsibility, including clinic duty, for a very long time (cuddy even specifically says that the only reason why house hasn’t been fired yet is because his ‘reputation is still worth something’; that ‘still’ seems to imply that this is in spite of his current work output). in the later seasons, we get various whisperings about house being world-renowned and patients with influence specifically lobbying to be treated by him, but this seems to be a reputation he has actively re-cultivated throughout the course of the show; before the pilot, he hasn’t been doing anything for a while. you can read into this however you like (i think the conclusion we’re supposed to come to is that this is residual post-infarction depression, given that cuddy mentions him being 6 years behind on clinic duty and the infarction happened 5 years prior; most of the backlog occurred post leg), but i do think it has some fascinating implications as to why house bothered hiring foreman specifically for ‘street smarts’ if he’d been in some kind of long term slump, and what exactly cameron, and especially chase, were doing while they were on the team pre-canon (we know from a deleted pilot scene that she had been there 6 months, and chase a year). the post-stacy pre-pilot era is a bit of a canon black hole, and so these little throwaway references do a lot of heavy lifting.

2) his lie about adler being his cousin. it’s easy to say this having watched this episode a dozen times over, but i don’t think this was ever intended to be a believable lie; wilson’s wearing a pretty shit-eating grin at the end of the scene (and when house throws his grand hissy fit to get adler’s mri and then tells wilson he better ‘love this cousin a whole lot’), he fumbles a little when house references his uncle dying of cancer to refute adler’s lack of history, and, as a bit of a rogue piece of evidence, in the turkish remake (hekimoglu) it is revealed almost IMMEDIATELY to the audience that wilson is lying and multiple scenes are inserted into what is otherwise a shot-for-shot remake of wilson panicking and trying to keep up the pretence. we obviously find out that adler isn’t wilson’s cousin anyway when foreman exposes him towards the end of the episode, but i just love this as a piece of establishing characterisation: that for all wilson is playing ‘good cop’ in this scene, and in his relationship with house more generally, he is lying and manipulating his way into doing so. sets the tone for his and house’s chronic dysfunction in such a beautiful, show-not-telling way.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

we’ll gloss over the weird cgi invasion of adler’s brain tissue, and get back to business: the introduction of the big three, foreman, cameron and chase. or non-introduction, rather; in this opening scene, none of them are addressed by name, and it’s only really foreman who gets much of a back-and-forth with house (cameron gets to say house’s name for the first time and smugly tell foreman that house doesn’t like dealing with patients; chase, making a running start as the fellow the show cared about the least in s1, gets a token contribution to the differential and a dream). but i still love this scene a lot, and i’ll break down what we get, fellow-by-fellow.

FOREMAN: as briefly mentioned, foreman makes his mark as daddy’s favourite child EARLY. he gets the first line in this scene (with house getting the second), and then the order reverses with his getting the second to last line and house getting the last word at the end. not to go all english major on everyone, but opening and closing lines (in poetry, in novels, in plays) tend to be very deliberate choices because they set the tone for what comes afterwards; foreman getting a hand in both of these is the literary equivalent of the show waving a big red sign that says THIS GUY’S IMPORTANT. he absolutely dominates this scene; much of it is a back and forth between him and house, with foreman playing the skeptic who lays out all the rules of conventional medicine (horses, not zebras; treating patients is why we became doctors)—but he also catches on very quickly to the way house’s brain works by suggesting the lab messed up the bloodwork. although the final version of the pilot doesn’t make it explicitly clear that this is foreman’s first week on the job, i think this scene does a great job of establishing him as an outsider—while chase and cameron stay quiet and composed in the background, foreman is asking all the questions. it’s handled really, really well, and really sets the trend for the next few episodes, wherein foreman spends a lot of time trying and sometimes failing to convince cameron and chase to take his side over house’s. even though foreman becoming dean of medicine in s8 was unplanned, i think you can see from this opening scene why it was him who got forced into that role and not any other character, because from day one he’s willing to go toe to toe with house. it’s a great introduction for him.

