A House Carol
Now that I've dispatched a stack of MA theses (temporarily, anyway), I can amuse myself (before going back to my freshman comp papers) by talking about last night's episode of House, "Merry Little Christmas." While not a Very Special Episode, it was certainly calculated to warm the cockles of any Victorianist's heart: the plot was a revisionist take on Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In and of themselves, the obvious parallels were amusing, if designedly obvious: Cuddy, Cameron, and Wilson were the three Spirits; the PoTW was a dwarf who wasn't really a dwarf, and her leg provided the key clue; House's Vicodin addiction filled in for Scrooge's miserliness; and so on. That being said, House's characters and situations didn't map precisely onto the Dickens originals; for example, the "Spirits, " particularly Wilson, also drew heavily on both Scrooge's nephew and Bob Cratchit.
The episode's play with A Christmas Carol's themes, however, was more interesting than the surface-level similarities between the two plots. When Scrooge worriedly inquires about the fate of Tiny Tim, the Ghost of Christmas Present chastizes him:
"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant [about "surplus population"] until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!" (Stave III)
This quotation is very much to the episode's point, since much of the dramatic tension grew out of House's refusal to treat the patient until Cuddy gave him his pills. (Wilson's attempt to extricate himself from the deal with Tritter also drew heavily on this passage: Wilson tried to sacrifice himself on the grounds that, in effect, he was "more worthless and less fit to live" than House.) Unlike Scrooge, who "bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground" (Stave III), House answered "yes" to the Ghost's question. Although House contributed occasionally to the diagnostic process over the course of the episode, he nevertheless beat both Wilson and Cuddy by a) stealing the drugs prescribed to Wilson's now-dead patient and b) forcing Cuddy to give in to his demand for Vicodin. And later, when Wilson extended an olive branch by offering to spend the evening with him, House chose "pills" over "people." No humility or sympathy there.
In other words, House-as-Scrooge effectively cheated: he cured the patient, true enough, but only after he made sure that he could keep his "gold" (the Vicodin) and his misanthropy. Scrooge undergoes what could very loosely be described as a conversion experience; not so House. Hence the episode's ending, which has been raising hackles over at TWoP. I agree with the TWoPpers that the episode was not especially satisfactory--the plotting, in particular, felt rather lackadaisical. Moreover, House's addiction and Scrooge's miserliness are not really similar problems, even though the episode invited us to read them that way. The lesson that Scrooge learns is very Carlylean, in the sense that he comes to understand the difference between "noble thrift and plenty" and "idle luxury alternating with mean scarcity and inability." Scrooge must learn, that is, that "wealth" is not a matter of having money, but of using it for the benefit of others; charity reaps its own profit in the form of communal well-being. By contrast, the viewers have never seen any sign that the Vicodin addiction prevents House from properly diagnosing his patients--if anything, House's skills go awry only when he's off the drugs and in terrible pain. (Presumably, Vicodin's lack of effect on House's skills derives from its origins in Sherlock Holmes' recreational drug habit.) While House's desire for Vicodin this season has indeed led him to show a rather spectacular contempt for the needs of others, it's not clear that there's a positive redirect for addiction in the same way that there is for stinginess. Nor is it clear that an unaddicted House would necessarily be a warmer, fuzzier House.
Still, given what we've got to work with, Wilson's behavior--while not Medically Correct, to be sure--made perfect sense, given the episode's debt to Dickens. Wilson was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, after all, whose job it was to show House what would happen if he refused to change. And because House had so refused, the "prophecies" came true. Wilson abandoned him in disgust; Tritter reneged on the rehab deal. In other words, this was an alternate Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge refuses to learn his lesson until he discovers, too late, that like Jacob Marley, he is wearing "the chain I forged in life" (Stave I).