TV Review: House, M.D. - "Humpty Dumpty"

After the emotional intensity of last week's episode, this week's "Humpty Dumpty" injected some welcome lightness into the doctor's demeanour. Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) is back to picking on Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) instead of little girls with cancer, and making remarks like "I can be a jerk to people I haven't slept with. I'm just that good."

In another Six Feet Under-ish setup, the episode opens with a jogging Cuddy in obvious discomfort. She guilts her handyman, who wants to leave early before fixing her roof, into staying to finish the job before she heads inside to choke on some water. If I hadn't read the one-line description that was printed in the television guide and plastered all over the Internet, or seen the preview after last week's episode, I would have thought Cuddy was the patient of the week. Since I did, it was no surprise when Alfredo fell off the roof and Cuddy was fine. But the real puzzle is that his fingers are slowly turning purple, and the team must find out the underlying cause before he loses his hands or his life.

The episode cleverly uses the bait-and-switch tactic the show loves, making us believe initially that we are seeing a role reversal with Cuddy as the aggressive maverick and House as the cautious naysayer. Instead, administrator Cuddy is the anti-House, making decisions solely based on guilt and an emotional attachment to the patient. Typically, House asks dismissively: "Do I get bonus points if I act like I care?" and solves the puzzle through deduction not just of the medical clues, but by discovering what the patient is hiding.

Written by Matt Witten, "Humpty Dumpty" showcases some of the best elements of House and some of the worst: the best being character development, and the worst being character development. Confused? I'll start with the best.

Despite my misgivings that the character's purpose had already been wrapped up in the season one finale, the introduction of Stacy (Sela Ward) is used effectively here to humanize other characters, particularly House and Cuddy. We know that Stacy and Wilson were friends, and that Stacy and Cuddy shared some responsibility for making the decision that left House with a limp and Vicodin addiction. Stacy is the only one in the inner circle to call them by their first names, and here she acts as confidant to Cuddy and, to a lesser extent, Wilson, and voice of conscience for House.

Unlike last week's episode, which featured Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in a central role but revealed little about his character, "Humpty Dumpty" finally sheds some light on Cuddy's personality and her relationship with House, while introducing some additional mystery – much more than the "did they or didn't they" question House's team ponders, but more fundamentally how the events of House's own medical crisis linked them professionally and personally. House's deceptively simple episode titles often have dual meanings, and here, Alfredo is not the only egg man.

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things by day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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