CAMERON: cameron doesn’t get nearly as much focus in this scene as foreman, but there are two points of interest. the first is her aforementioned aside to foreman—‘Dr House doesn’t like dealing with patients’. it’s telling that it’s cameron giving foreman this head up, and not chase; it’s maybe an early glimmer of chase’s own laziness/disdain for foreman, but also hugely revealing of how, even at the very beginning, cameron is someone who prides herself on knowing and reading people…especially house. she does it publicly in front of house, too, and not after they leave the office. it’s a performative gesture; she wants to be the friendly face seen as helping out the new guy, and she also wants house to know that she knows this about him. this is maybe the distant ancestor of cameron’s infamous ‘i know you like me and there’s nothing you can do to change my mind’ speech in love hurts. fabulous characterisation. the second point of interest for cameron is a very brief reaction shot: foreman accuses house of wanting to eliminate the humanity from medicine, to which house replies ‘humanity is overrated’ and we cut to a lingering shot of cameron, sitting stone-faced, while house continues to talk. honestly this shot alone is why i don’t think reading the livejournal transcripts of each episode (as brilliant of a resource as they are!) serve as a sufficient substitute for rewatching an episode in its entirety, because this goes entirely unmentioned in that transcript despite it being such a key bit of characterisation for cameron. the implication is clear: cameron’s the humanity on this team. hurray for subtle character work!

CHASE: lol. chase, bless his cotton socks, doesn’t get a lot to work with here—no lingering reaction shots aside from a look of furrowed confusion while he stares at the MRI, and his only two lines are to suggest an aneurysm and then clarify that cameron’s creutzfeld-jakob suggestion is mad cow. this in itself is kind of revealing; chase just isn’t as important as the other two (even though he’s later the one to save the day with the x ray suggestion!) and won’t be for a while. ironically enough, we do find out chase’s name first; while wheeling adler to radiology, he corrects her assumption that he’s house and introduces himself. but, uh, this scene makes it pretty clear that this does not translate into chase being more significant than foreman or cameron lol.

LISA CUDDY, DEAN OF MEDICINE

i’m going to be talking about all of cuddy’s scenes here, as opposed to just her first one, because most of them aren’t really significant enough to talk about on their own. cuddy’s introduction in this episode is a bit of a rogue one, because in a lot of ways it comes closer to her and house’s later dynamic than the rest of s1 does—the immediate rapidfire back-and-forth filled with veiled insults, them following each other around to continue a conversation, their various attempts to ragebait one another and get the last word—and yet something about it nevertheless feels a bit…off. it might just be because the quips themselves feel a little mean-spirited—cuddy’s deadpan ‘to what?’ when house says he’s going home, her later ‘but i’m pretty sure i can outrun ya’ zinger—or maybe it’s just that the first conversation is actually fairly mundane and professional underneath all the quiplash (cuddy wants house to do his job—not even as an appeal to sensibility, but to literally just do the bare minimum—and house is refusing and generally disengaged), but it feels like there’s a lot of energy that doesn’t really have much place to go here. i know huddy’s will they/won’t they can be, uh, divisive, but i think edelstein was spot on to recognise the chemistry between her and laurie and push the writers into going somewhere with it; this dynamic plays out a lot better later on when it feels like the bickering has real subtext. sometimes the actors do know best guys!!

