House jumps the shark

PZ, I'm totally with you. And what kind of gel were they looking at when they were analyzing his DNA?

Now you know how I feel if I try to watch one of those goddam CSI shows.

Oh. My. God.

I actually missed House last night. Now I'm glad that I did. I annoy my wife enough ranting at the TV over ridiculous portrayals of how medicine is practiced on E.R.. She'd have kicked me out for sure.

On the other hand, she doesn't really like House

Jumping the shark is an understatement. Hugh Laurie needs to go back to playing Bertie Wooster.

I usually enjoy House also, but this episode had me screaming the whole hour. What killed me what the monoclonal antibody approach- I nearly collapsed myself. The medical advisor was interviewed on the Absolute Science podcast several months ago- Dr. David Foster. I'd suggest forwarding this post to him.

Why chimeric tissue would cause all these problems is not explained.

I would assume it's an autoimmune reaction of some kind, if the immune system is of a different genotype than the other tissues.

House is great. But I never get how they can "cure" someone in what seems like 3 days.

Knowing the healthcare system in this country, it would take that long just to get the test done nevermind the results.

They need to get away from the CSI formula.

ha ha, you guys remind me of me when I'm watching the movie Hackers. It can be hard to watch something that deals with your area of expertise.

I LOVED this episode. The medicine was meaningless to me as usual, but the Wilson/Cuddy/House drama was great!

And just a nit

"and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient."

I can think of several episodes that didn't end in a cure at all...

It always drives me nuts in movies and on tv how much "sound" a computer interface makes when someone is working. All that beeping and clicking and whooshing...

As a math/ecology type with no training at all in human physiology, I really love the show. I always imagined they were making plenty of factual medical errors, but I don't really care. Kind of like I didn't care in Star Wars when lasers, explosions, and R2-D2 made cool sounds in a vacuum.

It's probably difficult on their production schedule to come up with plots with the right balance of tension and remain scientifically accurate. The writers come up with a good story, send it to the fact-checkers who nix a crucial third of it, the writers have to redo two thirds of it to work around that, the fact checkers nix half of that, etc... the process would take much longer. All to please the (probably <1%) portion of their audience who are well-trained in physiology and have a limited ability to suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction.

I agree that more accuracy is better, but I can understand why they'd make the trade-off.

There are some that don't end with a cure? I haven't seen them all, so I'll defer to that...but man, he sure seems to cure almost everything. And the subplot in this one was that he thought he failed to cure one guy in the last episode (even though he really did -- they were keeping secret from him to correct his hubris), and that one failure had him in the throes of self-doubt.

I've also got a bit of background in computers myself, and with a background in biology that means I've got a vague and distant awareness of medical issues, so almost all the medicine and technology bafflegab on TV is hopelessly annoying. It drives me away from all of these shows eventually. I can't abide CSI anymore because of it (although one of the spinoffs I can't abide because of that annoying skinny red-haired guy.)

It's amazing to watch how many times you can spot people randomly typing on a keyboard. The script lines just must say "Mash Keyboard In An Arbitrary Manner."

I really feel for experts watching CSI though. Some of the things they come up with... oh man. My favourite was they found some motor oil in a driveway and then came up with the "only one model of Lamborghini uses that oil."

It always drives me nuts in movies and on tv how much "sound" a computer interface makes when someone is working. All that beeping and clicking and whooshing...

The beeping and clicking makes it easier for them to find the data they're looking for; the whooshing produces the crystal clear interface that highlights exactly the parts of data they need and inconizes it.

I agree that House is going down hill. The first season was great. That's the season where he wasn't always able to cure everyone. I haven't seen any from the second season where he was unsuccessful. I also didn't like the second season as much.

Oh yeah an office full of people with their sound on would be such a lovely place to work.

I'm a big HOUSE fan, too, but predicted -- to any friends who would listen to my ranting -back in the excellent Season 1 that the writers couldn't sustain the premise beyond a second season. [Ditto, incidentally, for CSI.] IMHO, it jumped the shark early on in Season 2 with the whole ex-girlfriend plotline. The difference is my objections have nothing to do with the scientific inaccuracies because, while one might prefer a higher level of accuracy, this IS television, intended first and foremost as entertainment. We can address the inaccuracies with humorous, intelligent corrections like PZ's post, and perhaps educate one or two TV viewers in teh process. But when a show fails as basic entertainment -- well, then, it's time to pull the plug. :)

There used to be cheap programs you could buy that would add all the whooshes and beeps as you clicked around your computer. I had a couple of them.

They got turned off within days. I still have the sound files for one of them, though. Ahh, nostalgia.

Here, let me help you guys out:

It's a fantasy world. There are elves, they just don't get sick so House doesn't see them. It's not meant to be Real Life. If you can suspend your disbelief and enjoy action movies and sci-fi books and anything else, then you can do it for House.

If you can't, don't watch TV shows. They're all fantasy. All the characters have super powers (scriptwriters). House is a superhero (with a bum leg). Grissom and Horatio are superheroes (one with the personality of a wood plank and the other with a speech cadence that hints at some sort of defect). They can do the impossible.

For something Real, watch Mythbusters (a show i greatly enjoy).

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, when I taught physics, I used to give students an assignment to list as many physics impossibilities as they could find in the title sequence to Star Trek. (My favorite is the title sequence to Voyager, in which the reflection of the ship on planetary rings relative to the curvature of the rings implies that the ship is several thousand miles in length.)

But at the same time, I keep reminding myself, "It's a STORY!" Stories aren't supposed to be true. I hate to break this to you, but a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there never was a kid named Luke Skywalker. A story is a collection of falsehoods that, taken together, communicate some larger truth. Light sabers, FTL travel, humanoids with tentacles coming out of their heads, and so forth are all complete and utter balderdash -- but the basic coming of age message of that movie IS true.

The problem for me comes when the story is presented as true in its details. The obvious example here is the ABC movie, "The Path to 9/11", which deliberately falsifies events to push a political agenda. Nobody takes Star Wars seriously, but plenty of people will take "The Path to 9/11" seriously -- and that's wrong, wrong, wrong.

So then we get into shows like CSI. Sure, they play fast and loose with scientific truth. But consider this: the core message that they present is "follow the evidence". Over and over they show that gut feelings about suspects are misleading and the evidence can surprise you. Is that not the quintessence of the scientific worldview?

When I saw the "alien DNA" my first thought (and my wife's as well) was chimerism. But then when they showed where the foreign tissue was (the knee, heart, and eyes), I changed my mind. Would a chimera be likely to have his "other" cells concentrated in such disparate spots in the body? I assumed at least some bit of symmetry would happen since the two blastocysts fuse so early in development.

I am a physician who usually does not like doctor shows, and House was no exception, it was three episodes and out for me. I do love SCRUBS though, even if entire premise and first season were lifted without atttribution from House of God. I have to admit to arguing for CSI shows on the grounds that even though the science and police procidure are both (mostly) nonsense, that they take the idea of science seriously is important. And better than all the faith and anti-science based shows out there.

I just try to pretend that House isn't really a medical drama. I prefer to see it as a character study in assholes. If any of these jokers were my doctor, I'd just ask for Theoderic of York and his leeches.

As for the occasional failures last season, there was the woman with rabies, the kid whose dad gave him the highly radioactive good luck charm, and the cop who got the snootful of parasitic ameobae.

Why chimeric tissue would cause all these problems is not explained.
I would assume it's an autoimmune reaction of some kind, if the immune system is of a different genotype than the other tissues.

Probably not. The immune system would likely have been tolerized to the 'twin' tissue.

My beef with this program is the way a patient will come in, then the doctors (5 of them!where are their other patients?) will sit around thinking about what might be wrong, then they decide what they think it is most likly to be and test for that. Then the test will come back negative, so they'll go to their next choice, and test for that. What's wrong with running a bunch of tests at once? Not only that, it's one of the junior doctors who runs the test themselves, and if proof of some sort of environmental contamination is required (and it will be required as they can't possibly diagnose/treat without first finding the thing in the persons house that has caused the illness) then again, one of the doctors goes out to find it, all dressed up in their ET suits. Me thinks the script writers have been watching too much Quincy.

