if you’d be willing to write a bit about the characterization, personality, and general natures of the following characters?
Cameron, Foreman, Chase,
Cuddy, Wilson, House,
Thirteen, Kutner, and Taub
LET'S FUCKING GO. I was asked to write up about the characters/personalities/natures of the major 9 house characters — the original and remastered teams, plus the grownup trio (really need better nicknames for these gangs). With the caveats that this is all my opinion, and I definitely click with one trio more than the other two, I am going to do my very best! And start with the easiest group, the OG team of Foreman, Cameron, and Chase (also for reasons I will get into later).
I think they are the best written team — they have the benefit of screen-time, yes, but they were also created to be obvious foils and aspects of House’s personality, so there’s a lot of interesting stuff there; the second team is also remixes of the first, so they’re just an interesting topic to start with.
I find it useful to start with someone’s main flaws, because I find that, in general, in real life and fiction, a lot of your personality is shaped around your weaknesses, either in compensation or in embracing that weakness. Think of it as the dirt in an oyster that turns into a pearl: you can’t separate weakness from personality. For a perfect example, let’s start with…
FOREMAN
Foreman is a deeply insecure person. This is both not obvious and deeply intrinsic to his nature. At his core, he sees himself as a poor, delinquent, Black criminal, and he is convinced everyone else sees him that way, too.
FOREMAN: But then I got another chance. Left home, went to college, entered a whole other world. And yet some part of me I can’t get rid of thinks, “If I’m not the smartest, if I’m not the first, everywhere I go, they’ll figure out I’m not supposed to be here.” They’ll send me back.
PATIENT: You know that’s not going to happen. You’re out.
FOREMAN: I’ll never be out of there. (house training.)
This imposter syndrome and insecurity is constantly manifesting itself in everything Foreman does: from how he has to be the best, to his arrogance, to his dismissal and dislike of people that remind him of himself or his past, like Lupe in House Training, the homeless woman in Histories, or even Cynthia Nixon’s character in Deception, who he immediately dismisses as a lying alcoholic simply because she happened to get sick in a betting parlor. But we see it in other ways, too. One of the more tragic examples is in S2’s Euphoria, where he stabs Cameron with a used needle: now you have to go back into the patient’s apartment, he tells her, because he truly doesn’t believe she’d want to save him if her own life wasn’t at stake.
Foreman tends to be pretty bad at reading people, actually. We see this in his fundamental misunderstanding of Cameron (both in Euphoria and in Sleeping Dogs Lie), but also, rather hilariously, whenever he talks to Chase: Foreman tends to assume Chase has it out for him, is plotting revenge (he believes Chase’s opportunistic S4 betting pool is a scheme because Chase is jealous Foreman is back on the team, with zero evidence). He generally assumes the worst of people, that he has to be ruthless and cutthroat in order to get ahead, because they will screw him over if they can. It’s cynical… but it’s also heartbreaking. We see, also, he is thin-skinned and easily rattled: House’s comments get to him, quite frequently, where Cameron and Chase tend to shrug off similar insults. Foreman worries how he is perceived. He, several times, asks Chase “how would you describe me?” or “what kind of person do you think I am?”. He wants to be a leader and authority, but repeatedly (DNR, Failure to Communicate) freezes up when he’s put in charge, becoming suddenly unsure of himself and hesitant. He is confident to the point of arrogance… but is always questioning himself. We even see it in how he dresses: he is always perfectly fashionable, perfectly dressed. He does not relax, he does not let loose. Foreman is hyper aware of how he is perceived, hyper aware of how he thinks he is perceived, and always acts in accordance to that audience.