that criticism aside: i think the pilot does a really good job of establishing not only who cuddy is, but the role she plays in the show as Big Boss Lady. she’s uptight and obsessive, but also entirely willing and able to stoop to house’s level; she can be naïve and trite (my favourite, FAVOURITE gag in this episode is cuddy’s ‘when we make mistakes, people die’ line later being echoed in the medical soap house is watching), but she’s willing to recognise house is right when she sees tangible evidence. i especially adore that we get her name introduction not through it being spoken aloud, but by seeing it on the door to her office; this is just sooo cuddy to me, and it feels exactly like how she would want to be introduced lol. and i love that she is the person to complete the second half of the ‘you can’t always get what you want’ motif—not only is ‘but if you try sometimes, you get what you need’ very, very cuddy coded, especially during her s5 adoption arc, but it’s a (perhaps unintentional) piece of evidence that house and cuddy aren’t actually that different, that their approaches to medicine are really two sides of the same coin. lovely stuff. also rip to cuddy’s cunty little glasses, which get their first and last outing in this episode. apparently only one woman on this show can wear glasses at a time and the writers chose cameron as their initial glassesbearer. i miss you, glasses cuddy.

(NOT REALLY RELEVANT TO CUDDY BUT INCLUDING IT IN THIS SECTION BECAUSE IT COMES UP IN THAT FIRST HOUSE/CUDDY CONVERSATION: house’s immediate rebuttal to cuddy threat to fire him is ‘i have tenure’. this IS something that crops up again later in s1 and becomes a pretty core part of the vogler arc, but after that we don’t really hear much about it again. it’s kind of a shame. because first of all, what idiot approved of emboldening house by giving him tenure (probably cuddy, let’s be real). and second of all, the whole ‘house having tenure’ thing could have been incorporated a lot more firmly into his relationship with cuddy as an extra dimension as to why she doesn’t stop him from doing all the insane shit he does—she can hide behind the tenure excuse because she doesn’t necessarily want to admit she agrees with him. don’t get me wrong, i don’t think i would have actively preferred this to what we got (i like that it’s fairly undeniable that cuddy goes along with most of house’s excesses because she likes him as a person and as a doctor), but maybe it’s a missed opportunity. idk. something i thought was worth mentioning.)

[MRI ROOM INTERLUDE]

shoutout to the pilot for giving us not one, but TWO interludes in the MRI room; the first is interrupted by house’s authority to order procedures being pulled (it also gives us cameron’s name, as called out by the tech in the booth, and a quick chekhov’s gun explanation of how the contrast dye works) and the second is interrupted by adler going all lily rose depp in nosferatu and almost dying to gadolinium-induced anaphylaxis. since the first scene is so short and mostly serves as obligatory precursor to adler’s allergic reaction (though it is hilariously perfect that cameron steps in to reassure adler with her christmas tree analogy after foreman’s very science-heavy explanation, and chase is…idk, twiddling his thumbs somewhere out of shot), let’s talk about the second.

all of the fellows get a moment in the sun in the pilot (even poor chase), and this is cameron’s: she’s the one to immediately clock that something is wrong with adler after she fails to respond to a check-in question, and is quick to brush off chase’s attempts to argue otherwise (sidenote: lol of course chase tries to take the path of least resistance here. bless him, he doesn’t come off looking great in a lot of this episode). i am honestly so obsessed with how perfect this is as a piece of characterisation that i don’t even know where to begin; you could transplant this scene into a s3 episode, and it would still feel totally and utterly cameron in a way that is really admirable. she immediately proves house’s earlier flippant claim that ‘humanity is overrated’ wrong; it’s her compassion and attempt to check in on adler that allows her to realise something is going awry, and her insistence on standing by her gut instinct (something is wrong, adler went from feeling sick to going silent) saves adler’s life. this is something the show explicitly congratulates her for via chase’s repentant ‘good call’—for all that house later prods her this way and that throughout the seasons, cameron’s core compassion remains something to be admired. i also think it’s kind of fun that cameron, an immunologist, arrests an allergic reaction. we don’t know her specialty yet, but it’s a fun little nod. big fan.

other things to note: i like that foreman takes a bit of a backseat in this scene—it’s a nice bit of balance, given how foreman-heavy the rest of the episode is, and also illustrates that there are scenarios where being booksmart isn’t enough; it’s cameron’s emotional intelligence (and chase’s practical skill) doing the heavy lifting here. again, great way of showing, not telling, the team’s various strengths and weaknesses. i’m also strangely fond of how…quiet this whole scene is? it’s very elongated and eerie and there aren’t seven million beeping noises in the background; it’s totally different than the various disasters that occur in every other episode. it’d drive me crazy if every procedure-gone-wrong scene went like this, but i do like that it’s different.