If it weren't for Hugh and Billy from Neighbours, I don't think I could watch..

This season just doesn't feel or look right to me, I'm trying to give it a chance but I don't know how much longer I'm going to give it.
There have been a couple glaring examples of "WTF, these guys were supposed to have gone to medical school?" that I have noticed but let go. Getting fluid from the liquid part of the eye, you know, the vitreous humor, was good for a snicker.
My sister went to the University of New Haven and had Henry Lee as a teacher. Her issue with CSI is that he told the class to take off their gloves whenever they stepped away from the evidence or body and to throw them out. Use as many gloves as necessary. I haven't watched CSI except for a couple things here and there with her but she tells me that they leave their gloves on when they answer their phones, use their computers, and in a particularly disgusting scene there was a body that had been in the tub for days and they guy reached in to get a sample of goo and the adjusted his glasses. Nothing like contaminated evidence!
As for Hugh Laurie, he should go back to playing Prince George. Sing along with me: "Black Adder, Black Adder..."

I know, from a point of actual science, TV always does a hack job. But why do they do it?

Many reasons, I would imagine. Surely budget and time constraints make the main characters do everything, simply because it's cost-prohibitive to hire twenty actors to stand around on camera for a minute each, doing the correct tests with the correct equipment taking the correct amount of time. Would confuse the audience to no end. Plus you only get about 38 minutes of film in these so-called 'one hour dramas' any more. You simply can't spend time on things that don't drive the story forward.

Drama demands events be compressed, chronologically, spatially, and persona-lly. A few people doing a finite thing in a few locations over a small period of time. This goes way back to greek theater, and we still use it for the most part because it helps the audience keep up, and after all, the audience is the thing, the only thing.

One last thing, I have to say you should feel lucky that the entertainment industry finally finds you interesting enough to film. They'll keep improving at the technical details. I hope.

I haven't watched House, but I have seen Hugh Laurie in a number of British comedies, not the least of which being the magnificent Black Adder. I think it was Black Adder the Third, in which he played the spoiled, dimwitted Prince Regent, where he had one of the funniest lines I have ever heard -- a line that, for whatever reason, has been coming to mind steadily for me since, oh, January 2001 or so:

"Well, I may be as thick as a whale omelette, but...."

Trust me: with Laurie's delivery, it is just devastating.

It's an amazingly pretty pseudo-colored rendering of a valve opening and closing

I didn't see the episode, so I don't know how "pretty" it was, but I remember when I got an echocardiogram being pretty impressed with the quality of the images they got, and the display used Doppler shift to add color indicating which direction the blood was flowing in. So the show may actually not be that far off there.

Probably not. The immune system would likely have been tolerized to the 'twin' tissue.

Indeed, since there is a substantial number of such individuals walking around in perfect health- unless it's obvious from their appearance (eg. different-colored eyes) they are usually discovered by accident, in the course of genetic testing for medical purposes, or- oops!- parentage testing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild).

I figured that one out immediately: it's tetragametic chimerism.

I got the chimerism too, but not because of a deep background in biology or medicine -- because of my background in writing, editing and (of course) reading (English major here). In that context, there are few things more offensive to me than a poorly-constructed mystery, and last night's House was a textbook example.

Chimerism was the most obvious answer to the "conundrum" and dovetailed beautifully with the until-then-irrelevant revelation the kid was an in vitro. (Whenever a writer throws in a casual detail like that it infuriates me, because I know -- I know -- it will factor in later. At least Hitchcock had the courtesy to lob McGuffins.)

And of course the brain surgery had me just horrified. So not only is House a diagnostician, but he's a brain surgeon, and willing to cut open the head of a second-grader on essentially no evidence.

This shark is, indeed, jumped.

Why chimeric tissue would cause all these problems is not explained.

I would assume it's an autoimmune reaction of some kind, if the immune system is of a different genotype than the other tissues.
Posted by: Orac | September 13, 2006 10:55 AM

I thought that the immune system recognises all of the tissue present in utero and learns, somehow, not to attck those tissues (as is opposed to immunosupression being genebased). If this is true, chimerism shouldn't cause immune reactions the same way donor tissue, which is only present after birth, wouldn't cause immune reactions?

Michael Fox
She's a brick house; she mighty mighty just lettin' it all hang out.

Very much to my credit, I sent this note to a friend yesterday after seeing the "House" preview:

"Anal bleeding that a kid claims was caused by alien probes. Oh, geez--maybe that's the shark-jumping episode!"

It was way too convenient that several symptoms converged on the possibility of alien abduction. No, not convenient--unbelievable. A story has to be believable, at least on its own terms. If a vampire entered a home uninvited in "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," that's a problem, not because of the vampire, which we've agreed to accept, but because of the violation of a story convention. Applied to "House," it is not fair to, on one hand, ask us to accept the evidence of highly sophisticated science, while on the other hand expect us to swallow a string of outrageously implausible coincidences. It's not fair.

Last night's show was stupid because I figured it out long before House did, and I have only the most basic science background, augmented by reading on my own. I couldn't believe that I could have gotten what was going on so much ahead of a supposedly brilliant doctor. And I didn't like it--it seemed patronizing to me, like the writers decided to throw me a bone by allowing me to figure one out.

But even given all this, I'll keep watching, because nothing on TV makes me laugh more than the dark humor on "House." I'll just have to consider it a comedy with some science and medicine thrown in. If I can view comedy as the main point, I might not be so bothered by the other stuff.

I can't abide CSI anymore because of it (although one of the spinoffs I can't abide because of that annoying skinny red-haired guy.)

Funny, that's the only CSI spinoff that I actually like, mainly because of its extreme cheesiness and the hammy acting of the aforementioned skinny red-haired guy. Come on, you know you love it when he dramatically takes his sunglasses off before delivering some bon mot. I know I do.

Guilty pleasure.

Well... this would be one of the few times I come on here and strongly disagree with the majority of posters, but I'm legally restricted from doing so.

If you ever take a close look at the Consitution, you'll find a little known amendment guaranteeing the People "The right to bitch and moan and masturbate their own sense of self-worth, by nitpicking, unto death, literature, radio and moving pictures, which attempt to build dramatic plot around topics in which the viewer is, professionally or by hobby, particularly well versed."

Seriously, it's a character drama. It could be "House, ASE Certified Mechanic," for all that it matters to the show's strong points. Anyway, there's more bad military, police procedural, "hacker" and legal fiction out than medical or hard science by like a factor of ten, so I fricking win.

I like Hugh Laurie. I kind of think the only point to watching that show is to enjoy them characters making faces at each other. The rest is about as far from reality as possible.

Four doctors concentrating feverishly on your case to the exclusion of everything else, desperate to find out what's wrong with you - personally going and examining your house to find possible causes? WTF? It almost feels like AMA propaganda. (No, I'm not an anti-AMA crystals and pyramids nut.)

If pretty much any of the life-threatening cases shown on the show were real, the patient would have died unless things just happened to go their way and they got lucky, the Dr. got the diagnosis right on the first try, etc.

The only medical show I watch is Scrubs..Wish they were back already. At least they don't try to be too technical in it. Plus the situation comedy gets me every time. I'm a simple person.

(although one of the spinoffs I can't abide because of that annoying skinny red-haired guy

That annoying, skinny red-haired guy is the WILLIAM SHATNER OF HIS GENERATION.

You insensitive clod.

Would a chimera be likely to have his "other" cells concentrated in such disparate spots in the body?

Generally yes. When making transgenic mice, one uses two different strains with different fur colours. That way you can distinguish chimeric offspring from the your run of the mill di-gametic ones. The chimeras have plottchy coats (and by extension, splotchy insides).

As for Hugh Laurie. the man is versatile. I tuned into House once and recognized him thinking, "isn't that the idiot from BlackAdder?" The man is seriously brilliant with no trace of a British accent at all.

As for accurate sci-fi films/shows, there are some that try. Star Wars was never a'sci-fi' film, it was more of a fantasy film (wizardz, warlocks, elves, and MAGIC as in Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, the Emperor, Yoda, the force) with an element of Flash Gordon serials thrown in there. Lucas has said so numerously...

