re: tag about wilson on last reblog [rare statement from me] i think the waiting for godot references wilson makes are actually kinda fun to look into.
there are two instances of wilson making a joke about something using waiting for godot, which is a play that i'll talk more about in a minute if you were unaware. the first is when they're waiting for a call from the CDC [in poison] and he says "godot might be faster". the second is in finding judas when talking to chase and he says "beckett was going to call his play 'waiting for house's approval' but he thought it was too grim". these are, obviously, just jokes, and i do think the actual explanation for why he references it twice is "the writers forgot they already made that joke", lol. that being said, i will be choosing to read into it anyway.
wating for godot is a play a lot of people didn't, and still don't, enjoy. i've analyzed it for multiple of my college classes and i really like it, but it can easily be seen as "boring" to a lot of people. it's about two men, vladimir and estragon, waiting for someone called "godot". the entire first act of the play is spent waiting for him to come, with some comedic antics and philosophy along the way, and by the end of the first act he doesn't. they constantly talk about getting up and leaving, but they never actually do it. the second act is... the exact same thing; not all the beats are exactly the same, but again, they wait for godot the entire day and he doesn't come. that's the play.
there's a lot of interesting discussion about waiting for godot that i can't get into right now [okay, sorry, side tangent i can't resist going on: in the united states the play actually gained a lot of popularity from being performed for prison populations. they felt that it resonated with their daily lives; waiting for the seemingly and sometimes literally unreachable goal of "freedom", talking and playing and being with their friends to try and make their time meaningful anyway. which i think is REALLY interesting in general but also thinking about house. idk food for thought]. but i do want to talk about it in terms of house and wilson because i think it's sort of apt.
in that second instance of wilson's references, the joke at hand is obviously that house's approval is never going to come, that waiting for it is futile. the entire time you're watching waiting for godot, you're begging for the two men to give up, that he's not going to come, that they should stop waiting and get on with their lives. in this way, we can sort of see house AS godot. people wait for his approval, wait for him to change, wait for him to show up, and he doesn't. but they wait for him anyway. this applies to... well, nearly every significant character on the show, but wilson is definitely one of the people who's been waiting the longest, along with cuddy. please don't take any of this as me minimizing her role in his life, wilson is just the one who makes the godot jokes. and, well, she does leave eventually. pretty much everyone leaves, in some sense of the word, eventually. wilson keeps waiting.
this is one aspect to it, but in a lot of ways, house is also one of the men waiting [we'll say vladimir, for the sake of ease. i think he fits a bit better but it's not at all a one-to-one thing]. he seems to sort of wait for himself, or wait for someone to come along and do what he needs to do for himself. he sees cuddy as a savior; he waits for their relationship to "fix" him and well... it never does, because it can't. he is waiting for something impossible, not quite realizing what he's actually waiting for is himself.
it's an interesting angle to see house as both godot and vladimir, and wilson as estragon. they're both just... waiting for house to change, to be something that he's not. you start to question whether either of them truly wants 'godot' to show up, or if the state of stagnation has become comfortable and easy for them, if passing the time with their banter and antics has become more important than what they're waiting for.
then there's the "talking about leaving but never doing it" aspect. after amber dies wilson tries to leave ppth, but he doesn't. after house gets out of prison in season eight he tries to insist they aren't friends anymore, but he comes back. he stays waiting. house, too: when he starts methadone he initially commits to a pain free, kinder life outside of ppth but eventually goes back to vicodin and his old ways. a similar thing happens in season six. despite it all, he stays waiting.
they both wait, for an agonizingly long time, longer than anybody else, for house to change somehow, maybe without even quite realizing what they're waiting for. where house md and waiting for godot diverge is when house is, finally, able to realize that while he is vladimir he is also godot. he has to show up for himself, and for estragon. he has to free them from waiting. though, it is still a shame he doesn't manage to realize it until the last possible second, after everyone else he's tortured with stagnation has already passed him by.