MOMENT I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO PUT ANYWHERE ELSE: directly after this, there’s a fucking hilarious moment where house meets the team outside adler’s hospital room and tells them to get a better history. when foreman questions the logic of this if everybody lies, house replies with ‘truth begins in lies. think about it’ and walks off. at which point foreman stares after him and goes ‘that doesn’t mean anything. does it’ in the most clearly skeptical tone of all time that it fucking kills me. meanwhile cameron gazes thoughtfully and chase is clearly trying not to burst out laughing. this doesn’t really have much relevance other than that it’s another early example of foreman desperately trying to appeal to cameron and chase for some semblance of common sense and getting nothing back, and also it makes me giggle every time.

CLINIC DUTY INTERLUDE/VASCULITIS?????

not much to say about house’s initial clinic duty blitz, other than the obvious ‘lol everyone in this episode is orange’ and that i like how this breaks up the action a little. i especially like the asthma kid scene, which has a first time watcher’s most pressing question (what happened to house’s leg?) spoken aloud and ignored, and also features house’s steroids explanation leading him to the vasculitis epiphany—this trend of house’s clinic patients leading him to some revelation about the main case (and thus undermining his claim that clinic duty is USELESS) dies out pretty early on, and it’s probably for the best since it’d make things too predictable, but it is fairly satisfying while it’s here.

of more interest is the next two scenes with adler. getting to see her phrase her family history in her own words is a fun one-off—hereafter, it’s usually just reported to us by either the fellows or whoever is convincing house to take the case; it is also, lol, kind of funny that chase is once again off twiddling his thumbs somewhere else (when foreman is absent for the steroids being administered, we immediately cut to him searching the school; we never find out what chase is doing lmao. i know it’s pedantic of me to keep pointing out how useless he’s being, but it never stops being funny how disposable he is in the pilot LOL). and i know the shot of house shadowed in profile through the blinds is kind of cheesy but…it WORKS okay!! it reminds us very sharply that despite running the show, adler hasn’t actually met him yet. it’s another factor that makes this episode more patient centric than any other. and as a throwaway moment: cameron questions what will happen if they’re wrong about the vasculitis steroid treatment, to which house responds with ‘we learn something else’. another example of cameron winning the ‘caring the most about the patient’s welfare’ game, but also another possible example of evidence that supports the whole ‘house hasn’t had a case in a LONG TIME’ theory that i’ve been trying to build throughout this post. i mean realistically i know that this is just meant as exposition, but it’d make more sense if it were foreman asking that question as the New Guy than just cameron. the fact she’s been here a while and doesn’t know this suggests that something is a bit different with adler.

after this, we get one of my favourite moments in the whole episode: chase and cameron administering adler’s steroids. we get a whole lot of information about adler—the guy she was dating in the opener has since dumped her (as mentioned at the beginning), she claims not to have any friends at work (despite seeming very friendly and gossipy with her coworker)—that again supports this whole episode’s through-line of ‘everybody lies’/the truth being murky, but we also get this grade a confrontation between cameron and chase after cameron blurts out that adler is now being treated for vasculitis:

Chase: You should have told her the truth. It’s a long shot guess.

Cameron: [to nurse] Thank you. [To Chase] If House is right, no harm, if he’s wrong we’ve given a dying woman a couple days hope.

Chase: False hope.

