House: 7x03 "Unwritten" - Discussion and Spoilers
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Very good episode which, much like last week, had a lot more of the "medical mystery" stuff and felt more like that House of seasons past.
More nice development of the "Huddy" relationship that their "having nothing in common" is what will drive their relationship and how their personal and professional lives will work together.
Interesting POTW stroyline and it makes perfect sense House would be into the Twilight-like pop-trash novels the POTW wrote. (Even though it seems like the books may be a bit better than the Twilight books. Loved the argument House had with Sam re: the "team" they were on for the Protagonist's relationship.)
Also loved House trying to get the novel off of the typewriter ribbon. Again, some more of that obsessive-compulsive and love for pop-culture trash stuff we love from House.
I'll grade this episode an "Excellent" it's not one of the series' best, for sure, but it certainly more on track than the series was all last season.
More nice development of the "Huddy" relationship that their "having nothing in common" is what will drive their relationship and how their personal and professional lives will work together.
Interesting POTW stroyline and it makes perfect sense House would be into the Twilight-like pop-trash novels the POTW wrote. (Even though it seems like the books may be a bit better than the Twilight books. Loved the argument House had with Sam re: the "team" they were on for the Protagonist's relationship.)
Also loved House trying to get the novel off of the typewriter ribbon. Again, some more of that obsessive-compulsive and love for pop-culture trash stuff we love from House.
I'll grade this episode an "Excellent" it's not one of the series' best, for sure, but it certainly more on track than the series was all last season.
The indifferent "teenage" gocart attendant was awesome as was their race. (Though I'm surprised the race wasn't stopped earlier when Sam started acting like she was) House disconnecting her car's battery with his cane was awesome. Good, fun, episode. Really, again, felt like the old House.
The book series was as much Harry Potter (right down to the facial scar) as Twilight. With maybe (showing my age here) a touch of The Hardy Boys.
I dunno, I found the whole thing a little too on the nose, that everything the author wrote would be autobiographical. Also the coincidence that House would just happen to pick a recreational activity that would just happen to cause Cuddy a minor injury that would just happen to give House an epiphany about the cause of the patient's illness. For that matter, there's the coincidence that a patient House took on because he liked her books would just happen to turn out to be the kind of patient he specializes in, with an elusive, seemingly undiagnosable mystery ailment. What are the odds?
I did love it that the writers remembered how a typewriter ribbon works, and that it's possible to reconstruct a text by reading the used ribbon. I'm sure that's been a clue in more than a few mysteries in the past -- I'm not sure if it was ever used in Columbo, but it's just the sort of thing they would've used -- but in this day and age it's nice to see that the capabilities of old technologies are not forgotten.
The bit about the MRI ripping the screws out of her leg was bogus. Such screws are generally titanium, and there's no danger of them being torn out by an MRI; I have some screws and plates in my jaw and have had several MRIs with no difficulty. The only problem that such things can cause is that they can interfere with the scans, creating image artifacts that can get in the way of what the doctors are trying to see.
Poor House, never getting the answers about the books' mysteries. Oh well, there's always fanfic. (Or maybe I should say poor Alice, because her fans are going to eviscerate her online.)
I dunno, I found the whole thing a little too on the nose, that everything the author wrote would be autobiographical. Also the coincidence that House would just happen to pick a recreational activity that would just happen to cause Cuddy a minor injury that would just happen to give House an epiphany about the cause of the patient's illness. For that matter, there's the coincidence that a patient House took on because he liked her books would just happen to turn out to be the kind of patient he specializes in, with an elusive, seemingly undiagnosable mystery ailment. What are the odds?
I did love it that the writers remembered how a typewriter ribbon works, and that it's possible to reconstruct a text by reading the used ribbon. I'm sure that's been a clue in more than a few mysteries in the past -- I'm not sure if it was ever used in Columbo, but it's just the sort of thing they would've used -- but in this day and age it's nice to see that the capabilities of old technologies are not forgotten.
The bit about the MRI ripping the screws out of her leg was bogus. Such screws are generally titanium, and there's no danger of them being torn out by an MRI; I have some screws and plates in my jaw and have had several MRIs with no difficulty. The only problem that such things can cause is that they can interfere with the scans, creating image artifacts that can get in the way of what the doctors are trying to see.
Poor House, never getting the answers about the books' mysteries. Oh well, there's always fanfic. (Or maybe I should say poor Alice, because her fans are going to eviscerate her online.)
