The woman who played the kid's mother drove me nuts with her fake over the top acting. That's my only real complaint. The subject matter of the episode was pretty intriguing but House being absent or asleep for half the case made it a tiny bit boring. It's called "House" for a reason, I'm glad he's back!
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slnorman-0554114 November 2020
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tert724 November 2020Parents are faced with a extremely hard decision at the birth of their child. Has both male and female DNA, the episode says. They chose for the child to be a boy. And 13 thinks she has the moral upper ground by halfway telling the kid the truth against the wishes of the parents. She acts like the parents are doing something wrong. And she has to be the savior for the boy. Not only what she did is ethically wrong, but she has NO idea of what the parents have to go through, or what the boy has been going through. The kid is sick in the hospital, possibly dying, maybe wait till AFTER he gets better to tell him the truth? 13 always acts like she has the superior upper moral ground, which can grate on a viewers nerves.
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The episode opens with a couple being told that their newborn baby has ambiguous gender and both male and female DNA. We then see a young teen boy collapse during a basketball game, and the team gets a new case. The parents are scared it is due to the gender issues at his birth (a blind uterus), but when an MRI rules that out, things get more complicated. The team quickly gets frustrated trying to diagnose and interact with the boy because the parents are too afraid to address the gender issue with him, and have kept it a secret all his life. 13 finds out that the boy's mother has strictly enforced gender stereotypes by forbidding him from taking dance classes and instead making him do sports like basketball or hockey. She empathizes much more with the boy than with the parents, and gives him just enough information to force the parents to be honest with their son.
Meanwhile, House is behaving unusually and when he passes out in his office, Cuddy and Wilson begin to suspect he is using heroin. Foreman and 13 are still seeing each other, but pretending they've broken up. The fact that Kutner and Taub have figured them out but House hasn't is a red flag for Foreman and he joins in suspecting that House is using illegal narcotics. What's really happening is very dangerous but also very effective, and they have to decide how to address the situation professionally.
Many aspects of this episode are emotional and dramatic, causing some people to feel that the series was continuing toward a more soap-opera format. However, I think this is a solid episode addressing a gender issue in a new way. (And I also feel that by season 5, if the show had stuck with a strict medical detective format, most fans would be quite bored with it. They're there for the characters and relationships, not just the mystery, right?) And sure, there was an episode in previous seasons which dealt with a beautiful female model having male DNA, but this is a very different approach to gender and something that is rarely explored in fiction. The previous episode didn't explore the gender construct at all, it ended with the reveal that the girl had internal testicles. There was no follow-up on the way the girl felt about her gender or how her father dealt with the news. This episode is about gender from the beginning, not just landing a surprise 'you're a boy!' at the end.
What makes it compelling is the the parents, who know about their son's gender complications but have kept it hidden from him, and are overly sensitive to any potential gender issue because of it. They enforce gender rules more than most parents, ever concerned that they made the 'wrong choice' when he was born. They create far more distress in him by scrutinizing his every interest, making him believe that just because he wants to take dance, he's not a 'real boy'. It's an important thing to give attention to for a lot of reasons, and there's a good message behind the episode - even if your kid doesn't know there's something different about them (and even if there ISN'T anything unusual about them), they'll feel like a freak if you treat them like one. -
ctomvelu-126 February 2009House treats a boy who may be a girl, and whose parents have kept this information from "him" for years. The kid has severe stomach pains, which turns out to be a lot of nothing. But things get complicated when an MRI of the boy throws everything for a loop. House meanwhile is acting way too mellow, to the point of passing out on the job, and everyone suspects him of using heroin. They're close. The episode is too much of a soap opera for me. Foreman and 13 are still hiding their affair from House, or so they think. Cuddy emotes way too much over House's odd condition. And so on and so forth. The case itself isn't all that interesting, either. It almost seems like a rehash of an episode from way back when, involving a girl who turns out to also be a boy. Only good thing about that episode was the girl was played by a very attractive young model who flashes her very lovely teats at House to make a point. Make that two points.
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foppejan224 February 2009.. and again house becomes soft because he isn't in pain, and freaks out because he is a worse doctor for it. yawn. They seem to be milking the relationships for all they're worth, and they're hardly worth much (or very interesting). You basically see a bunch of teenagers trying not to get caught, House being "happy" because "not in pain", making dumb mistakes (because it's in the script), and retreating from using them because of the scary Identity disorder thing. Even if they're portraying a guy who is in pain all the time, and an addict because of it, they're making him more and more boring while doing it. Patient diagnosis is retreating into the background more and more (over the past few episodes), almost becoming the trademark gimmick to excuse the fact that they're making a soap opera out of the series. This disappoints me greatly, as there is a reason I don't watch soaps.
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phoenixnl-166479 August 2022The story is decent. But the House on Methadon story needed work. He is willing to leave the hospital to remain on methadon first to the point where he leaves his patient in the (rather incompetant) hands of his assistant team. But then when he can stay and continue to use methadon, al of a sudden his small mistake that endangered that same patient he didn't care about earlier makes him stop using the methadon... Doesn't make sense.