Succinct, Slightly Derisive Doogie Howser Episode Summaries: Season 4

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4x1 There's A Riot Going On

What do the Rodney King riots mean to you? For DHMD they mean a chance for a Very Special race relations episode, and dreamy sweat-drenched Doogie running around a chaotic ER.

 

4x2 Look Ma, No Pants

Mrs. Howser is upset when she catches Doogie late-night skinny-dipping with her boss.

Milestone: An unprecedented (? maybe?) bit of plot in the journal section as Doogie concludes today's entry, "It's time I move out."

Gay Vinnie Quote: "Howser, you Adonis!"

 

4x3 Doogie Got a Gun

In this anvilicious VSE, Doogie, spooked after a robbery, tries to learn to shoot a gun, but is hindered by memories of treating gunshot victims in the ER.

Bad Lesson: Things this episode tries to teach you to fear include meeting someone who's found your wallet and opening the door of your home, ever.

 

4x4 Doogie Has Left the Building

I was working on my D&D character sheet during this one but I am pretty sure that it is about Doogie's dad wanting him to buy a solid investment of a boring condo while Doogie prefers a quirky but slighty seedy loft.

Question: Where is Doogie's money going? Until now, he's lived rent-free, and he's been working a three years as a resident (admittedly a low-paying job) and several months as a trauma surgeon (pay scale?) without being able to touch his own money. How come his dad needs to bankroll his first place to live? I guess he has med school loans, but I would have pegged his dad as the type to help pay for that expense.

Milestones: Doogie movies into a super cool loft you guys! There's an elevator that goes right into the apartment!

Gayest Moments: Oddly, this week's by far gayest moment is between Vinnie and the dad. Vinnie is also looking for a place to stay since his parents are splitting up and selling the house. For some reason Vinnie and Doogie don't revisit the idea of moving in together, even though it seems obvious that's what will happen. Instead, Dr. Howser invites Vinnie to move in to their now-spare room. Although Vinnie ultimately turns him down--he needs to stand on his own for awhile, as the girl who isn't the cute drummer conveniently said to the the kid from Mask in Some Kind of Wonderful--a heartfelt exchange of I love yous follows.

 

4x5 The Patient In Spite of Himself

After a short stay in the hospital, Canfield decides to run a super fun experiment: the interns (and resident-in-charge Doogie) must experience the hospital from the patient's side! Doogie and Annoying Intern Janice have to share a room and bond. It's really ridiculous.

Ethics Watch: Leaving aside the ethical implications inherent in taking hospital personnel away from their duties for several days--not to mention using up hospital resources in the process--I really don't see how this little demonstration can possibly be okay, ethically. Notably, each participant is given a physical manifestation of their fake ailment--for example, Doogie's fingers are taped up with splints to represent arthritis, and Janice is given Vaseline-smeared glasses to represent cataracts. What do they do to represent the common experiences of headache, or nausea, or pain?

Even without all that, you need to agree to be a participant in an experiment, and everyone seems to be doing this unwillingly.

 

4x6 To Err Is Human, To Give Up Isn't A Bad Idea

Doogie's chewed out in an M&M conference for nicking a bowel, psyching him out before his first solo surgery.

Annoying Gimmick: The episode is framed with scenes from an imaginary game show, "So You Want To Be a Trauma Surgeon," with Vinnie as the host, Curly as Vanna White, and Doogie as the contestant. It's saved somewhat by Doogie's cheesy overacting during the imagination scenes; he's really starting to look and sound like grown-up NPH.

Annoying B-Plot: The show manages to do a storyline about the Bush/Clinton election without appearing to endorse either candidate by having Doogie refuse to say who he's voting for (because he's a tool) and Vinnie unable to decide (whatever, he's obviously a Dem). Vinnie considers abstaining until the Howsers' Wise Asian Gardener (TM) tells him, "No candidate ever perfect. No voter ever perfect. Only thing perfect is democracy. You no vote, you lose." BARF.

Gayest Moment: After voting Vinnie gives Doogie a fierce hug. "I'm so proud to be an American!" he declares. "Thank you," murmurs Doogie.

 

4x7 Doogie, Can You Hear Me?

A cute Deaf girl inspires Doogie to champion to cause of cochlear implants, annoying her, and Vinnie to make a silent slapstick film, delighting her.

