Wednesday, April 08, 2009

RIP Lawrence Kutner, etc.


I watched this week's episode of House and it was bad. Kutner killed himself and no one knew why. The guy who played Kutner got a job in the Obama administration so that's all good, but irrelevant to the show.

There's a thinly veiled parallel to reality here. When Kutner was found, everyone was shocked. No one had seen it coming, no one had known to try to help. He hadn't reached out to anyone. But what if he had? What if he'd called everyone he knew over and over threatening to kill himself, for years? What if he had been so filled with self-pity that nothing had helped? What if he had alienated everyone with his abject refusal to do anything more than drink, call people, and cry out, "Why me?" to anyone within ear shot, about common problems he had brought on himself? Kutner had no romantic interest written into the show. What if he'd driven away every romantic interest he'd had until no one would have him? What if everyone he'd known had, for their own sanity, been forced to let him go long before he killed himself? What if instead of, "We didn't know, we never saw it coming, he never told us," it had been that everyone saw it coming, everyone knew, and he told everyone, but nothing had changed? What if every person in Kutner's life had tried to help, had listened and given advice until they had no more to give? How would the writers invent a tomorrow for people who had just had to let him go?

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