Yeah, I noticed shades of all three in there. But the way House was discussing a character being "stupid" if they picked one relationship over another, and his discussion with Sam over which "Team" they were on struck me as more Twilight stuff. But there were certainly shades of Potter and even the Hardy Boys in there.
But it's funny, it actually sounded like a nifty book series that'd be fun to read!
Perhaps you're not remembering the last six seasons of this show?
I thought the same-thing about the screws in her leg, that they'd be made of a non-ferrous metal or they would've done a CT or other scan before-hand to insure she didn't have any metal in there. But this, BTW, was the first time I recall "metal in the room" instantly reacting with the MRIofDOOOOOOM!!!! In previous episodes when metal was used to take the MRI out of the plot the metal doesn't react with the MRI until it was turned on. (Which, of course, is false.)
I used to have typewriter that used a ribbon and on it the letters could easily be seen imprinted on it through a light (much like photographic negative) I suspect the ink-ribbon in this cased worked differently? And would the entire book have fit on the whole ribbon or did House managed to recover all of the ribbons she had used on the typewriter over the course of the months or year it'd of taken her to write the book?
But that part was neat, clever, and made sense that it'd be something House would notice and try to do.
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^Good points about the ribbon. I think it was a certain type of ribbon that left the clear impressions, maybe an IBM Selectric ribbon. There were other types, cloth ribbons, I think, where the impressions were fainter. I think there was enough ink left on the ribbon that you could rewind it or reverse it and reuse it somewhat. She had a pretty old manual typewriter, a Royal or something like it, and it would've taken that type of ribbon.
And yeah, he would've needed more than one ribbon's worth to reconstruct the whole book, I think. Unless she reused it and overtyped, in which case they would've needed to do a palimpsest-style reconstruction with the MRI. But in the shot where they were focusing on the ribbon, it did kind of look like the focus was shifting between overlapping layers of letters.
And yeah, he would've needed more than one ribbon's worth to reconstruct the whole book, I think. Unless she reused it and overtyped, in which case they would've needed to do a palimpsest-style reconstruction with the MRI. But in the shot where they were focusing on the ribbon, it did kind of look like the focus was shifting between overlapping layers of letters.
And, honestly, why didn't she use a computer? It seemed to me, like Stephanie Meyer, she wasn't a career writer and was just doing this series of books to "keep her son alive." So it's not like she'd been writing for 30 or 40 years and just was attached to using the typewriter she had begun writing with why wasn't she using a computer?
When I was a kid I used to write short-stories on that old typewriter (which, indeed, was an electric one that had a bit of a "buffer" to so you could correct mistakes before the line was typed onto the paper) and it sucked. Sucked to format, edit and everything. Not that I was big on either back then but looking back I couldn't imagine trying to write on that thing.
Today when I write I do it in Word and it's easier as far as editing and formating the writings and even then it takes me time to edit it. (I've finished a book I've been working on for sometime, have gone through the hard-copy of it made notes, corrections and edits and have pretty much gone back to square-one with the thing to write it all over again)
I can respect that some old-school writers would still be attached to a typewriter and don't mind dealing with the problems writing on one would cause, but it didn't seem to me this woman was some great, classic, author. She was writing pop-culture trash and, as I said, it seemed like a one-time deal. So why wasn't she using a computer?
(The answer? Because then it'd have been much, much harder for House to get a hold of the manuscript, read it, and get the insight he needed to solve the case. Of course, in that case she could've just had an ancient dot-matrix printer and pretty much did the same thing with the ribbon in one of those as he did here with the typewriter ribbon.)
When I was a kid I used to write short-stories on that old typewriter (which, indeed, was an electric one that had a bit of a "buffer" to so you could correct mistakes before the line was typed onto the paper) and it sucked. Sucked to format, edit and everything. Not that I was big on either back then but looking back I couldn't imagine trying to write on that thing.
Today when I write I do it in Word and it's easier as far as editing and formating the writings and even then it takes me time to edit it. (I've finished a book I've been working on for sometime, have gone through the hard-copy of it made notes, corrections and edits and have pretty much gone back to square-one with the thing to write it all over again)
I can respect that some old-school writers would still be attached to a typewriter and don't mind dealing with the problems writing on one would cause, but it didn't seem to me this woman was some great, classic, author. She was writing pop-culture trash and, as I said, it seemed like a one-time deal. So why wasn't she using a computer?
