#I did think about the possibility of blood transfusion plotline at one point | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

not-a-bit-good · 7 years

Text

House’s You Don’t Want to Know episode parallels Sherlock's Plot

Several parallels between Sherlock and House MD that have been pointed out recently.

Now, it’s been a long time since I watched the show, but one thing I remember quite well is the recurring joke of “It’s never lupus” from House (the reason is that lupus usually takes years to diagnose in real life, so not ideal for a show with a “Disease of the week” format). This “joke” parallels the “It’s never twins” tagline that we’ve had since TAB (even though Sherlock solves the My husband is 3 people case in TSOT by immediately identifying 3 identical twins).

Given that:

House MD is another show that took a lot of inspiration from Sherlock Holmes (#UnderstatementOfTheYear, they barely changed the names and even made House live at the 221, and he and Wilson live together on an on-and-off basis throughout the series)

Mofftiss give us references to all Holmes adaptations (even the one in which they’re mice)

Moffat actually wrote Johnlock as an interspecies lesbian couple in Doctor Who

I thought it’d be worth a shot to look it up and see if House ever actually had a case of lupus on his hands. And it turns out that he did, actually. In episode 8 (4x2) of season 4, titled You don’t want to know. It’s almost like they’d planned to use this plot since forever ago (the episode aired for the 1st time somewhen between 2007 and 2008) ;)

(Btw, I’m getting my information on this episode of House MD from Mycroft Wikipedia and this transcript, so if you see something wrong or inaccurate feel free to correct me)

Also: Huge spoilers for both House MD and Sherlock.

Essentially there are 3 main plotlines in this episode, and I feel they’re all somewhat relevant to Sherlock in general and TST in particular

The patient of the week

The patient in this episode is a magician whose heart stopped when he was dumped in a tank full of water. (wow, we’re already off to a great start)

There’s also a bit about the magician bleeding in an MRI because he’d swallowed a key for one of his tricks (so of course the MRI’s magnet ripped it out of his intestines).

Then the magician’s nose starts bleeding profusely, and someone on House’s team suggest it was due to cocaine use.

But House thinks the cardiac arrest is a symptom of something more serious, so he orders a biopsy on the magician’s heart while 2 of his team go to the patient’s appartment, where they find an old fortune-telling machine (think of Sherlock’s premonition lines in t6t), rabbits (Rosie’s pink rabbit onesie, and Rosie’s mirror Bluebell the glowing rabbit) and marijuana (Mrs Hudson’s herbal soothers). So they theorize that one of the rabbits could have given the magician pericarditis (inflamation of the envelope around the heart, ie burnt his heart). Let me rephrase that: they think a rabbit(John’s baby) caused the magician(Sherlock)’s heart to start burning

However, House then diagnoses the patient with tularemia from his rabbits. Interesting fact about tularemia: symptoms include

fever, lethargy, loss of appetite, signs of sepsis, and possibly death [...] The face and eyes redden and become inflamed. (blind Sherlock theory, anyone ?)

The patient then has bleeding around his heart, which could be a sign of cancer, so House tells his underlings to find the cancer.

The patient then predicts he’ll die the following day (again, Sherlock’s premonition in T6T + TRF in which Sherlock realizes Moriarty’s plan is to get him to kill himself, and he fakes his death the following day), which is “confirmed” when the doctors find out that he has a lot of internal bleeding.

The team then has 2 new theories: contaminated blood transfusion (Sherlock certainly had a blood transfusions after Mary shot him, and I’ve seen theories that Sherlock is drugged throughout T6T), or amyloidosis (an accumulation of amyloid in the body -- “A rare development [of amyloidosis] is a susceptibility to bleeding with bruising around the eyes, termed "racoon-eyes"”) (sounds like red-eyed Sherlock pics during setlock).

The patient then has a grand mal seizure ( “type of generalized seizure that affects the entire brain. Tonic–clonic seizures are the seizure type most commonly associated with epilepsy and seizures in general, though it is a misconception that they are the only type”. -- and we suspect that Sherlock’s brain is being affected by something) and a kidney failure, which convinces House that the patient has amyloidosis. But the treatment requires irradiation for a bone-marrow transplant, so they have to prove this decisively.

Eventually House suggests they test the contaminated blood theory on himself, since he has universal receiver blood type; the transfusion does make him sick, but not with the same symptoms as the patient, so he insists that it is amyloidosis and refuses to let anyone examine him. Eventually Thirteen (the openly bisexual recurring character) drugs House’s tea (see the Sherlock is being drugged theory again) to test his organs while he is unconscious and buy time for the team to test the amyloidosis theory (which House realizes as soon as he wakes up). When he complains that she drugged him, she answers that he drugged her (first). And this has interesting implications for what’s happening on Sherlock. Could this mean that John is drugging Sherlock for his own good somehow? For instance to keep Sherlock into a coma so that his body heals? If EMP theory is correct and John has power of attorney over Sherlock, it’s very possible.

Wilson (obviously Watson to House’s Holmes) stops by House’s office, and their conversation about blood types causes House to realize that his patient has lupus. (because that’s another thing I remember from House MD: often talking with Wilson about more or less unrelated topics causes House to get to the correct diagnosis for his patients -- Wilson is House’s conductor of light, if you will).

And House then deduces correctly that he finally has a case of lupus.