But there are some interesting series such as the late babylon 5 where here were no sounds in space, where space ships flew in straight lines in accordance with the laws of physics (no banking and diving plane-like space ships here), where gravity was generated by rotating sections on vessels. The new Battle Star Galactica is pretty good in this regard too. And then there were films like 2001: Space Odyssy that were quite accurate until all the weird supernatural hoky pokey near the end.

As far as I can tell, in any drama in a high-tech setting (spaceship, hospital, forensics lab, etc.) faces a trade-off.

1. Be extremely specific and technical, use lots of expository dialogue ("DNA is unique, like fingerprints!" x 100 per season), and have technically competent people in the real world nit-pick your show and scream at the TV.

2. Be vague and use made-up words as much as possible, so nobody knows what you're talking about and detailed analysis is impossible. Star Trek is famous for doing this - they never actually explain why, for example, Gold-Pressed Latinum is somehow valuable in a world where your kitchen consists of a box that glows and produces anything at all.

Both the above are extremes - so far, House seems to be doing OK, somewhere a little more towards 1 than 2. Last night's episode was a little more extreme than most of the others I remember from last season, but whatever, it's the second episode of a new season, they're obviously trying to attract and hold on to as large an audience as possible. Get people in the habit of "Tuesday night - must watch" and the network is happy. The pretty blinking lights and gory bits are just decoration on a watchable core of acerbic, dysfunctional personality interactions. People like stories about people, right?

Oh, I should mention that four physicians standing around trying to figure out the obvious is my typical experience. If its not in "the book", then it doesn't exist.

I'd say the "CSI-ification" of science goes back farther, to Star Trek: TNG at least. How many episodes were there where the Enterprise was in some kind of death trap, and Geordie and Data stitch together two unconfirmed scientific theories in the last 5 minutes and save the day? I have no formal science education beyond high school chemistry, but I'm quite certain that's not how science is done. On the other hand, in like mind with Chris Crawford and dr steveb above, I appreciate the core message of intelligent, educated people using their brains and experience to resolve a crisis (as opposed to always shooting your problems: the philosophy of far too many action films is "In Gun and Bomb We Trust").

I have a computer professor friend who gets annoyed with any movie where computers are a central plot point (The Net, Hackers, etc.). As a librarian, I know I get irritated with how information retrieval and storage is portrayed in fiction. Like the Law of Conservation of Information (TNG is guilty of this too): information downloaded from a database is actually physically removed from the database server, and no one else can access it. Kind of defeats the purpose of digitizing information in the first place, eh? The kind of information characters in fiction find online always baffles me too. Or that other great myth: The One Perfect Source--the single book that answers all of the protagonists' dilemmas. The fanciful pipe dream of all the students I help regularly. ;-)

Oh, you're just miffed that House is muscling in on your 'obnoxious genius' territory. And being a fictional character, he isn't in on any real science. He's Sherlock Holmes in medicine, and the fun comes in where others try to put up with being around someone so observant that their normal defenses become transparent to him.

I love House as a character story, and pay no attention to the 'medicine'. I especially loved the subplot where they lied to him about his last case.

The think that spooks me about House is that it's a little like the Agatha Christie series... in that it's exceedingly unlikely that these statistically improbable events (murder versus staggeringly bizarre medical anomalies) just "seem to happen" around the main character.

By all statistical accounts, I'd highly suspect that they somehow cause the troubles :)

I love how all the computer systems are like, running the next OS AFTER Windows Vista, with all sorts of bizarrely unecessary zooming and flipping animations.

Here at Case in Cleveland, the medical software is apparently still command-line shell with a text-front end (like the old library catelog systems). That's right: not even GUI, much less one modeled after star trek.

I don't watch House regularly, but I do like the fact that he's an athiest character on TV. Gives at least some exposure.

The only other athiest character on TV I can think of was Ted Danson on Becker, who was also a doctor. Interesting. I wonder why that's so?

I don't watch TV much at all, let alone the major network stuff. I've heard all kinds of people talk about House over the last 2 years or so. I pretty much pass everything off as crap, rightly or wrongly.

But it definitely sounds like they ran out of ideas on this one. When a medical drama is resorting to the storytelling equivalent of Star Trek's magical "trilithium" (a substance that vacillates from week to week as the universe's most dangerous, to its most benign), you know you've got a recipe for a new writing team.

"I'd say the "CSI-ification" of science goes back farther, to Star Trek: TNG at least. How many episodes were there where the Enterprise was in some kind of death trap, and Geordie and Data stitch together two unconfirmed scientific theories in the last 5 minutes and save the day? "

That's probably the surest sign that the people who write these plots have never programmed anything or done any science. About 80% of the time on any such endeavor is generally spent on dealing with bugs or working out screwy variables that weren't well controlled. In Star Trek or hacker movies, people write totally new software, or try out things based on new scientific theories... and they work on like, the very very first try. That's what takes a huge suspension of disbelief. TV programmers NEVER forget a ; at the end of a line. :)

I must confess that I consider both House and the original CSI guilty pleasures. It probably helps that I'm just ignorant enough about actual police and medical procedures that I can suspend my disbelief for the most part, but I don't imagine for a moment that the shows portray anything close to reality. Even without knowing much about medicine it's pretty obvious that no doctor is going to come up with a cure for every patient within a matter of days.

Being a Systems Administrator I'm in a similar boat to the folks who mentioned earlier their annoyance with magical computers that show up in most movies and TV shows, but I just remind myself that it's only a movie/show and I let it slide for the most part. I usually point and say something like: Look! It's MovieOS! I so have to buy that operating system for my own PC someday soon.

So wait, the kid WASN'T possessed?
What a letdown.

When a show has a good season its writers often get poached, then the next season's worse.

Um, yeah - it's called fiction, you know, drama - indeed, House is generally described in program guides as a "mystery."

But no, let's follow your suggestion. Week one: patient shows up, drags around parking deck, finds space, rides rickety elevator to streen level, walks to hospital building, wanders around looking for the department where he has an appointment, checks in, pays co-pay, fills out medical history form, turns it in, takes a seat. Whoa! Heart pounding realism.

Week two: we spend the hour with the patient still sitting around the waiting room because the House team is "a little busy today but we'll get you in as soon as we can."

Week three: Patient is called, their vitals are taken, then they get ushered into the lab to have blood drawn. Now we're getting some good, gory action. Then patient gets taken to exam room...and waits. Yes, totally realistic. Happened to me just yesterday.

Come on, it's television. Nobody watches House for the medicine - they watch for the soap opera - the character interaction. You guys are just silly...thekeez

Over and over they show that gut feelings about suspects are misleading and the evidence can surprise you. Is that not the quintessence of the scientific worldview?

Perhaps, but I would argue that CSI is actually anti-scientific in terms of regarding its first results as gospel and never questioning whether they, and by extension the people who did the procedure, could be wrong. The only time they were thrown into doubt on the original show that I've seen was in the season finale of 2004. It was one time when they were dealing, ironically, with a chimera. The DNA profile left at a crime scene didn't match the suspect, but the eyewitness identified him. Catherine suggests whether the evidence could be wrong, and Grissom says "You can be wrong, I can be wrong, but the evidence can't be wrong." That in itself is wrong. There are plenty of reasons why a profile might falsely exclude someone or falsely include them, including the generation of a "ghost" profile, allelic drop-out, etc. etc. Instead of looking for horses, they went and chased down a zebra (almost literally--they discovered the genetic anomaly when they saw the guy had Blaschko's lines, which is yet another thing oversimplified).

The biggest possibility is simply user error. To assume that the "evidence can't be wrong" means that they've been infallible in processing the evidence, which they never are. I well remember one CSI episode where Catherine finds the murder weapon, an umbrella handle which has been used to beat a person to death, in a closet. She then hangs the umbrella on the doorknob before getting some phenophthalein out of her kit to test for blood. I literally smacked myself in the forehead watching that, because she not only got blood transfer on the doorknob, but she also may have gotten the blood contaminated with skin cells sloughed off from the last person to close the closet door.

I could go on and on, but I won't test others' patience.