Cameron: If there was any other type available I would have given her that.

it’s more great characterisation for cameron, obviously (she who turns out to be awful at delivering bad news), but also pretty revealing for chase. he’s fairly blasé while adler is telling him about her lack of a support network (it looks like he’s laughing in places, even), and hasn’t really exhibited much concern about her as a person prior to this, but cameron telling adler she doesn’t have a brain tumour—giving her ‘false hope’—really riles him, to the point where at the end of the conversation he huffs and storms off back the way he and cameron came. this idea of distributing false hope really bugs him in a way that i think can be linked to his speech to house about his father in 1x13 cursed: ‘no disappointments’. and as a little treat to myself (stalwart camchase shipper and defended): i think it’s kind of sweet that chase throws a hissy fit like this with cameron, given how stilted and cordial a lot of the other fellow interactions are this episode. great teaser for how much of a dysfunctional mess this team dynamic will be and also shows how comfortable chase and cameron are with one another as opposed to foreman. it’s fun!

ERIC “SEARCH AND DESTROY” FOREMAN

yeah don’t be misled by the section title; we still don’t know foreman’s name yet (we are twenty minutes into the episode, by the way, for those playing along at home, and, spoiler: we have a while to wait). not much of note happens while foreman is searching the kindergarten (aside from him physically making this face ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ after finding out a kid dropped a book on a gerbil), so we’ll cut to The Cafeteria scene.

other scenes in the pilot might be my favourites, but i think this cafeteria scene between foreman and house is, objectively, the best. for just a moment, it elevates foreman to house’s equal—no other fellow get a proper tête-a-tête with him like this in the pilot; although cameron manages to get him alone for the ‘why did you hire me’ chat, it’s only because she actively ambushes him—and then it comes crashing down as soon as foreman refuses to buy into house’s justification for searching adler’s apartment, via cafeteria lady metaphor, and house whips out the juvie record reveal. (side note: here, we are told foreman broke into someone’s home. almost exclusively afterwards, it’s referred to as him being a car thief. obviously this is just a continuity error but Lol). this alone isn’t what leads foreman to agree to the break-in—it’s house’s later choice to stop all treatment and watch how fast adler dies in lieu of more information—but it’s an important precursor. time and time again, we see foreman make the choice he does after this cafeteria scene—to acquiesce to being like house, and even mimicking his language (later, he parrots house’s ‘she might have a meth lab!’ comment to cameron), but nevertheless hold on to his more romantic beliefs in people’s choices (he eats the potentially contaminated sandwich anyway). there are a lot of recurring points in the show where foreman tries not to be like house, and then immediately fumbles and buckles under the pressure; this scene makes it clear he was doomed to fall into this cycle from the start. the next time someone tries to argue chase was the chosen one from day one i’m going to sentence them to watching this cafeteria scene ten million times because it is so, so obvious that foreman is being singled out here in a way cameron and chase just aren’t. house interrogated his high school gym teacher, for god’s sake. if that doesn’t scream chosen one, idk what does.

IRRELEVANT SIDE NOTES: we never see this cafeteria set again, the first of many cafeteria set casualties to come. also, house trying to watch tv behind foreman’s head for the first part of this scene sends me and could be right out of an s3 episode.

HE’S YOUR FRIEND, HUH?

other people have spoken about adler and wilson’s conversation and how it illustrates house and wilson’s relationship far more eloquently and with more substance than i can ever hope to do, so let’s put that mostly to one side and talk about everything else that comes up in this scene with them both. i am of course contractually bound to laugh at the following: wilson randomly checking up on adler despite having nothing to do with her for the rest of the episode (ostensibly this is to further make us question whether she’s actually his cousin, since they interact with zero familiarity, but come on lol), and also wilson’s throwaway comment about how adler might see house ‘at the movies, or on the bus’. house on a bus…likely place for him to be. anyway back to the serious stuff.

adler gets one of the thesis statements of the show in this scene: ‘it’s not what people say, it’s what they do’. if the show has any one big thing to say, it’s about the importance of action: people CAN change, doing things changes things. there’s even payoff for this later in the episode; house and adler talk themselves in circles, and it doesn’t change her mind about wishing to be discharged—only doing something, getting that cold hard proof of the worm in her leg, changes her mind. every single romantic relationship in the show fails for this reason; action outweighs feeling or sentiment. this so easily could have been a trite, throwaway line, but the show has the courage to act upon its own internal ruleset and make it mean something. i really, really appreciate that.

sorry i got too earnest for a second. MOVING ON!

