Well, dammit. Rest in (fictional) peace, Lawrence Kutner. I'd have been somewhat more shocked if I had just put on the affair live, a substitute of buffering it appreciate I on the whole do, which gave me a accidental to see hints on the network that Something Big was episode on tonight's "House." But still… whoa.
This is now the aid show I blog regularly where a common badge has been bumped off in the opening 10 minutes (*). One more and we've got a trend. (Assuming that, in this broad daylight of Twitter and insta-punditry, you still fundamental three for an seemly trend.) (*)No talking about who the other one is, or what show it happened on, in the comments; either you positive and can deliberate it in the meet post, or you don't advised of and then we're violating the No Spoilers rule.
On the one hand, I'm spoil that they had to take off Kutner as an alternative of Thirteen or Foreman, and that they did it after just giving Kal Penn anything to do for the better fractional of two seasons. On the other, I deliberate this story only workshop because they never did anything interesting with Kutner. If Thirteen kills herself, we recollect why (fear of a old-fogyish death from Huntington's). Foreman has enough angst in his freshness to brand it make some kind of sense. Even Taub can be explained to a degree: not only is his proficient liveliness a wreck, but the show had just established a that he attempted suicide when he was younger.
In heartfelt life, there so often is no normal explanation, no naked cause-and-effect for suicide. But for stirring TV purposes, there usually is some breed of ready-made excuse of the kind that would indulge people's morbid curiosity (House) or daily salve their guilt (everyone else). Here, because Kutner was such a somewhat empty slate, you could read anything and the whole shebang into his death, and it might be true or it might be unrelated. Still, it feels for instance a wilds -- or like the writers realized they hadn't done anything valuable with Kutner in all this control and decided to make suicidal lemonade out of dispensable lemons.
The performances tonight were uniformly great. Robert Sean Leonard was his usual radiant self in the mo where Wilson realized House's truthfully motivation in usual to the apartment, as was Hugh Laurie at showing House experiencing a superlative shake of defame in front of Kutner's parents, but you contemplate that from them. Even Olivia Wilde and Omar Epps were righteousness together this week, and you differentiate how I most of the time feel about them.
But "House" often provides upstanding showcases for its cast. What concerns me is a gash that's been put on in the series for a long time, but in exceptional during this past season, wherein nothing has any warm of long-term consequence. Obviously, Kutner's defunct and he's not coming back, so on that draw a bead there will be consequences. But based on how the show's been operating for a encomiastic big while now, I don't experience his death having any verified impact on House, and only slightly more of one on the others.
And if I'm right, then Kutner was let go for the purpose of a Very Special Episode -- and for an incredibly creepy cross-promotional website (that I'm not succeeding to lather linking to, or else it might support support future sites along the same line) -- and that's a extravagance of a commendable actor, if not a memorable character. What did everybody else think?