I generally enjoy House, especially for Hugh Laurie (Blackadder fans should have been pleased with last evening's not-so-subtle reference to a "cunning plan"), but this episode was a really groaner. I especially looked forward this morning to checking Scott's analysis at:
http://politedissent.com/

He does a medical review of each episode, with links for more info. Highly entertaining, and today more so than the episode (damning with faint praise though that may be!)

False Prophet:

Or that other great myth: The One Perfect Source--the single book that answers all of the protagonists' dilemmas. The fanciful pipe dream of all the students I help regularly. ;-)

Hey! No ragging on Douglas Adams' Deep Thought! ;-)

Ritchie Annand:

The think that spooks me about House is that it's a little like the Agatha Christie series... in that it's exceedingly unlikely that these statistically improbable events (murder versus staggeringly bizarre medical anomalies) just "seem to happen" around the main character.

By all statistical accounts, I'd highly suspect that they somehow cause the troubles :)

Well, not to spoil anyone's enjoyment but...

***SPOILER***

In Curtain, Hercule Poirot does murder one of the characters. So old Agatha at least saw that objection and built a book around it.

I must admit, mystery series are my guilty pleasure. My most recent favorite reading has been the Jane Austen mysteries, which, of course, do put a retiring 19th century lady novelist in all sorts of improbable positions. However, I was pleased to see her take a much more active stance in Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House, when she actually confronted the murderer in the final scene and stole a vital piece of evidence. If you have to have people placed, improbably, in the middle of murder mysteries, they should at least throw themselves into it.

Don't get me wrong: I think the character House is a great one, and he can make for an enjoyable show. The problem is that the writers keep giving him such brain-dead macguffins that it detracts from the pleasures of watching the performance.

No-one's mentioned "Numbers." Is the math in that as daft as the medicine and science in these other shows? As for last night's House, I think they missed a great opportunity by not having the kid hallucinate Jonathan "Alien Autopsy" Frakes duing the brain surgery. That would have lit up those "fear" bits in no time!

I watch for the snarkiness, hubby watches to see which boob jokes House makes regarding Dr. Cuddy. (and there are usually several per episode)

Yes the medical aspect of it takes a great leap of disbelief but there are some fabulous one-liners and the character interactions are usually fun.

This reminds me of a lecture from one of my physics professors in college. He was going on about relativity and gravity and was pointing out an issue with an episode of Star Trek that apparently tried to make use of gravity in a clever way that would actually have been cancelled out by relativistic effects. I don't remember the exact details, but it involved a bit of calculation and some terms surprisingly cancelling out. He said, "I should write a letter about this to the producers." My first thought was, "This is Star Trek we're talking about. Does he really think he's going to be the first physics geek to write in about this?"

Good professor and fun lecture, anyway.

Plucky Punk: I don't watch Bones as a rule, but I have caught a couple of episodes, and the eponymous character (a forensic osteologist) appears to be a strongly outspoken athiest.

The most recent episode I saw had her discussing the parable of Abraham and Isaac; she was of the opinion that the underlying myth was all about doing the right thing for your children, even when it seems wrong (without of course, explaining how murdering them might be the right thing). The lesson I took from this is that it's OK for a TV scientist to be an athiest, so long as they never say anything bad about the Bible, or point out that God condones murder, slavery and torture.

On a couple of tangents:

I used to be a fan of 7 Days, a fun time-travel romp, with a distinctly Christian gloss. One of the chief scientists was a Russian Christian (though, apparently, not Orthodox). When asked if she shouldn't be an athiest, given that she was brought up as a good communist, and taught not to believe in anything but the State, she responds that she was brought up to be a good scientist, and not believe in anything but the evidence. I suppose this represents the other acceptable view of American TV scientists.

My most favourite sciency moment (and a medical one, no less) in Star Trek came in DS9, when they discovered a crash-landed Jem'Hadar ship, and determined that the crew had all died of "massive osteonecrosis", or "bone death". I've just discovered that this term is actually in real use, but somehow I doubt that "a disease resulting from the temporary or permanent loss of the blood supply to the bones" was what they meant, so I feel justified in continuing to laugh at them...

Oh, and one more thing I missed:

I have lost faith in House.

That's for the best. You should leave faith in fictional characters to the theists.

That annoying, skinny red-haired guy is the WILLIAM SHATNER OF HIS GENERATION.
You insensitive clod.

Oh, does he sing?

Wintermute:

I don't see Bones often, but the most recent one I saw was regarding zombies in the American South. She compared Catholisim with Voodooism (both revering the dead and zombies) The male lead took exception to the comparison, her response was something along the lines of:

He dies, you bury him for a couple of days and he gets up and walks around,isn't that what a zombie is?

When will we get a drama about grad students?

"Arrgh, the developer is down, will I ever get this western developed?!"

OR

"Zounds, the SysAdmin deleted my account accidentally while upgrading network privelidges. No!!!!"

OR

"The boss is away on conference, quick, to the pub!"

Tune in next week, when our hero tries to decide between buying a case of beer and eating.

Or maybe not...

Best medical prog around? Green Wing, no debate.

It's on Channel 4 here in the UK - I don't know whether it's ever been shown in the States, but it's one of the funniest things I've seen. There again, the humour may not translate - an American friend of mine couldn't see how funny The Royle Family was...

Oh, does he sing?

That's SPOKEN WORD, you insensitive clod!

That's probably the surest sign that the people who write these plots have never programmed anything or done any science. About 80% of the time on any such endeavor is generally spent on dealing with bugs or working out screwy variables that weren't well controlled. In Star Trek or hacker movies, people write totally new software, or try out things based on new scientific theories... and they work on like, the very very first try. That's what takes a huge suspension of disbelief. TV programmers NEVER forget a ; at the end of a line. :)

Posted by: plunge | September 13, 2006 01:15 PM

That's a big reason I can't stand Tom Clancy novels. US military and intelligence operatives are given brand spankin' new gadgets and they work as advertised their first time in the field. I've studied too much military history and military hardware to swallow that nonsense (For example, the engineers of Nazi Germany--the same guys who created the V2 rocket and by extension, the rudiments of space travel--had trouble designing a four-engine long-distance bomber aircraft that didn't kill its pilots!). Some of this stuff is right out of James Bond, too. I can't believe that asshat is taken seriously as some kind of military expert.

I am a CSI:TOS fan. I stop flipping around for Miami, sometimes, but they've killed off nearly all the characters they started with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but they haven't replaced any of them, and the ones they left alive are all preening jackholes.

CSI I watch for Grissom and Greg, oh, and the cop Brass. Everyone else is background for me.

Don't even get me started on CSI:NY. They had a good thing going, and then they chose the most stereotypical locale for the third series. Idiots. the charm about CSI is they don't take place in cliche New York, LA, or San Francisco. If you wanted a metropolis, why not go Portland, or Seattle, Chicago or Detroit? Heck, even DC. New York City's been strip-mined of all entertainment value. There's nothing left but Jerry Orbach clones and that crazy streetcar/scene change noise.

I still like House. I know the medicine is pretty much wrong; I don't care. I don't care that these doctors are doing tests and procedures they very clearly wouldn't really be doing (a common complaint at Polite Dissent) in real life because it's a TV show. I'd never want these people as my doctors -- but that's ok, because they're actors pretending to be doctors.

Bones is starting to suck -- spirituality is often winning out over science.

Also, Angel once did walk into a house without being invited -- that show where he saved the cop (who was the 'Is it because I'm a lesbian?" DA on LO:SVU). Very obnoxious.

Graham Douglas:

Speaking as a born-and-bred Brit, I think the problem your American friend had with The Royle Family was that it simply wasn't funny.

It's not true that humour doesn't translate between Britain and America - Everything from Monty Python to Blackadder/i> to Black Books is laughed at heartily in America, just as British audiences take to Scrubs, Family Guy and Cheers. Barring the problem of translation, I don't think that there's a "humour barrier" between any two nations, any more than there is between London and Liverpool.

I think (though I don't claim any serious evidence) that humour is a universal, and if you discount translation issues, I would be surprised to know that there was a comedy that was only considered funny by one nation (or any other essentially arbitrary group) and not by another...

Well, I like the series also because of Laurie and I chose to ignore the not so good parts. Question from abroad: Is it like that in american hospitals that the consultations/examinations take place in glass cubicles with open shutters and open doors to the public? Also, are there no technicians, I mean, all the MRI/CT scans are done by the doctors themselves who are, well, not really qualified for this kind of work, are they? Is this drama or based in reality?