SO HOW’D YOU GET THE JOB?

i already covered foreman’s break-in breaking point (lol) in the cafeteria section, and, uh, even i can’t spin chronic fatigue guy into some deep allegory for rest of the show, so let’s skip to the break-in!

this scene is sooo playful—i love the jump cuts between cameron and foreman open-and-closing cabinets, cameron’s casual ‘i managed to make it to 17 without a criminal record’ (cameron are you implying you got arrested at 17???), foreman just straight-up giving up on keeping his criminal record a secret and having told cameron the full story off-screen (and cameron comparing him to jean valjean and taking house’s side), foreman still being in his full suit while cameron’s in a tank top with her hair down…even the simple act of foreman having the audacity to be bitching and moaning about being hired for his past while simultaneously making himself a sandwich out of adler’s groceries. foreman and cameron are probably the duo who get the least amount of screen time together in s1 (for all that i’ve mocked him for being an afterthought, they’re both usually paired up with chase instead of each other) so it’s nice that we get such an extended moment of them together…and also makes me wonder if there’s an alternate universe where forecam was the big fellows love story instead of camchase.

what makes this scene really fruitful, though, is the complete role reversal that takes place. we open with cameron, smugly telling foreman about how house ‘doesn’t believe in pretence’ and that it’s ridiculous of him to be upset about being hired for his criminal record; we end with foreman teasingly asking cameron what she did to get hired, after cameron attempts to point out all the reasons why foreman likely got the place on merit regardless (he went to a better school, he got better grades), and a slow zoom on cameron’s blank expression. in the span of less than a week, foreman has begged a question that cameron has never even thought to ask—and it clearly unnerves her. cameron’s later disgust at being hired for her looks is, imo, less about the perceived sexism (although cameron does seem to have a complex about being dismissed because she’s a woman, because she’s pretty, etc—she says this practically verbatim in 1x14 control) and more because it did not even occur to her that there could be a pretext for her hiring. she is upset at having not read house as well as she thought. something similar happens during s2’s articlegate; cameron lets her article rot on house’s desk for months, assuming her patience will be rewarded, whereas foreman assumes the worst and immediately forces his under house’s nose. we get the set up for this IN THE PILOT!!! ugh i’m obsessed.

SILLY THINGS: the way foreman says ‘her dog definitely has fleas’ is so satisfying. i already mentioned it but shoutout to cameron’s les mis reference. i like how tenderly cameron examines the drawings from adler’s students. also, foreman mentions them ripping up the carpet. in the kindergarten scene he was sniffing the carpet. there’s a joke here about how carpets are a euphemism for a certain part of the female anatomy and what that might imply about foreman…but i’m not going to make it.

ADLER’S NOT HIS COUSIN!

THIRTY MINUTES INTO THE EPISODE and we finally get wilson AND foreman’s names revealed. by one another, no less! phew. now i can finally find and replace all the sentences where i just described them both by epithets. jokes aside, it does feel a little silly that it took this long to get names for either of them (especially foreman, who is by far the most prominent character in the episode after house!) but there’s something to be said about the order of name reveals maybe alluding to their narrative importance in the episode (in reverse order): chase, cameron, cuddy, wilson, foreman. or maybe it’s just that this episode had a big deleted scene where the three fellows hung out together and addressed one another by name and mentioned how long they’d all been there and that scene being cut messed up the flow a little bit. i guess we’ll never know!! (to be clear: it is probably the latter).