Additional Doogie Superpowers: Doogie knows ASL. (NPH evidently doesn't though. According to this show there is a very simple sort of handwave near the head which is the sign for "auditory nerve." There's little appreciable difference between Doogie's talk-and-sign scenes and a sequence where Vinnie just talks slowly with a lot of gestures.)

Credit Where It's Due: Julia (played by Terrylene, a Deaf actress) is really very cute.

Tokenism Watch: While the basic cause-and-effect of the plot is OK--I'm glad that Doogie's refusal to drop the cochlear implant issue doesn't change Julia's mind, except to turn her off him, and her points ("I like my life, you're the one with the problem") are good. Still, I still detect some condescension even in Vinnie, who's supposed to be the one who TRULY UNDERSTANDS her. The story he tells her about Doogie's lifelong jerkiness, for example, is that as a kid, Doogie would climb a tree that Vinnie couldn't climb and throw pine cones and taunt him, until one day Vinnie got so mad he climbed up just to get Doogie. "What Doogie doesn't understand," he concludes, "is that not everyone needs to climb that tree." Gee, thanks, Vin. You truly understand that although getting a shitty cochlear implant that won't work that well for her is undoubtedly an admirable goal which she is only not pursuing out of fear, not everyone needs to climb that tree.

Gayest Moments:

 

4x8 Nothing Compares 2 U

Every episode is about Doogie's obnoxiousness these days, isn't it? Doogie gets jealous when a girl chooses Vinnie over him, and goes overboard trying to make his own superiority obvious.

Additional Doogie Superpowers: Doogie claims to be "fluent in seven languages." Later, after he mangles "Arigato gozaimasu" to a Japanese waitress and Laura says, "You speak Japanese?", he lists them: besides Japanese, "I also speak Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, some Portuguese, and a smattering of Mandarin." He doesn't mention ASL.

Gayest Moment: There's no way Laura doesn't think Doogie and Vinnie are a couple as they sit knee-jostlingly close on a bench in the dog park, with a single tiny dog at their feet. Here is the ensuing conversation, with obvious slashy translation provided in [square brackets].
LAURA: Dr. Howser! You never mentioned you had a dog. [Boyfriend.]
VINNIE: He's very protective of their relationship. High profile doctor, dog-nappers... You can understand his reluctance. [Our; a homophobic society.]
DOOGIE (placing a hand on Vinnie's shoulder): By the way, this is Vinnie.
VINNIE: Doogie's just nuts about canines, aren't you? [Cocks.]
DOOGIE: Sure. Man's best friend. Right, Monty?
(Dog growls.)
VINNIE: Ha ha. Isn't that adorable? They do little jokes together. I mean, they do everything together. They even sleep in the same bed. [We; we; we.]
LAURA: Really? Missy sleeps with me too. We're inseparable.
VINNIE: Same thing with him and Monty. I mean, you should see the two of them, snoozing nose to nose--
DOOGIE: --Vinnie--
VINNIE: --Monty's drool forming a little wet spot on Doog's pillow, his tail brushing against Doogie's thigh... [Overload! Overload! Abort! Abort!]

 

4x9 Do The Right Thing... If You Can Figure Out What That Is

Doogie catches his favored transplant candidate smoking; Janine wants Vinnie back, but Vinnie's not interested in an exclusive relationship.

Nice Callback: Since breaking up with Janine, Vinnie tells Doogie, "I've seen lots of other women, including several I stole from you." Ha ha, that was the last two episodes, wasn't it?

Weird Sexual Politics: I get that The Right Thing To Do is supposed to be to give someone all the information before they make a decision they can't unmake, but it sort of seems like the subtext (or text?) in this case is that The Right Thing to Do is to protect a fragile woman at all costs from the HUGE MISTAKE of sleeping with someone outside of a long-term future-oriented relationship. If I were making a grand play for someone at the level of Janine's campaign for Vinnie, I'd be happy to get into their pants, even if the tryst didn't last. I guess it's considered slutty to admit that. Basically, Vinnie put Janine in a position where she couldn't have sex with him without appearing slutty.

I don't know why I'm surprised. Vinnie is well known to subtly sabotage any chance he gets to have sex with a woman. Hey-ah.

Gayest Moments:

 

4x10 The Big Sleep... Not!