I predicted the seizures, later figured out chimerism. Would have been very impressed if they had gone for something that hadn't been on CSI a couple years ago. Like a flurry of activity from retrotransposons.

Star Trek is famous for doing this - they never actually explain why, for example, Gold-Pressed Latinum is somehow valuable in a world where your kitchen consists of a box that glows and produces anything at all.

This is actually explained in one of the very few Star Trek books I have. Basically, gold pressed latinum isn't technically "gold pressed". It has a gold color, due to small molecular anamolies. Supposedly, due to the nature of those, its nearly impossible to replicate, though someone in the book was able to manipulate the "surface" of bars of normal latinum, making it look like the more valuable material. Needless to say, the Ferrengi found out about it somehow, kidnapped the fool that invented it and then tried to buy something with a massive amount of counterfeit latinum.

Anyway, as to the original issue, there are cases where the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking the individuals own tissues, its not completely improbable that this error might only target one set of cells, in a chimeric individual, though the rest of the premise, that the chimeric cells would be in clumped areas, is rather rediculous.

I suck at teh italics today :(

Basically, gold pressed latinum isn't technically "gold pressed". It has a gold color, due to small molecular anamolies. Supposedly, due to the nature of those, its nearly impossible to replicate, though someone in the book was able to manipulate the "surface" of bars of normal latinum, making it look like the more valuable material. Needless to say, the Ferrengi found out about it somehow, kidnapped the fool that invented it and then tried to buy something with a massive amount of counterfeit latinum.

This is completely contradicted by on-screen conversations in DS9.

Latinum is a liquid that looks a lot like mercury with the magical property of not being able to be replicated. So, in order to make it easy to carry and divide into units, it is held within the vacuoles of honeycombed bars of "worthless" gold.

Gold apparently became worthless in a very short space of time, as it was still a standard medium of exchange amongst the Ferengi in TNG.

All I know is that Hugh Laurie can have me any time he's ready! For real. (Homina, homina, homina...)

Mixter

Also, Angel once did walk into a house without being invited -- that show where he saved the cop (who was the 'Is it because I'm a lesbian?" DA on LO:SVU). Very obnoxious.

Well, except that it was supposed to be deliberate, according to the dialogue at the end of that same episode. It was obviously considered more dramatic than an anonymous cellphone call to 911 (which, granted, Angel might have had trouble making, since he wasn't much for cellphones back then), or shouting "Help!" until a neighbor appeared, and throwing them bodily into the apartment to help. Hey, can vampires throw stuff into a residence without being invited in? And it was the original Law and Order, not SVU. So there.

Look, I'll agree that the "medical" process was more irritating than usual last night on House, but at least the notion of alien abductions was treated rather derisively; e.g., House muttering darkly about the metal not being terrestrial in origin, then responding to "Really?" with "No, you idiot, it's titanium!" So I'd still chalk up a partial win for skepticism, which is worth a lot these days.

Just a little nitpick:
The machine used to detect the chimeric tissue in the episode is PET scanner, not an MRI. I work at GE Healthcare, who made the particular model they show in this episode. That one's actually a combo CT scanner/PET scanner. So it has the ability to do multiple slice X-Rays and pick up areas of radioactive emissions. I think the scan actually makes sense, because if the 'antibodies' were tagged with an isotope, then a PET scanner would have little trouble picking up its location.

It's just television...something I had to keep telling myself every time I watched a lawyer show.

Especially annoying was an episode of LA Law whose writer had asked me about a particular legal document - a durable power of attorney for health care, which is basically a boiler-plate form with options - and had Arnie take three days to prepare it. It should take a secretary no more than ten minutes to fill in the client's wishes...but the "dramatic arc" required that a period of time elapse, so wothehell, screw accuracy.

I know the science is nonsense on House and CSI, but I do love the characters. There is a time for willing suspension of disbelief and prime time is it.

I do wonder sometimes whether any of these "we will track down your DNA from one molecule [sic] and find you and convict you" ever prevents crime - is a would-be criminal ever deterred by the fear that Gus Grissom will ferret him out?

Oh, that's right: House blew up the MRI in a previous show. Or was that the one where it was all a dream?

Surely there are more important things to be complaining about?

It's a television show. It's a fictional television show. I don't get my medical/scientific information from a fictional medical show about fictional doctors doing fictional stuff, let it go! The people who might get their information from fictional shows aren't the sort of people who will read this blog, so you're only preaching to the converted.

This is I would suggest only a problem for those who work or were educated in relevant fields, because I don't give two hoots about the medicine or science in it and enjoy the show immensely (I am watching it to be entertained, not educated). In my opinion it's funny, the main character is an atheist (and they are few and far between on television, why pick on one of the only positive representations of atheism on television when we need all the help we get in this godridden country), I think it's pretty well written, it's interesting and Hugh Laurie is excellent in it.

As for it getting facts wrong, duh, it's a television show. If you don't like it, don't watch it, which is exacty the reason I usually avoid historical dramas (Braveheart anyone), military dramas (U-571 anyone) and shows which involve computers/technology (Swordfish anyone) - they are usually wrong and usually rubbish!

Do the people complaining about the science and medicine in CSI and House complain there are Orcs in Lord of the Rings? After all they don't really exist you know. Star Wars must have your blood pressure through the roof. Forget Futurama, or Red Dwarf. A pox on Battlestar Galactica. Transformers? Forget it. Spiderman - impossible. Fraggles don't even really exist you know. Apollo landings sure, but Wallace and Gromit, never. Colombo? Never follows police procedure. I hate to tell you, but there is no angel called Clarence. Buzz Lightyear doesn't come to life when you leave the room. Don't get me started on the anatomical representations of humans in the Simpsons. Coyotes can't really build rocket cars. Did I make my point or do I need to go on?

House is a medical drama, not a medical documentary. That means it has medicine and drama, it doesn't mean any of it has to be right though.

Man going to the movies must sure be a barrel of laughs with some of you.

'Pffff, the energy needed to destroy an entire planet like that could never be generated by a Death Star, we're leaving now.'

'Hmmmph. There's no such thing as the Force, can't believe they're peddling this crap.'

'Grrr. Pigs and frogs could never really love each other. And as for bears telling jokes...'

I enjoy reading this blog, but this thread could be the shark jumping moment. Or would abandoning something I enjoy because of one flawed episode just be a good example of spitting my dummy out?

You're right, it was the original L&O.

I don't care what stupid handwaving they did in the episode, ooooh, TPTB let Angel break the rules just this once to save her -- it was annoying and stupid and unnecessary. I know it was deliberate, and I think that makes it worse.

PZ, the blowing up the (only!) MRI machine was in the hallucination.

Clare said:

No-one's mentioned "Numbers." Is the math in that as daft as the medicine and science in these other shows?

Numb3rs is *ok*, except that Charlie throws words like "game theory" around too often without sufficient explanations. He and his teams are also spectacular programmers because they seem to be able to crank amazing number crunching software within days! There are several numb3rs blogs that analyze individual episodes.

I watch House solely because of the dark humor and personal and interpersonal conflicts. I am somewhat glad that I don't know medicine because it would possibly drive me away like physics and computers do in other shows.

1) I got that it was chimerism immediately because it was a plot point on CSI last season or the one before. (Suspected murderer's DNA sample inconsistent with DNA at crime scene; the reason was chimerism.) Bad House, bad.

2) Numbers drives me crazy because the math is so wrong. I could not have imagined that there would be a TV show with Judd Hirsch, Rob Morrow and Peter MacNicol that I would actively dislike, but there you are. ("Where's the kidnap victim? Maybe we can use this formula that generates prime numbers to figure it out!" I overstate only slightly.)

