Customer Reviews

Broken, Part 1 [HD]

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I have to say I disagree with Patrick - other reviewer - a lot.

On the whole I am/was getting a bit bored with the House formula.........gets patient with bizarre disease, spent 45 minutes treating and eliminating diseases, get a brainwave from an unrelated activity at about the 50 minute mark. Cure patient. Yippee.

This is different. Not least from the fact that it's twice as long as a normal episode. For the better part of 2 series now we've explored the part about House being an addict and his downward mental spiral. This episode deals solely with this.

For me, the episode is almost 100% about House, with the other characters playing off him. The "menace" or lack of it from the councilor is academic. Some of the mental duels between them are excellent - way better than what you get in a normal episode between House and Cuddy.

This is just an awesome episode exploring the mind of House and the stages he'd going through. There's a whole range of emotions here and I think Hugh Lawrie plays it well.

Sure there's a few cheesy parts, but this is a truly great episode.

I started watching House a couple years ago. I was working on a contract at UC Medical in SF. The doctors were commenting about how accurate (or inaccurate) was the medicine. I tuned in.

This season however House seems to have used up the medical premise. Hugh Laurie is now only incidentally a doctor. He seems to be a sort of political prisoner caught in a mental ward. His captor is black. Perhaps they discovered that he didn't vote for Obama?

The black guy, Andre Braugher - who should have won the Oscar for best suporting actor in "Glory" (not Denzel Washington)- has let himself go. He's quite fat now. He now looks like Cedric the Entertainer or Eddie Murphy in one of his fat suits. A couple seasons ago they had a huge fat black guy play a billionaire villian. He was effective because he was taller than Laurie. As was the scary white cop played by David Morse. House the character is very, very smart and Laurie the actor is pretty tall and fit (he boxes for sport), so even with his bum leg he is a hard man to intimidate. This makes playing the plot menace difficult. Braugher - the new chubby Braugher - is not up to the task.

I missed this episode when it was broadcast so I bought it here at Amazon throgh Roku. It looked sensational in HD and I enjoyed not having commercials but like Operation Market Garden (A Bridge Too Far), this may be "A Season Too Many".