Doogie's loneliness and Vinnie's broken-home-holiday-stress-induced insomnia are miraculously cured when the boys share a late-night "first annual Howser/Delpino Thanksgiving."

Gayest Moments:

 

4x11 Will the Real Dr. Howser Please Stand Up?

The Drs. Howser clash when Doogie, treating one of his father's pediatric patients in the ER, suspects the child's father of abuse; Vinnie convinces Doogie to go out with a Harley-riding hairdresser from his video dating service.

 

4x12 The Mother of All Fishing Trips

Dr. Howser throws out his back just before the father/son fishing trip and Doogie finds his mother a poor substitute until they share a bonding incident involving Doogie giving mouth-to-mouth to a fetal fawn.

Gayest Moments:

 

4x13 Roommate with a View

It's the plot of several romantic comedies when Doogie has to share his apartment with a model to whom the former owner subletted. She's a spunky, spontaneous Magical Girl! He's Felix Unger! Who will win? (Her, of course. And then she will disappear into the magical ether from which she came.)

Gayest Moment: DOOGIE (thinking he's talking to Phoebe across the room divider bedsheet): I've been thinking about our living arrangement, and you can stay as long as you want. I guess what I'm saying is, I am attracted to you.
VINNIE (drawing back the curtain): I love you too, darling.

 

4x14 Spell It M-A-N

TEXTUAL GAY PLOT! Vinnie's freaked when he finds out his new friend and roommate is gay; Doogie exaggerates his sex life with Michele in doctor locker-room talk.

Huh: Apparently Doogie is still, or again, dating Michele Faber, a now-no-longer-student nurse we haven't seen in over a year. (2x20 Fatal Distraction)

Straightest Moment: The textual gay plot actually makes it more difficult to do a queer reading, since Vinnie is being positioned as nervously homophobic here (though this could obviously be a blind). It's also not a romance--Mark is just gay and single. Doogie stands up ideologically for gay people to Vinnie, with patient, amused responses to his freaking (how weird must that have been for NPH?), but he has an aggressively heterosexual plotline in this episode, and he is fixing something while he is at it.

 

4x15 It's A Tough Job, But Why Does My Father Have to Do It?

Dr. Howser takes over as head of family medicine at Eastman; Vinnie is obnoxious to his father's girlfriend.

 

4x16 The Adventures of Sherlock Howser

Doogie dates a nurse; interminable Sherlock Holmes impressions.

Annoying Gimmick: Half the episode is the titular Sherlock Howser plot, shot in black and white with Vinnie doing a serviceable Nigel Bruce and Doogie, I guess, doing Basil Rathbone. It is pretty weird that Doogie also plays the victim's boyfriend (who of course turns out to be the culprit). But I think the weirdest thing about this is that the plotline isn't a mystery. I mean, there's just no reason to be jamming Sherlock Holmes into this at all. In the Sherlock storyline, Sherlock Howser is trying to figure out who is sending poison pen letters to Michele (aka independently wealthy London lady Miss Faber), but there's no equivalent mystery in the real-life storyline. It's just scenes of Michele telling Doogie she doesn't want to get exclusive and Doogie not being okay with it. I guess they wanted to do their Sherlock plot, and this was the only episode without a logical B-story.

Weird Sexual Politics: Somewhat indirectly, the writers seem to be implying that Michele's preference for dating other people is a feminist issue. Michele, and the relationship Doogie has with her, are repeatedly described in both the 1890s and 1990s plots as "modern," with a slightly derisive, slightly befuddled tone.

 

4x17 Love Means Constantly Having to Say You're Sorry

Vinnie finally loses his virginity, and instantly becomes a creepy stalker.

Huh: Apparently Vinnie is still dating Laura from 4x8. (Do you get the feeling they write all these episodes, then throw them down the stairs and air them in the order that they land?)

 

4x18 You've Come A Long Way, Baby-sitter

Doogie impresses the babysitter he had a crush on as a child.

Most Cringeworthy Moment: While all of the child-Doogie/Rachel flashbacks are admittedly creepy--that little boy playing child-Doogie has a certain knowing, blissed-out smile which is horrible--the moment when Doogie and Rachel first start kissing, and Doogie moans, "Ohh, God... this is how good a woman's hair smells, these are the hairs I learned it from... your skin, and your mouth, and your eyes... everything I believe to be beautiful about women I first saw in you" is so painful it cannot be watched without some sort of white noise to drown out the soundtrack. Screaming works well.