other great things about this scene: cameron’s little look at foreman before he reveals adler isn’t wilson’s cousin because she had pork in her fridge. chase’s eyes playing ping pong between foreman and wilson while they’re arguing about adler (not) being wilson’s cousin. chase having to cover his mouth because he’s openly laughing after wilson claims he calls adler rachel instead of rebecca. house’s little call and response explanation of tapeworm larvae overlaid with a cgi worm sequence. also i can’t believe i haven’t mentioned this yet but i find it so very charming how everyone keeps cramming themselves into house’s inner office instead of using the perfectly nice conference room next door. more proof that this is the first differential they’ve done in months lmaoo.

WE CAN LIVE WITH DIGNITY, WE CAN’T DIE WITH IT

there is no way i can express everything i want to about this scene between house and adler, but i’m going to try my best.

i think there’s something so beautiful about this scene—the conversation, yes, but also just the way it’s shot. the sudden cool, blue tones; the rain and sleet in the background; house and adler facing each other head on. them both wearing blue shirts. i think it’s telling that we only get the truth of what happened to house’s leg when adler puts it in the most ugly, cruellest terms:

ADLER: What made you a cripple?

it’s taken to mean house’s leg, but she’s also asking what made house the way he is—why he hides himself away, why he has refused to see her. he answers this head on, but the next question—what makes you think i’m so much better than you, adler asks—house avoids. adler convinces house to leave her alone not because her own reasoning is so convincing, but because she asks questions house cannot, or at the very least will not, answer. this is confirmed later, when cameron surmises wilson’s reasoning (that adler is not just a file to him anymore, that he respects her) for house’s refusal to treat adler in one succinct question: ‘so because you respect her, you’re gonna let her die?’. house doesn’t verbally respond, but he does shake his head slightly. he does respect adler, but that isn’t why he’s letting her make her own decisions. it’s because he cannot give her an answer that will satisfy her.

(NICE CHARACTER DETAIL I CAN’T PUT ANYWHERE ELSE: when house gives the news that adler is still refusing treatment, foreman and cameron react with visible dismay and wilson turns his head. chase’s face stays impassive. a few lines later, cameron and foreman brainstorm ways to keep adler in hospital; a court order, and claiming the illness made her incompetent. chase, again, stays silent. part of it is ostensibly because he’s about to have his big moment, but it’s nevertheless pretty clear that he isn’t surprised, and doesn’t need wilson’s explanation as to why house won’t treat adler. and, well, of course he isn’t; he’s been there the longest! it’s great.)

THEY LIGHT UP LIKE SHOTGUN PELLETS

chase finally gets his time to shine!!! and we’re only 36 minutes in!

i don’t have much to say about chase’s x ray epiphany (the most important part—that if there’s a worm in adler’s brain, there’s probably one in her thigh—is house’s own revelation, and also intended to parallel adler and house even more closely) other than 1) it’s about damn time, 2) it’s the start of a long pattern of chase popping up at the end of an episode, having quietly stewed the whole time, to put the pieces of the puzzle together (he technically does this as early as 1x14 control; he’s the one who bothers to look for the ipecac!). well, that and the whole ‘worms light up under x rays’ thing honestly sounds like something he picked up from his dad, who would have been very familiar with using the ‘old fashioned’ method. still, i feel a bit bad for having mercilessly dunked on him, so i thought he could do with the special section. i do actually like chase, i just, uh, don’t get much to work with in this episode.

