I find House episodes very relaxing if I have an hour before bed, and I am in the middle of season three. A few episodes ago, House, who is addicted to Vicodin, pulled out some pills he had hidden in a hollowed-out lupus textbook. Foreman said, 'You stash your drugs in a lupus textbook?' and House replied, 'It's never lupus.' I presumed this was a joke because lupus - an autoimmune disease - is constantly being raised as a possible diagnosis, but it is never the culprit.
I wondered if this was a call-out to the House fan community, who I imagine have been making the lupus gag for years. I looked up, 'It's never lupus' on Google, and found this. There are plenty more where that came from. How could I not have noticed House/Holmes and Wilson/Watson? How could I not have noticed the similarities in formula? The drugs? Only interested in the extraordinary? Can see the extraordinary in what others regard as commonplace? Music is his private release? Arrogance, blah?
I am not angry with myself for not being Holmesianly observant enough to notice that House lives at 221B on whatever street. Or that the guy who shoots House, who I don't think is named in the episode, is credited as Moriarty.
(My other House question, for top telly executives only: is it deliberate that his three sidekicks have different numbers of syllables in their names? Does this kind of thing help easy differentiation on a subliminal level in the same way that their being white male, black male and white female works on an unsubliminal level? I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that this level of thinking takes place, or that it doesn't.)
3 comments:
I am in no sense a top telly executive, because God has been kind to me, but I do often do that thing with the syllables (e.g. Crieff, Shappey, Richardson). Also, I try not to double up the categories of name derivation (patronymic, occupational, geographical, descriptive). Not religiously, but if I noticed I'd called my two main characters Jones and Anderson, say, or Armstrong and Whitehead, I'd change one of them.
I feel like a goober now. I totally don't think about that. I'm going to be carefuller in the future, because I often end up changing my names at the last minute. True fact: I have forgotten the final name of one of my KSC protagonists, and also that one of my second tier characters. Their working names are still how I think of them.
(True fact 2: I really want to do plays and other shows in which people, like in life have the same name. So two of the four characters in a play are called David, for instance, and nothing is ever made of it, and it doesn't cause confusion, because that's lifelike. It might just not work, but I really want to do it.)
There were two Lindsays in Brookside.
I have taken to keeping an atlas by my desk to help with naming characters, because otherwise they all get named after authors on the bookshelves within my line of vision.
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