 

4x19 Love Makes the World Go Round... Or Is It Money?

It's moral ambiguity week when a bank error credits Vinnie with $16,000, and Doogie has a dilemma for which the morally correct resolution, according to the show, is to take a twelve-year-old girl on a creepily intense rooftop date.

Seriously: WHAT IS WITH ALL THE ADULT/CHILD ROMANCE LATELY? I guess that has been a theme of the show since day 1 when Curly took off Doogie's pants for no reason.

 

4x20 Dorky Housecall, M.D.

Annoying overenunciating cartoonist lampoons Doogie; Doogie busts in on Michele's date to do some romantic-comedy-speechifying.

Nitpick: In general, I hate storylines about writers who only write thinly veiled accounts of what's happening to them in the show, but I particularly hate the patient's stupid comics, which don't follow a logical three-panel format at all. The (admittedly fictional) cartoonist manages to waste all of his set-up panels on irrelevant self-serving ranting about his hospital experience, then the last panel will be this lame, out-of-nowhere "punchlines." It'll be like,

PATIENT: Gee, doctor, why are you running all these tests? A biopsy for a broken arm? Isn't that a little much?
DORKY HOUSECALL: Don't worry, dude! Cowabunga!
PATIENT: Medicine these days!
DORKY HOUSECALL: Breasts!

Anyway, that aside, it's so weird that he just draws comics about Doogie in the hospital and then the next day they're in the paper. The "Dorky Housecall" plotline would probably actually just be beginning the day the paper ran the cartoonist's obit.

Weird Sexual Politics, Cont'd: Michele's decision to date exclusively non-exclusively is once again framed as a feminist issue, in an even more intense yet indirect way. After Doogie rants to Curly about how women shouldn't claim they want commitment if they don't, Curly responds with an eloquent but, upon reflection, largely non-logically-following speech about how women's work is important.

Gayest Doogie Quote: "Off she goes, gallivanting with the first good-looking resident she sees! Not that I blame her! If I were a pretty woman, I'd be a sexual butterfly too!"

Seriously, It's Getting Old: Next time I watch this show, I need to keep a count of how often someone says, "You may be a genius, but you have a lot to learn."

 

4x21 Eleven Angry People... And Vinnie

Vinnie Henry Fondas it up on jury duty, and points out the existence of moral gray areas when Doogie discovers a sainlty old doctor is a fraud.

 

4x22 What Makes Doogie Run

An acting class teaches Doogie the value of being spontaneous and childlike, so he quits Eastman to take an open-ended trip to Rome.

Nitpick: The show clearly wants to set up a clear division between Doogie's gimmicky, hunchbacked reading of the opening speech from Richard III and Vinnie's plain and simple, truly-understands-the-text reading, but Vinnie's choice to put on a grandiose RSC-ish accent for this is really distracting.

Credit Where It's Due: It's interesting that they introduced Doogie's leukemia backstory in the pilot, but didn't explicitly make the connection until this finale, that there's actually a causal relationship between his survivorhood and his prodigious achievements: he's been fast-tracking his life because he never quite got over feeling like it wasn't going to last very long. I didn't make that connection, and I think it's pretty cool.

Gayest Moment: As the finale winds up with Doogie's sudden whirlwind vacation plans, there's a series of farewells, from his parents wishing him well and saying he deserve this, to Doogie squeezing Vinnie's shoulder all "I'm going to miss you," to feeling weird not helping a trauma patient but instead carrying a box of his stuff out of the hospital, to a candle-surrounded make-out session with Michele, and all the while you're like, "But Vinnie will come with him, right? There's still time for Vinnie to come with him. Or at least we'll get another last-minute romantic send-off, because come on, Vinnie is like, the central relationship of the show. That shoulder-squeeze wasn't it, was it?" And with every further farewell your hope wavers, and next thing you know it's the laptop screen, and Doogie's journal. Then we cut away to Doogie on the plane, with Vinnie next to him. Ha ha! Vindicated! I love a show which ends with the two slashy leads riding off into the sunset together. We also get what I think is a first and only, in which there's actually a cut back to Doogie from the final journal, making a disgusted/amused face at the sounds of Vinnie retching beside him. And that's a wrap.

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