He’s also, however, capable of great self reflection. Foreman trying to change himself is something of a running theme of the show, coming up in S2, 3, and 4, and the thing is: he’s often pretty successful. While he tends to define himself against House for a while, to mixed success, he also… genuinely is capable of change. In S4’s Mirror Mirror, he realizes he’s stuck in Princeton and that despite wanting to hate it, he doesn’t. And instead of fighting this, he decides to embrace it. He doesn’t hate who he is. Maybe it’s okay to be who he is. He’s a deeply reflective person, and while he can absolutely take this too far, he’s consistently able to look at himself and course correct. He knows his flaws and shortcomings. He tries to overcome them. He is able to apologize for being a jerk; he knows he can be manipulative; he doesn’t lie to himself. He’s actually a pretty honest and straightforward person: while Foreman is capable of scheming, he doesn’t, usually. This can be to his detriment: he’s a bit testy and short-tempered and terrible at hiding it, but it’s honestly a plus, too. He approaches people and situations honestly. He doesn’t bullshit or fake a smile. (It is no coincidence that he really can’t stand Chase.) He’s capable of admitting when he was wrong, despite his pride; he’s capable of looking at himself critically (sometimes too critically). He has his faults, but he’s aware of them.
It’s so hard to talk about Foreman without House, because Foreman is a direct parallel to House and both they and the show know it: Foreman is the most intelligent of the fellows, he is set up time and again as a leader and put in charge of the team. He shares House’s inferiority complex and feeling of being an outsider (and it’s interesting that the show pretty clearly equates race with disability in this way); he also shares House’s drive and arrogance and callous nature. But it’s where they’re different that’s telling: Foreman wants to change, and he does change. He pushes himself. He is ambitious. He can admit when he’s wrong, and ask for help when he needs it.
In early seasons, Foreman can be downright reckless, doing what he thinks is correct and breaking the rules as he goes. Interestingly, while characters like Chase become more reckless as the series progresses, Foreman becomes markedly more of a rules-follower: after his early brushes with arrogance and ego-based decision making lead to some noted failures, he becomes much more cautious.
He is a reserved person who does not make friends easily: part of this is that Foreman seems to expect the worst of others and is bad at understanding them (see: his deep distaste for Chase), but a lot of this also seems to be his inferiority complex again: he has to be the best, so anyone who challenges this is sort of a threat. But it’s interesting, and telling, that when he discovers Taub is a former hotshot doctor with high expectations who feels like a failure, Foreman immediately warms to him and they become close friends: Foreman can’t really handle a rival, but with people he doesn’t view as threats (like Cameron, who he is openly dismissive of as a doctor), he is warmer. With Thirteen, who he approaches as someone to help and fix first, he is kinder. He has a noted habit of losing interest in relationships around the six month mark, because he is uninterested in opening up or true intimacy. This does make him come off as cold, but here’s the twist: Foreman is a romantic.
We see him repeatedly in S3 and beyond bond with idealistic young men who have a difficult hand in life and are doing their best: he is prickly around the patient in Fools for Love for a good while, but is also his biggest supporter and the biggest defender of the patient’s (unfortunately incestuous) marriage; he ends the episode skipping a date to sit with the patient and offer him comfort. In Whac-a-Mole, Foreman openly and loudly admires the patient caring for his younger siblings, and hopes loudly that the family will work things out: he has a real idealistic streak. He wants good people to succeed and odds to be overcome. He hates the lazy and cheaters of the world (c h a s e, who was designed in a lab to trigger him). He wants justice and love to prevail, and is a much kinder, and warmer person than he is often given credit for.
EDIT: Asked about Foreman's post-Euphoria arc:
One of the themes of the show is people changing/being unable to change/wanting to change. We see Foreman, Wilson (via Amber), and Chase all suffer near-death experiences over the series and try to redefine themselves in reaction to it, but way they go about it is fascinating and very different. Foreman tries to reinvent himself as the person he'd like to be (warm, friendly, optimistic) and ignore who he is; he wants/needs his experience in Euphoria to Mean Something. and it… kind of doesn't: he's trying too hard, he's not really reflecting, he's doing a fantasy 180. It lasts less than a week before he can no longer sustain it. But it also leads directly into his S3 arc, where he keeps latching onto a series of Bright Young Men he blatantly sees himself in, and keeps… failing to help them/change them. Again. The Romani kid picks his family over education. The single dad teenager gives the kids to foster care. The accidental incest guy loses his happy marriage and life.
And this in turn leads directly into Foreman's resignation arc, right? He wants to be different, he wants the world to be different, but everyone/House keep telling him, he's not. He's arrogant, he's ruthless, he's cold, he's heartless. (His girlfriend, Wendy, dumps him in the middle of this arc for this exact coldness: his ideals are nowhere near his reality.) We see him do a bit of his post-Euphoria character editing in early S4, in his brief stint at Mercy hospital: on his first case, he is careful to smile, to compliment his staff; you can practically see him thinking I am so much nicer than House. But he's still using House as a marker, so it doesn't stick.