3) Bones needs to be taken out and shot because the scriptwriters don't know what they are doing. The minor attributes of the main character is that she is (a) lacking empathy and (b) a best-selling novelist. Either would be fine, but they don't go together. Emily Deschanel cannot make sense of this nonsense even though she appears to have some talent. As a side note, any program featuring a 3D holographic viewer as big as a table that is not set in the 26th century is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Relative to both of those shows, House (its medical correctness aside) is a much better depiction of how smart, hard-working people who are not cartoons actually behave, notwithstanding the extremity of the main character.

wintermute: I only said it might not translate - that same friend is a big fan of all sorts of Brit comedy, from Monty Python to The Fast Show. Maybe Green Wing would get a favourable reaction - if The Office can do it, so can that.

of course I was terribly drunk at the time...

Just out of curiosity, can anybody give a solid example of when the science performed on CSI was actually wrong? By this I mean fundamental errors in the purpose, procedure, tools used or the basic theory behind the tests performed of such a degree that a viewer of reasonable intelligence would become less informed about the basic principles or forensic science.

While procedural errors, oversimplifications, and unrealistic timelines abound, for the most part the basic science is correct. CSI is not a training program for forensic technicians. However, the scientific principles presented in the show are quite far from nonsense.

How many viewers of CSI had no idea what DNA was before watching this show, much less a chimera? How many people can tell you what GCMS stands for, what it is used for, and maybe even how it works because of those animations that seem to be despised by so many people here. Most importantly, how many people have been inspired by Gil Grissom's tireless dedication to the accumulation of knowlege through an unbiased examination of the physical world, regardless of how undesirable and inconvenient the implications may be.

I understand how fustrating it can be to spend hours of work on a problem only to see a dramatization of your effort depicted as a few keystokes by an abnormally good looking team of scientists bathed by a sexy blue glow as opposed to flickering cool white flourescents, but please refrain from calling it "nonsense" or claiming they "get the science all wrong" unless you can back up your assertion with a better example than people forgetting to change gloves often enough.

How many viewers of CSI had no idea what DNA was before watching this show, much less a chimera?

Hmmm... a good question. Here's another: how many viewers of CSI have IQs less than 70?

C'mon - they've deliberately made him the best diagnostician on the East Coast to explain why he attracts the cases. And it would be awfully boring to watch a show in which techs did the tests and the docs sat around and ... did nothing. Unless the show was about the techs. This show isn't.

We are still on series 2 here in Australia - and in my opinion it has already jumped the shark in its predictability. Cue for House to discover the cause and apply the cure at 9.28pm. NCIS is much better!!!!

Spiderman - impossible.
But (no pun intended) wouldn't it be nice if they would just get the area where webs are produced right just once?

PZ, the blowing up the (only!) MRI machine was in the hallucination.

No it wasn't, it was in Euphoria, part 1. He wants to find out if the MRI will work on someone with metal bullet fragments in his head, so he shoots a corpse in the head and then puts the corpse in the MRI. Satisfyingly dramatic destruction ensues and they decide not to MRI the living guy.

They also mention that it will be out of commission for "weeks", so it's not a continuity error if they have to use it again in a later episode.

Of course they don't get all the medicine right. Complaining about this seems about on par with complaining that their first two or three theories, no matter how reasonable and well-supported, almost always turn out to be wrong. It's a limitation of the format.

It's difficult to hold up the succession of bizarre and improbable cases against the show, though, because the reason for that is included in the show's presence: House specializes in bizarre cases nobody else can figure out. Anything that really is what it looks like gets filtered out before it reaches him (except in the clinic, where he often *does* get obvious things he can diagnose in five minutes.)

His success rate is improbably high from a realism standpoint, but who really wants to watch all the episodes where they're still trying to figure out what happens when the patient dies? There's a reason there aren't many of those, although that reason has nothing to do with accuracy.

While the inaccuracies and distortions-for-dramatic-effect can be annoying, overall I consider it an enjoyable show. Certainly it's miles above dreck like Fear Factor or American Idol, and I'd put it above the superficially clever but deeply stupid Lost, too.

PZ:

...the writers also think I am an idiot.

Well, you were watching TV, after all....

Incorrect these show maybe but the numbers of people doing forensic science in Australia has grown astronomically since CSI. I think shows that make science sexy should be applauded.

However CSI has had a bad effect on jurors, some of whom have formed a greatly exaggerated idea of the amount of relevant physical evidence typically left in the course of a crime, and who will therefore look askance at, say, the absence of DNA testing even in cases where there is no DNA evidence of any probative value, or will "conclude" that an individual could not have been in a room if latent prints matching him aren't found all over the place. Even cops sometimes think magical results can be obtained (in 20 minute of course). And frankly most of the kids who watch CSI and then imagine they want to be forensic scientists are not capable of earning a degree in science (or don't even realize they need to) since the show completely confuses the roles of crime scene technicians and forensic scientists. Speaking as a forensic scientist I really don't think the net effect of those shows has been positive by any means.

A higher burden of proof on the government is always good, in my book.

1) I got that it was chimerism immediately because it was a plot point on CSI last season or the one before. (Suspected murderer's DNA sample inconsistent with DNA at crime scene; the reason was chimerism.) Bad House, bad.

CSI even rips itself off. One "gag" they've used on two of the CSI shows: we have a person in a frame from video surveillance (or tourist digital snapshot), but what we need to see is not in the frame.

They zoom into the eyeball of the person, and read a license plate number from the reflection in the eyeball.

Just out of curiosity, can anybody give a solid example of when the science performed on CSI was actually wrong? By this I mean fundamental errors in the purpose, procedure, tools used or the basic theory behind the tests performed of such a degree that a viewer of reasonable intelligence would become less informed about the basic principles or forensic science.

60 Minutes did an interview with a lady who worked in the CSI unit of Los Angeles; who worked as a consultant on CSI: Las Vegas.

It was an appreciative interview, but they showed a clip from the show, where one of the lab techs was casting a knife blade (for tool mark analysis) by pouring plaster into a wound.

The interviewer: "That really wouldn't work, would it?"

The consultant: "That was an argument I lost."

I hoped it was just an aberration ...

I haven't seen it (not that I've seen that much House at all because I was expecting just those sort of reality issues right from the first advert for it). So, as far as I'm concerned, you might have been the one dreaming the episode this time. ;-)

C'mon you geeks! This was a great episode! So what if some shortcuts in technique were taken. I get over it when every freakin' cop show just "sharpens" the image on a 640x480 secuirty camera image to reveal the hidden perpetrator, as long as the story is good. And please, PLEASE, can we retire that old jumping the shark crap. It was funny the first time I heard it, somewhat less so the next 57 billion times.

Mr. LaBonne,

There's also the reverse effect of the CSI effect, which is when jurors think that any DNA evidence is prima facie always right, and it outweighs the other evidence. A man was falsely convicted in Oklahoma on charges that he raped an 11 year-old, based on the testimony of the girl, some hair comparisons, and a DNA profile supposedly 'matching' his own.

It might be a strong case, if the guy had no evidence to offer up in his defense, but he brought forth eleven witnesses that put him in another state the night of the rape...and the jury convicted him anyway.

Of course, neither the hair comparisons nor the eyewitness testimony themselves are secure enough bases on which to ignore eleven alibi witnesses, so in this case I think that the conviction was based on an errant belief in the infallibility of DNA evidence when the technician had failed to properly sort out a mixed sample, and assumed that the mixed sample was a single-source sample.

CSI is responsible for misunderstandings which hurt the defense as well as the prosecution.

This House sucked. I mean, how can I be amazed at a large number of brilliant doctors sitting around trying to figure out something that took me a tenth of a second? My sister figured it out instantly as well (so half the room I watched it in). Then the doctors didn't. What the hell? You can't amaze me with crap, I figured out in half a second and the main characters took "days" to figure out. And figuring it out, didn't do anything. Oh, now we know, so what are we going to do differently... nothing!

Then a lot of the stuff didn't follow, and alien abduction crap was a result of his mind? How? And why the hell did they go away when the other part was removed? The end they got the kid to start picturing aliens, checked what part of his brain was lighting up and removed the other part. First off, you usually have about 5% or so of your brain firing at any one time (you use 100%, but only fire about 5% at a time). I mean, if he wasn't smelling anything at the time would they remove his olfactory centers? If he wasn't trying to talk would Broca's Area be yanked out? If he wasn't remembering the his fifth birthday would that part of his memory center be removed? It seems like you'd remove all the parts that weren't used to hallucinate aliens.