So given that “It’s never twins” is a similar recurring “joke” that we’ve had in 2 episodes already, after Sherlock solved a case where the solution was twins, I think one of the main characters actually has/had a twin, and we will learn more about them in TLD.

And there’s probably going to be something wrong with Sherlock’s eyes.

Thirteen’s Huntington’s chorea

It’s also the episode in which House and the audience learn that Thirteen’s mother died of Huntington's chorea (a neurodegenerative disease), and that if she has inherited it, she only has about 12 years left to live. (doomed to die after a long illness like Emilia Ricoletti in TAB).

She refuses to be tested for the disease however, and when House has her saliva tested in secret and presents her with the results, she refuses to look at them because she says that not knowing makes her live her life to the fullest (a reasoning that House doesn’t understand at 1st, but that he seems to accept at the end of the episode). (one reason for the episode’s title)

However, we learn in a later episode that she does have Huntington’s chorea.

It is also later revealed that Thirteen went to prison because she euthanised her brother, who also suffered from Huntington's, out of a promise she made to him to end his life when it was time. In "After Hours", Thirteen risks the life of a friend to fulfill her promise to her, leading Chase to theorize that if Thirteen commits herself to keeping all her promises, she does not need to blame herself for killing her brother and can, instead, blame the promise. Thirteen later tells him he is right, and that she is scared the guilt will consume her and destroy her life.

(and my heart is breaking as I consider this, but could Sherlock’s childhood trauma be that he had to euthanize a sibling? It would fit with the emphasis T6T put on the vow he made in TSOT)

Thirteen is also closeted to her father in regards to her sexual orientation (and illness). (sure sounds like John)

Cuddy’s panties

In this episode, House also challenges his team to bring him Lisa Cuddy’s thong, without her knowing about the challenge (as a means to test whether they can break rules without getting caught). Since Lisa Cuddy is the hospital’s director and their boss, the challenge seems near impossible. However, as a reward the winner gets to nominate 2 other competitors, and House says he’ll fire one of the nominees.

First Amber (Wilson’s future late wife) and another underling try to trick House into taking Amber’s underwear (and making him think it’s Cuddy’s), but he isn’t fooled (wrong color).

Then it turns out another underling, Cole, actually obtains Cuddy’s panties and gives them to House. (since Cole’s nickname is Big Love because he is a Mormon, and the love triangle between Mary, John and Sherlock in T6T, I’m pretty sure he’s a John mirror, or rather, that Mofftiss cast John as Cole when they took inspiration from this story)

At 1st House is puzzled as to how he got it, but when Cole nominates his friend to be eliminated, House realizes that Cole made a deal with Cuddy to get the thong.

Since the objective of the exercise was to find out which of the underlings could conspire with House to trick Cuddy, and that Cole did the opposite (conspired with Cuddy to trick House), House fires him.

Subtext-wise, that could translate to Sherlock as Sherlock thinking he’s conspiring with John, and finding out that John is conspiring with someone else (my bet is on Mycroft, he has authority over the other characters but still has to answer to other people, like Cuddy) to trick Sherlock. Which could lead to Sherlock (temporarily) rejecting John (just like House fired Cole)

Just a magic trick

Another nice touch of the episode is House himself doing magic tricks with cards and debunking magic tricks, so we kwon for sure that House=the magician=Holmes=Sherlock.

There’s a conversation between House and the magician at some point, in which House asks his patient how he did a particular magic trick and the latter says “Ah, if I explain, it becomes mundane”. But House insists that “The fun is in knowing”. (so subtextually it’s House asking himself really)

Basically, this conversation/episode is about whether it’s more fun to know or not to know how a trick was done (hence the episode title, and also reminiscent of Sherlock refusing to tell John how he did his “magic trick”, ie faked his death in TEH). And if you’re a fan of Sherlock Holmes, you probably agree that for us the fun is in knowing how it was done -- that’s the whole point of the mystery genre.

And the episode confirms this. True, House never got to know how the magician’s tricks were done, but he solved the important mysteries of the episode:

What caused all of the magician’s symptoms (lupus); House even gets him to admit that he dos want to know what his illness is.

Why Thirteen got so afraid when she accidentally dropped something (Thirteen’s mother had Huntington’s chorea and in a later episode we learn that Thirteen does have Huntington’s chorea)

How Cole obtained Cuddy’s underwear (he made a deal with her).

TL; DR:

I’m calling it now:

TLD (ie episode 2 of season 4) will give us more information about the mysterious twin we’ve been waiting for; knowing Mofftiss, it could even be an actual (Evil?) Twin story done right.

It will probably deal with Sherlock’s eyes being impaired (possibly even blinded)

It may also deal with Sherlock finally explaining exactly how (and why) he faked his death in TRF to John

AND WE WILL HAVE EXPLICIT CONFIRMATION THAT SHERLOCK AND JOHN ARE IN LOVE IN TLD.

Tags (I hope you guys are okay with me tagging you?)

@amo-not-ammo, @currently-in-my-mind-palace, @mmmerlenoir, @can-you-whisper-not-really, @1975-1895, @sherlocksings, @shag-me-senseless-watson, @ellinorosterberg, @tendergingergirl, @the-teacup-shatters, @just-sort-of-happened, @gentlewatson, @sherlooks, @chemically-defected, @simpleanddestructivechemistry, @sherlockedgay, @jumpers-and-experiments

#sherlock #tld #tjlc #meta #twin theory #house md #spoilers #t6t #tst #speculations #q #blind!lock #trf

1 note · View note