House, of course, insists that all this is simply because people can't change, but interestingly, Foreman does start to after this. It's just that he has to accept who he is first. He can't just do an overnight 180, but he does shift in some pretty significant ways. He becomes less reckless. He becomes more content with himself and who he is. he loses a lot (although not all) of his general thin skin.
CAMERON
The thing about Cameron, the foundational cornerstone to her personality, is that she is profoundly damaged. The show is explicit about this, and it’s in fact one of the first things we learn about her, focused on in the Pilot: she is damaged. She is not okay.
Cameron’s dead husband is often reduced to a sort of meme (or excuse to bash her, depending where you look): she married a man who was dying because she’s attracted to people she can fix! She never loved him, she just wanted to fix him! She never really cared, it was just X. Whether or not she really, truly, romantically loved him or not (the show is surprisingly ambivalent about this), what you can’t underestimate is what the show itself tells us: it fucked her up, and: she was already damaged.
Cameron is defined by her fear of loss. She’s afraid of death, she emotionally shuts down and breaks down in the face of it, we see this time and again, but she’s also afraid of it in a more general sense: she is afraid of heartbreak, of failure, of a lack of control. Of losing, in some vague sense. She is someone who always has to be in control. We see this in various ways and manifestations: from the way she struggles to take emotional risks with Chase, repeatedly, to the way she quits her job in S1 when House rejects her, to the way she really struggles to deal with criticism or being wrong, getting aggressive and very angry at the very suggestion. Hunting is a fantastic episode and character study of her, and telling: when asked, repeatedly, if she is happy, the best she can come up with is “I find my life satisfying.” When challenged to be selfish, to do something she wants, she still needs to take meth in order to have the excuse to act. Honestly, a lot of her S2-3 relationship with Chase is pretty telling: see also how she approaches their FWB relationship with a ten page document of rules, then panics and breaks up with him when he asks for more. Although admittedly the show doesn’t portray this well, we are meant to understand that she has feelings for him at this point — she certainly acts like they’re dating this entire period — and that Chase is correct to call her out. But she’s afraid, so she runs, and running is another consistent trait of Cameron’s; I think another way of asserting control: if she leaves a situation, then she is in charge of it. If something is too difficult to face, she can choose to leave it. We know she moved cross country after both of her marriages ended.
Cameron is, of course, intensely compassionate. This is, I think, where she has the most in common with House and is his foil: he is compassionate too, of course, but more than that, they both share a drive to understand people, to pick at them and pick them apart. Cameron pushes at people, is always demanding answers or challenging their beliefs: we see she and House have these sort of discussions quite a lot, but she does it to others as well. Interestingly, Cameron is often prone to over-reading people: she has incredibly empathy and compassion, but kind of has the habit of… putting a bit too much of herself into someone’s head, either by believing somewhat paternalistically that she knows best (drugging the patient in Que Sera Sera and refusing to believe him when he says his weight is not an issue; trying to pick apart the patient in The Itch and fix his agoraphobia), or by inserting a bit too much of her own thoughts into the situation (telling the husband in Fidelity that he should be happy is wife is alive, even if she did have an affair, because Cameron misses her dead husband and isn’t really thinking about how insane that sounds). In a way, I think it’s another form of control: if she understands people, she won’t be hurt by them, although that’s not to suggest her empathy and compassion aren’t sincere.
This drive to understand and difficulty in neutrality also makes Cameron a bit wishy-washy at times, a flaw she is called out on in the show repeatedly; she suffers a certain amount of choice paralysis, being unable to take action when there is no clear right answer, or when the answer is ‘difficult.’ Faced with Chase wanting to propose in Saviors, she ghosts him until he breaks up with her, not because she wanted that but because she wanted to avoid the situation: faced with Dibala, she is torn between wanting him dead and not wanting to kill him personally, something Dibala himself eventually calls her out on!
One of the most telling exchanges about her, to me, is a conversation she has with Wilson in Spin. She reveals that, as her husband was dying, she fell in love with his best friend.