Why would any of this crap cause any problem at all? If it triggered his immune system he would have had rather major problems earlier in his life and perhaps died. There are a number of perfectly ordinary chimeras that don't have any problems at all, and if they did it would be really really early (quite common with male-female chimeras to notice it instantly).

Why did they do a DNA analysis of his heart?
Why would a slight problem like that cause any other problems? Oh, his heart is only 97% working perfectly. Eek.
Why did removing the cells from his eye magically make it see?
And why the hell were they keeping House's last cured guy from him? I mean, what the hell? He didn't have any reason to think he was right, save it explaining everything?
Why the hell didn't House just give the guy the shot himself and send him on his way? I mean, you have one last ditch theory that explains everything and a harmless shot? I mean, give him the shot *then* give up. It's not like it will kill the veggie guy. I would give the guy the shot. Hell, might as well give that shot to everybody in such a state. There is no downside to it at all.

They must have new writers.

...

Also, the last episode of Bones was complete and utter crap. I mean, it's great to have a show with an atheist on it. But she starts talking about Abraham and Isaac as if it were some kind of good thing. The FBI guy's response is correct, I don't care if God said kill my son, I wouldn't. Damned right, because the Bible is full of crap and you shouldn't listen to voices in your head telling you to kill your loved ones. Faith my left testicle! Even worse is her new more common anti-social comments. "I don't understand why mothers do it; raising kids" -- They might as well smash them on rocks? What the hell? Every biologist understands it's to propagate the species. Strong emotional ties make sure people like babies and make you love your kids. I mean, Bones makes it seems like love is beyond the ability of biology to understand. Their stupid hologram system is bad enough, but to start making stupid statements that sound like they come from the mouth of somebody-who-doesn't-even-know-basic-things really ruins the illusion.

I'm glad to have smart atheistic characters on TV, but do they have to be cookie-cutter theistic straw-man mockups? I'll hope this was just a bad writing job for just this episode of House. I mean, the episode "House vs. God" wasn't bad (although God got a point for each problem and House a point for solving the problem, thusly the best he could do was tie), and many episodes are good enough that I'll give them a second chance.

This episode was just bad. But, maybe it was just this episode... and the last episode(season premier)... and the episode before that (season finale).

I find the argument that a couple of comments have put forward that since it's fiction it doesn't have to obey any rules a little disturbing, frankly. I can't imagine even attempting to enjoy a dramatic entertainment where the writers are allowed to do anything. It would be as though Donald Rumsfeld worked for Hollywood.

And it isn't even true. Good writing does obey rules, or at least conventions, most of the time, and a good writer will know where the limits are beyond which he will lose his audience. Thankfully we haven't yet reached the point where most of the audience will accept anything that appears on the magic box.

While there are certainly some cases where the "CSI effect" has led to some poor thinking on the part of the jury, I would assert that prosecuting and defense lawyers are much more efficient instruments of misinformation. One need only look at the circus that was the OJ trial to see how badly the science of DNA analysis can be bungled without the help of tv.

Regarding factual inaccuracies:

rrusick writes:
It was an appreciative interview, but they showed a clip from the show, where one of the lab techs was casting a knife blade (for tool mark analysis) by pouring plaster into a wound.

From what I remember, I think they were only looking at the shape of the knife, not any kind of tool marks (although that admittedly would still be kind of sketchy). There certainly are other errors as well, but for the most part,I don't think these kinds of errors are too common.

NelC:

Not sure whether I am included in your comment or not after my post, but I would certainly not be arguing that because House and CSI are fiction then anything goes and there are no rules.

Arguing that this is fine:
House says: 'The patient is suffering severe [insert symptom] so it must be hyper intelligent flying pink elephants passing on a virus through mind control.'

Is clearly not the same as stating that since a program is fiction and entertainment then dramatic license is acceptable, suspension of disbelief is a requirement, you shouldn't treat it as factual truth, and you should beware of hypocrisy in criticising one program because it wasn't 100% accurate, but not complaining about all the other shows which aren't 100% accurate.

Why complain about the science in CSI, but not the science in Star Wars?

I don't claim to speak for others, but I would hazard a guess that the argument is that it's fiction, it's going to get stuff wrong and you miss the point if you think it's a science lesson, and not that it's fiction therefore write whatever you want.

My favourite Hugh Laurie quote from Blackadder the Third is:

"I'm as happy as a Frenchman who's just invented self-removing trousers!"

FYI, Kansas Anarchist, the error in that Oklahoma case was of a kind that cannot occur with current STR technology. The older polymarker testing (the blue dots on a reverse dot blot that intrepid watchers of the OJ trial may recall) was very poor at resolving mixtures, which (together with a totally incompetent work by an unaccredited private lab) let to that error. Mixture resolution is in contrast a main strength of STRs. And guess how that guy, Timothy Durham, was exonerated? That's right, competent DNA testing, conducted under the auspices of the Innocence Proejct.

Short of actually switching samples (against which any properly written set of procedures has multiple safeguards) it's simply not possible to get a false positive result from STRs. Current DNA technology is so reliable that, as I'm sure you know, it has uncovered many wrongful convictions obtained using other kinds of evidence, eyewitness as well as less reliable forensic evidence. There's a reason why the Innocence Project (whose work I very much admire) focuses on tracking down, and obtaining testing of, potential DNA evidence in the cases it pursues.

By the way I have no stake whatsoever in incriminating anyone; I get equal satisfaction when my results exonerate a suspect, which happens very frequently.

I like House, mostly for th einteraction between all the interesting charcters/good actors. CSI drives me crazy because:

Since when do crime scene techs interview witnesses?

No one ever makes a mistake

The evidence is always very clear and points to a specific person

Apparently the whole lab only works one or maybe two cases at a time

Somewhere there's a same-day DNA lab

I agree, last night's House was not a good medicine episode. It was sad to see him go back to his cane, though. Sad because very few series are willing to make actual changes to the main premise of their characters.

The science in Star Trek got to be hilarious - they invented a new subatomic particle every week!

Argh! House!

Here's why I am not a fan:
House = Ally McBeal + Transmetropolitan + Bad Science

I mean, look at that equation. Silliness abounds, it's built in.

I mean, who was the guy who came up with this premise? "Hey, I've got this great idea for a show -- Spider Jerusalem is a genius DOCTOR...."

Gah.

No one ever makes a mistake

That reminds me of one more thing I should have said (and do say in court) which is that proper laboratory procedures are designed on the assumption that human beings are fallible and will make mistakes. Thus multiple controls, checks and safeguards need to be built in to ensure that any mistake is caught before results are reported.

I watch House when I can. I'm a huge Hugh Laurie fan from his work in Jeeves & Wooster and Black Adder. Yes, the science can be quite silly at times, but what I find to be most humorous is the physical location of House. I love how the producers of the show use shots of the Student Center at Princeton University to stand in for the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Also, one should note that Princeton University does not have a medical school (nor a law or post-grad business school either). Fun, fun stuff.

Why complain about the science in CSI, but not the science in Star Wars?

Because from the opening scene in Episode IV it's apparent that we're in a different place where the rules are also different. Whereas the CSI Las Vegas is quite like our own; we expect the rules to be the same, and it's annoying when they're not.

Now, I can swallow certain dramatic conventions for the sake of a story. The seemingly instantaneous DNA analyses, the one-at-a-time case loads, the lack of human error, and so on are just dramatic editing. In my head I know that a case that is solved in 40 minutes screen-time might realistically be bobbing around getting little bits of it done over weeks.

Like witnesses in these shows who only give the information that the police need to get them to the next scene, without any umming and erring, circumlocutions, confusions or false memories, the editing only gives the audience what we need to get to the next scene and a decent chance to out-guess the protagonists.

But some things drop us out of our suspension of disbelief. For me it's anything to do with image processing, like the reflection of a number plate in an eyeball seen in a frame from a CCTV camera recorded onto a much-used VHS video-tape. Argh!

Why does this upset me? Because it's broken the contract between the writer and me implied by setting the story in the modern world in a real place, that they'll keep to the rules of physical reality, even if they take dramatic licence. If the writers want to play fast and loose with reality, let them set the show on Trantor, or Laputa.