BUT YOU ARE DAMAGED, AREN’T YOU?

welcome to a scene that has been misinterpreted 7 million times before i made this recap post, and will likely be misinterpreted another 7 million times: why did house hire cameron?

one of the best, most underrated parts of this scene is the beginning. house walks into his office, sees cameron waiting at his desk—and sighs. when cameron starts her ‘why did you hire me’ interrogation, he doesn’t seem surprised, or even ask where’s coming from. hiring foreman for his juvie record was the most ostentatious example of house’s particular hiring process…and he didn’t expect it to stay secret, or for cameron (at the very least) to not ask questions. house knows this is coming. and i just think that’s neat! there’s also some excellent accidental foreshadowing for cameron’s s6 departure when house tells her ‘the only thing that matters is what you think’. because, yeah, in the end cameron’s impression of house (who he is, what he is, the effect he has on others) is what makes and breaks her time on the show. i also think this is a line that, if he were capable of embarrassment around the whole cameron crush situation, would make house stare at the ceiling late at night because she absolutely kept this in mind while she was pursuing him. house you can’t just say stuff like this in front of the stubbornest woman alive!!!!!

anyway. why did house hire cameron? his immediate answer that it’s because she is ‘very pretty’ often gets taken at face value, even with his later explanation. sure, on a superficial it’s because cameron is nice to look at—but it’s more because of what that beauty represents. in cameron’s own words, she worked very hard to get where she is. becoming a doctor was an active choice for her in a way it wasn’t for chase, or even foreman (who is more naturally book smart than she is). house correctly guesses that she is damaged (although not precisely how), but it isn’t even necessarily about the damage itself, in my opinion—although that does make her more intriguing—and more that it gives cameron a level of drive and determination that the boys, even foreman, lack. cameron is a bleeding heart, but she’s also driven more by defiance than she’s given credit for. that’s the core of Why Cameron, and it isn’t too dissimilar to Why Thirteen in s4. but, uh, that’s not as catchy as saying it’s because she’s pretty.

NOT STRICTLY RELATED TO WHY CAMERON WAS HIRED BUT STILL RELEVANT TO THIS SCENE: obsessed with house’s transparent ragebait when he asks cameron if it would REALLY offend her to know she was hired for one natural gift and not another. even the delivery of this line is so smug. Lol. shoutout to the absolute nothingburger of ‘i hired chase because his dad made a phone call’ that, to this day, remains a source of constant fandom speculation as to what exactly happened there (notably cameron does not visibly react to this at all, so chase’s nepo baby status has never been something he has attempted to hide Lmao). very funny that house doesn’t attempt to give cameron the same nuance he did foreman as to why he hired him (foreman, at least, gets a ‘i needed someone with street smarts’, which implies that it was less strictly about the juvie record and more about foreman being able to offer an alternate worldview that cameron and chase, and even house, couldn’t) and instead just sticks to the ‘lol i wanted a criminal’ answer. cameron leaves this scene because her pager beeps to go pick up adler’s kindergarten class because her and chase have been scheming off-screen, something she has managed to fit in around lurking in house’s office god knows how long, which is just sort of funny to me for silly meta ‘these doctors don’t do ANYTHING’ reasons. also i really like the way house and cameron circle each other and move around the office space in this scene; cards on the table that i’m not a hameron shipper, but there’s a lovely sense of intimacy there that makes me nod my head in approval.

I NEVER LIE

oh my god we’re finally at the end of the episode. who cheered!!

there’s a lovely bit of circularity here in the final scene; the episode starts with house and wilson, and ends with house and wilson. in that respect, it makes the s8 finale feel that much more inevitable. ‘i never lie’, house claims—to wilson’s laughter—but it doesn’t really feel like a full joke. it’s kind of reminiscent of adler twisting the story about her boyfriend into one about making friends at the start of the episode; that story was technically true, but twisted beyond recognition. for all that house is manipulative and facetious and a coward, he can also be surprisingly earnest when it counts; towards stacy, towards cuddy, towards thirteen, towards wilson especially. i think there is a little part of house that want to believes it when he says he never lies. but that, in itself, is a lie…so it’s kind of a paradox, huh.

anyway uh. 7000 words later, that is the pilot DONE! alexa play you can’t always get what you want.

#house md #beautiful #love this show #and i love reading extensive deep dives on every episode

56 notes · View notes