CAMERON: I fell in love with my husband's best friend. Near the end I was at the hospital every day, and Joe would come by after work. We'd go for walks and try to talk each other through it. We kind of clung on to each other.
WILSON: (…) What happened to you, how can anyone go through that alone? You can't control your emotions.
CAMERON: No. Just your actions.
WILSON: You didn't do it, did you? You didn't sleep with him.
CAMERON: I couldn't have lived with myself. (spin)
You can’t control your thoughts and feelings, but you can control your actions. This is something we see a lot from Cameron, actually, for all her bleeding heart reputation: she often tries to be pragmatic, and even her appeals to ethics are often framed to House in a “and if we don’t do this, then the practical effects are thus” sort of way. We see it, again, with Chase, and how she tries to hide all her feelings for him behind the rules of a FWB arrangement; there is a cut line in the Occam’s Razor script where she tells Chase she finds him attractive, but can control and resist it because she isn’t an ‘animal.’ In a similar vein, she’s actually surprisingly okay with schemes and manipulation if it’s for the greater good — she has a lot of fun messing with House in S4 (Cameron can be very silly!), but she also shows repeatedly she’ll lie to patients if she thinks it will help: it’s pragmatic, you know?
Cameron can come off as kind of contradictory. This is… sort of on purpose. She isn’t really as good at being rational and pragmatic as she thinks she is (see: FWB arrangement); she is quick to change her mind because she can see all sides of an issue. But at her core, she’s deeply consistent: she tries to remain in control of situations, and protect herself. She loves incredibly deeply and easily (indeed, she has fallen in love more times on the show than any other character, with a grand total of five canon love interests and one crush), but is afraid of vulnerability and loss; she tries to control her actions and avoid hurt — and ends up being incredibly risk adverse — but her heart and emotions win out every time. She’s also prone to making bad jokes, failing badly at playing 5D chess, and can be surprisingly punchy and short tempered: she feuds with every major cast member but Chase in S1-3. She is wonderful and I adore her.
(A final note about her dead husband, truly an essay in itself. A lot of times, Cameron is reduced to someone who only wants to fix people, or she didn’t love DH/House, only fix them, or worse, she doesn’t love, she only pretends to. While her feelings about her DH are ambiguous, it’s also doing her a huge disservice to reduce her to that trait: first of all, she never was trying to fix him, since she knew all along he was dying; if anything, she was trying to… console him? Reward him? In Acceptance, she says that when someone dies, there should be an effect, but we see in that episode and in One Day, One Room she doesn’t enjoy or want to do this; it makes her miserable to watch people die and mourn them, it is a punishment, not a case of loving nursing. Nor does she try to fix people generally: she did get accused of such by House, but she fell for him because he was just as damaged as she was, not to change him; even though that does seem to have been an element of their relationship, the mere existence of Chase — and the cited existence of Joe — also proves it’s not really what she’s after. I hate making ships a part of this little essay, but let’s be real, Cameron is often reduced to a romantic interest both in and out of the show, with fans often erasing this part of her entirely.)
CHASE
If I were to pick one exchange to sum up Chase, I’d naturally run to Cursed. After most of an episode avoiding talking about his father to everyone, House finally corners Chase, and we get this exchange:
HOUSE: I know you hate your dad, but I’m gonna tell you something —
CHASE: I don’t hate him. I loved him until I figured out that it hurts a lot less to just not care. You don’t expect him to turn up to your football match? No disappointments. You don’t expect a call on your birthday, don’t expect to see him for months? No disappointments. You want us to go make up? Sink a few beers together, nice family hug? I’ve given him enough hugs. He’s given me enough disappointments. (cursed)
Chase is someone who does not want to care. He grew up with all sorts of abusive and neglect from his parents, without anyone in his life who seemed to care about him. Instead, he was forced to be the caregiver from a young age, both to his alcoholic, dying mother and his baby sister. He spent his teenage and young adult years seeking belonging and, implicitly, caregivers (trying repeatedly with his father, turning to the Catholic Church) and failing.