And, for what it's worth, I have complained about the science in Star Wars, ever since it first came out. And been shouted down by yahoos because "it's just a story". Doesn't mean I don't like the movie, just that it has flaws. I also like CSI and House, but that shouldn't stop me from criticising them.

Someone who's written a good story while sticking to the rules of the world is to be lauded. Someone who messes with the rules in order to write a good story should not be encouraged in his bad habits.

NelC:

After seeing Star Wars Episode IV would you have encouraged Lucas not to make episodes V and VI (note I don't mention the three prequels, if only someone had discouraged him), since he should not be encouraged in his bad habits of writing bad science? The world he writes for may be superficially internally consistent (anything more than that and it isn't) but the science sucks, and according to many on here that means you shouldn't watch it anymore, it's too fictional.

On top of that, if you recognise that the 'world rules' of CSI already allow for implausible reality, why get worked up by just one more implausible step? As you say, it's a personal preference (image processing for you). No 'rule' has been broken in the CSI world, you just didn't like it. The writer broke no contract with you if the problem is your personal preference. I know that what you describe for image processing is implausible, but I know the rest of the show is too, so no rules within the CSI world are broken because it's approach is consistent, the science isn't that accurate.

From the opening credits its obvious that Star Wars is not set in our galaxy, however nowhere does it say the laws of physics no longer count, so this is a non-argument in trying to claim what is in Star Wars is fine (I know you state that you have criticised Star Wars), but not what is in CSI. By the very nature of being fiction, CSI is not set in the real world, the science shouldn't be taken seriously, so there's no point getting worked up about it unless it claims to be factual or accurate, which as far as I can tell it doesn't.

More importantly, the idea that you should stop watching a fictional show because it has fictional content is just laughable, and yet that is what some people on here have done.

I agree with a few points made by previous posters. There is a difference between suspension of disbelief for dramatic purposes and glaring errors that pull us out of the story (not to get literary, but this reminds me of Brecht's S-effect; a moment that makes the theatricallity and fiction of the play evident). When House and the team do a one-day DNA test or look at an unrealistic cardiogram, or cure nearly every patient in three days, etc., these are acceptable dramatic conventions. The problem is when the characters break the spell, and this happened this week with the characters' incompetant handling of the DNA information. This made me, with no medical knowlege, raise an eyebrow.

Still, i wouldn't be too hard on House. Read through the body of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - the stories are formulaic and stretch the borders of believability. Some of the mysteries still hold up today as compact and effective, but others must have been pushing it in Doyle's time and are completely unbelievable today (an air-powered sniper rifle and the explanation for the hound of the Baskervilles comes to mind). Still, a classic. If the writers can maintain House's alluring Holmesness, the show will continue to draw viewers.

"that annoying skinny red-haired guy"

It is funny how overacting gets you. When Sean Connery or Robbie Coltrane does it, I usually oversee it because of their personal charm. (So it isn't good looks...) But when David Caruso or Vincent D'Onofrio does it I usually doesn't, even though they both has managed to pull off some excellent movie performances while doing it.

Over the shows lifetimes they turn it down though, and D'Onofrio has managed to turn me over. Caruso I'm not so sure of, it is only a few seconds here and there that he seems like a real person. Larger-than-life doesn't mean not-life-as-we-know-it.

Hugh Laurie is usually brilliant, so I look forward to see House.

"Stories aren't supposed to be true."

Especially SciFi is supposed to be exploring alternate worlds that could or could never be, and explore the social and technical ramifications. Sometimes they give you a new slant on an old problem, sometimes they give you a new problem, and sometimes they just amuse you.

Star Wars is space opera though, you could as well place the story in medieval time.

I worry more about the physics and biology of everyday fictional presentations. What if kids really thinks you can hit someone over the head without risking serious or mortal damage? There is bound to be some stupid enough to integrate such erronous things into their repertoire of possible actions.

"TV always does a hack job. But why do they do it?"

Because it is cheap and yet we pay them for the product. Why do scandal and fabrications sell? Not that I am complaining, if they were more thorough they would produce even less. (I'm a black hole for sci fi. :-)

"How many episodes were there where the Enterprise was in some kind of death trap, and Geordie and Data stitch together two unconfirmed scientific theories in the last 5 minutes and save the day? I have no formal science education beyond high school chemistry, but I'm quite certain that's not how science is done."

It isn't science at all. The science is mostly supposed to be done beforehand, hence the mentioning of previous theories or scientists, and the technical solutions are tested on the fly. If they had time to test it first, I'm sure they would, in real life. But sometimes that isn't believable either depending on the time constraints of the situation, and it is a plot device to fit the dramatic arc.

There is at least one episode where the solution doesn't work and they have to redo it more thoroughly from the "test run". It is when the alienophobe Parnaks by agreement tries to erase the crews biological memories instead of destroying the ship and risk further Star Fleet investigation. (Data is ordered to never mention it, the computer records are changed, et cetera.) IIRC, STNG "Clues".

Torbjorn Larsson:
"It isn't science at all. The science is mostly supposed to be done beforehand, hence the mentioning of previous theories or scientists, and the technical solutions are tested on the fly."

Yep. It's engineering. Those guys in the yellow suits were "engineers." Problem solved :)

Jimmy_Blue, if anyone is saying, "Don't watch this," please point out where. As far I can see, people are saying,"It could be better," and they're not as enthusiastic about it as they might be if it were better and therefore they're not watching as much as they might. The only ones being proscriptive are those telling us critical ones that we shouldn't be critical at all.

As for CSI vs Star Wars physics, in SF some of the rules of physics are often different, it's part of the ground rules for SF. So I'm not going to bitch about faster-than-light travel, I'm not going to bitch about psychic powers, I might bitch about light-sabres if somebody calls them lasers, but I am definitely going to bitch about a CGI Obiwan Kenobi being tossed about on the back of a riding lizard hard enough to break his back. FTL and psychic powers are part of the setting: FTL is common enough in SF to pass with no explanation beyond a bit of dialog about "making the jump to lightspeed" and the psychic powers are introduced gradually through several scenes in the story; these follow established rules for SFnal story-telling. Ewan McGregor surviving without whiplash is just bad CGI, and as such it needs to be criticised.

CSI, as I said, seems to take place in our universe and it makes a great show of being about science. When it gets the science wrong, it should be excoriated because it's setting us up to expect better. I can tell myself that it's set in a fantasy universe where CCTV cameras commonly have pin sharp colour HDTV resolution, but that universe isn't very interesting to me.

Why do I have different standards for dramatic editing and for scientific realism? Damned if I know. Maybe it's a byproduct of having a bicameral mind. Perhaps my right-brain gives as much weight to dramatic necessity as my left-brain does to physical reality.

I love House. It entertains me. I'm a geologist so all the biology and medicine is way over my head. I suppose if I knew a lot more about it, I'd be frustrated too (I cringe just thinking about the movie The Core). But what do all of you watch instead? Discovery? TLC? The Science Channel? All great and I thoroughly enjoy them, but sometimes I just want to be entertained.

It's funny, all this. When Laurie was on Inside the Actors Studio he was asked (by an audience member, I think) if he'd learned a lot of medical stuff by doing House. He basically said that whatever he learned was there for the shooting and forgotten shortly thereafter, and that it would be a mistake to trust him to save your life in a medical situation.

He said, in short, "Good grief -- it's television!"

NelC:

I didn't say people were saying 'Don't watch this.' I said people had stopped watching fictional shows because they felt they were too fictional, please don't put words in my mouth and then use those words to accuse me of being prescriptive, at least do me the courtesy of being honest about what I say.

My argument is simply that getting worked up about fictional shows because they contain fictional events is pointless, something I had to learn through sitting through countless 'historical' dramas. Saying its pointless doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means you're energy is better directed elsewhere.

I am still a little confused by your double standard with CSI however. If you accept implausibilies in it, why complain about implausibilities in it? Sure the shows premise is that science can lead you to the answers as long as you follow the evidence, but throughout it is implausible. That is the 'rule' set that the show sets itself, so no rules can be broken if it does something else that is unlikely/implausible. Therefore the only grounds for criticism are your own personal preferences, not the mythical breaking of imaginary script rules.