(The answer? Because then it'd have been much, much harder for House to get a hold of the manuscript, read it, and get the insight he needed to solve the case. Of course, in that case she could've just had an ancient dot-matrix printer and pretty much did the same thing with the ribbon in one of those as he did here with the typewriter ribbon.)
You are correct in remembering that typewriter ribbons can be used many times before they need to be replaced. there's a switch that reverses the direction of the spool when you get to the end. probably not enough to do the whole book but close enough for suspension of disbelief.
As to her preference to using the typewriter, she didn't have to worry about editing, since it's a first draft. Also it would probably help her stream of consciousness writing style not to be tempted to stop and correct typos.
didn't they say this was her 11th book in the series? How long ago was the accident can't remember the number, 15 years? If she started writing in the mid 90s I could see her writing on a typewriter if they gave her JK Rowlings rags to riches backstory.
One other thing, I read an account from a guy who said his wife had joint pain and found typing on a typewriter less painful than on a computer keyboard because the throw of the keys was longer and the stop at the end was not as abrupt. The author in the story also had joint pain so that could play into it as well.
As to her preference to using the typewriter, she didn't have to worry about editing, since it's a first draft. Also it would probably help her stream of consciousness writing style not to be tempted to stop and correct typos.
didn't they say this was her 11th book in the series? How long ago was the accident can't remember the number, 15 years? If she started writing in the mid 90s I could see her writing on a typewriter if they gave her JK Rowlings rags to riches backstory.
One other thing, I read an account from a guy who said his wife had joint pain and found typing on a typewriter less painful than on a computer keyboard because the throw of the keys was longer and the stop at the end was not as abrupt. The author in the story also had joint pain so that could play into it as well.
Actually it would've been easier if she'd written it on a computer, because he could've just hacked her hard drive. Even if she'd deleted the file, it could've been reconstructed unless she used government-level erasure/overwriting protocols.
Indeed, given her concern for secrecy -- locking the manuscript in her safe the moment she was done with it -- that could be why she used the typewriter. Perhaps she didn't trust computers to be sufficiently secure. Indeed, the fact that she overlooked the need to destroy the ribbon suggests that maybe she wasn't that familiar with typewriters; maybe she only adopted the habit recently after someone hacked her computer and got hold of a draft of an earlier book or something.
Which reminds me: she locked the MS in her safe and then tried to kill herself. How did she expect anyone to retrieve it for publication? Did her lawyer have the combination? Maybe it was in her will.
I liked this episode. It did feel like an earlier episode of House, but there are differences as well. House not popping pills all the time and he has grown as a person and I think being with Cuddy is good for him. I hope they continue to show how this relationship affects him (and Cuddy), rather than going for more standard fare soap opera shenanigans.
By the way, I'm not a writer, but I doubt that the writing process ends by typing the last page and finishing with "The End".
Or do some writers prefer to leave the last pages until they're pretty much done, having it already in mind?
(Before the final editing process etc)
By the way, I'm not a writer, but I doubt that the writing process ends by typing the last page and finishing with "The End".
Or do some writers prefer to leave the last pages until they're pretty much done, having it already in mind?
(Before the final editing process etc)
Well, yeah, that is how you end a first draft. Sure, you generally have the ending planned out in advance, but that's part of the outline phase. Maybe some writers do actually write the last scenes of the manuscript first, but I generally write the MS in order, occasionally backtracking or jumping ahead if I have reason to. Even though I know what I want the ending to be, I'm sure to discover new things along the way and I want to be able to incorporate them into the ending I eventually write.
And writing "THE END" or something similar at the end is useful to indicate to the editor that they have indeed reached the end of the story and no pages have been lost.
And writing "THE END" or something similar at the end is useful to indicate to the editor that they have indeed reached the end of the story and no pages have been lost.
I imagine it also gives the writer a personal sense of accomplishment, or just a symbolic, "Okay, I'm done" moment, like dusting your hands together. I'm sure everyone is different.
Robert Parker said he wrote the Spenser novels one chapter a day, in order, starting from a basic premise and seeing where it took him every day, with no concrete end in mind.
Robert Parker said he wrote the Spenser novels one chapter a day, in order, starting from a basic premise and seeing where it took him every day, with no concrete end in mind.