Chase is a surprisingly independent-minded person. He doesn’t rely on people, he doesn’t open up to people. He has an incredibly telling conversation with Adams in S8, where he calmly explains that if you burden others you should kill yourself; he is talking about how he wishes his mother had done just that. It is an insane take, but it is part of this same stance. People let you down. You can’t really trust them. It’s better not to need anyone, better not to expect anything from anyone. When he is stabbed in S8, he brushes off every attempt at sympathy: when he is divorced in S6, he does exactly the same thing. Chase doesn’t care. No disappointments.
As a result, despite his generally genial, easy-going nature, Chase can be surprisingly standoffish. He doesn’t open up to people; he doesn’t really try to get to know them. He barely talks to the new team until S6; he rebuffs Masters for most of S7, and it takes Park most of S8 and a lot of effort before she wears him down. While Chase is superficially friendly and charming, he keeps things superficial. Foreman complains he’s fake; we see in many episodes Chase is very good at schmoozing and small talk (and kissing ass). (Actually, one of my favorite little exchanges in in S5’s The Social Contract: House needs a surgery done, and correctly surmises that Chase has kissed his new boss’s ass sufficiently that Chase can get it done, confirming that Chase’s asskissing is political and intentional and manipulative, not just pathetic.) But it’s all superficial. He doesn’t care. No disappointments.
The problem: Chase is very bad at this. Despite his stated efforts, we see time and time again that he cares intensely. In Cursed, he goes to his father one last time. He brushes off patients, but bonds with every child he meets. He falls intensely hard for Cameron, and we see in After Hours that at the first hint something is wrong with Thirteen, he falls all over himself to help her. Even if Chase’s goal is to not rely on people and not be let down by them, he’s… bad at it. To cite the cliche, he wants to be loved, he wants to open up to others. But he has been burned a lot.
Chase, unlike Foreman and even Cameron, is pretty blatantly unambitious. Even though the House Fellowship is very prestigious and can launch his career in any way he chooses, he never seems interested in doing so: he doesn’t care about leading a team, or running cases. But he is self serving, which I think ties back to his general self-protection: he can be somewhat cutthroat, he rats to Vogler without a second thought or even regret, he tries to guilt Foreman into covering up Dibala’s murder, and as soon as Cameron leaves him, he reframes the situation as entirely her fault: their divorce is not because he killed a man, but because she never loved him. He’s puts himself first, because no one else will.
Chase is also extremely observant. We see this in part, I think, with his statistically higher-than-anyone-but-House case solve rate; he also makes a habit of calling people out and calling their bluffs. He’s unusually good at seeing through House, but we see him call Foreman out more than once, and he sees right through Cameron’s bullshit as well. He’s a schmoozer and a schemer, and his people skills are used to this end; he is also maybe surprisingly sneaky (House himself calls him a “sneaky bastard” and goes to him for schemes on a few occasions), and able to weaponize his charm to manipulate: he has no problem being underhand, and, while he does have morals and ethical beliefs, he’s very pragmatic: it’s that self-serving nature again. He’s called spineless, although he doesn’t actually seem to have much problem standing up for himself or anything he strongly believes in — Chase’s problem is more than he doesn’t strongly believe in all that much besides protecting himself.
Even a lot of his ass-kissing is often more about him not caring about external drama: there’s several scenes where Foreman and Cameron are objecting to something House does on ethical reasons, and Chase just carries on with the differential, earning House’s mockery. But… is he really trying to suck up to House, or does he just not care that much about the other drama? Chase avoids conflict when he can, doesn’t like to get too involved in what other people are arguing about. He’s also intensely private: one of the fastest ways, consistently, to make Chase angry is to poke into his personal life and business. That apathy again.
This might make Chase seem overly cynical. He isn’t. In fact, this makes his more caring nature all the more striking: despite his outer shell of smarm and apathy, he is really bad at keeping closed off. He likes to joke around, he’s openly desperate for approval, he’s quite confident, has a bit of a teasing/trolling sense of humor, and is an absolute idiot around pretty girls. For all that his apathetic shell is a survival strategy and reflective of his childhood, he’s also the guy who was eagerly planning out his and Cameron’s future three kids and wedding, or the guy who flirts at a wedding by talking John Hughes movies. He’s a dork, and he’s not nearly as cold and aloof as he (badly) tries to be.
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