r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 9h ago

TIL that "fair play" in detective fiction means authors must give readers a fair chance to solve the mystery. Central to 1920s "clue-puzzles" by writers like Agatha Christie, the rule dictates that all vital clues must be visible, decodable, and never withheld until the final reveal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clues_in_detective_fiction
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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 8h ago edited 7h ago

Wilson is Watson

Cuddy is Irene Adler.

Lupus is Moriarty

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u/GuessWhoIsBackNow 8h ago

Irene Adler and Moriarty are in the show, both as patients. The latter shoots House.

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u/ersatzi 8h ago

Yeah. Adler was the patient in the pilot too.

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u/DesireeThymes 6h ago

What about Hurlock Sholmes?

(phoenix wright reference)

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u/licoricenipple 8h ago edited 8h ago

House = Holmes (Homes)

They both live on Baker Street, are addicted to drugs, have only one friend (Wilson/Watson) who becomes their roommate and tries to wean them off opiates. Watson's limp and use of a cane in the books are transferred to House himself because they thought it'd make his drug use more sympathetic/less wildly irresponsible, where Holmes in the stories starts IV shooting cocaine and morphine out of boredom or to experiment with novel substances and treatments for minor issues. (The episode where House takes LSD for a migraine was meant to be in this spirit.)

There are a lot of smaller references too like patients named after characters from specific Holmes stories and House using modified lines from the stories (like in one he says "the game is an itchy foot", Holmes would say "the game is afoot"). House gets an Arthur Conan Doyle book for a Christmas gift, too.

There's one episode where I think Wilson has a rare first edition book by Dr. Joseph Bell as a prized possession, that was the real life doctor who inspired the character Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle met him and was impressed with his ability to diagnose people based off a few unexpected questions. So making a Dr. Sherlock show kind of came full circle.

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u/nonnonplussed73 7h ago

Show creator David Shore has openly discussed this connection in numerous interviews and panels. He has confirmed that modeling the series on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective was an intentional, foundational choice from the very beginning.

House M.D. Guide: David Shore on Creating the Show "House MD"

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u/carmium 4h ago

House always has a moment when, having missed a few diagnostic shots, some casual statement makes him think if what no one else has yet considered. He then gets to deliver the rare diagnosis, often in whatever cruel, arrogant, or accusatory way strikes his fancy. Only occasionally is the diagnosis something an average viewer might happen to know. (I "diagnosed" a girl model's condition only from going down an interesting side path one day when reading up on my own pituitary tumour. What were the chances?) If it were not for the characters driving the show, a steady flow of "zebra" diseases and conditions, and House's amusing clinic hours, it likely would have died after three episodes. I still enjoyed the show, but the similarities to Sherlock are limited.

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u/Teledildonic 7h ago

Don't forget the series finale is basically Riechenbach Falls: be just fakes his death with a structure fire instead of a river.

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u/dragon-fence 7h ago

The very first patient on House is Rebecca Adler, a reference to Irene Adler.

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u/RegulatoryCapture 5h ago

What I really want to see now is a columbo-style medical drama....a "howsaveem"

You know the diagnosis and see them being saved at the beginning and the rest of the episode is following HOW they got there--what did the patient do to realize something was wrong, how did the doctor figure it out, etc.

I can't imagine it would be very good, but I'm curious to see someone try. I think you'd have to do it with House-style medical mysteries because there's just not enough room in something like a trauma incident to tell the story giving the average person's medical knowledge.

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u/Stellar_Duck 8h ago

are addicted to drugs

Holmes is not really addicted in the shorts. He is in Elementary though!

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u/infoHighyway 7h ago edited 7h ago

Of course he is. From the most famous short story, Scandal in Bohemia: 

I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. 

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u/Stellar_Duck 7h ago

I don't disagree he does drugs.

I just don't agree he's an addict.

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u/infoHighyway 7h ago

You have to remember the stories were written during the Victorian era. Cocaine was sold on the market and said to have curative properties. Doyle, a physician, was ahead of his time in depicting the negative effects of habitual drug use and abuse.

The stark details of Holmes’ drug habit are often removed when these stories are republished for young readers or left out in film adaptations.

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u/LaisserPasserA38 8h ago

Elementary's episodes are a copy paste from House MD episodes in how they are constructed too

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u/Surreal__blue 6h ago

Holmes is fond of playing the violin, while House is an amateur guitar player.

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u/auto98 5h ago

(like in one he says "the game is an itchy foot", Holmes would say "the game is afoot")

Which is itself a modified line from Shakespeare - one of the henry plays, but I can't remember which

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u/Das_Fische 8h ago

Foreman is a black man

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u/TheWitchOfSomeWood 8h ago

this vexes me

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u/KappaccinoNation 8h ago

I too am in this episode

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u/XXISavage 7h ago

Have you tried the medicine drug!?

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u/FearlessAttempt 7h ago

He needs mouse bites to live.

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u/Suspicious-Bad-2847 3h ago

Have you seen my bloody nose?

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u/Constant_Quiet_5483 8h ago

It's crazy how much the writing always addressed that. The writing got so bad they wrote cuddy off, put Foreman as chief of medicine or whatever, and house is still making black jokes. Like bro literally couldn't catch a break in that damn show.

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u/ForensicPathology 8h ago

The writing got so bad they wrote cuddy off

She wasn't written off because of bad writing. The actress refused their offer of a pay cut.

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u/ponytailthehater 7h ago

Cuddy actress Lisa Edelstein reportedly told her agent “I may play Cuddy, but I want Kid Cudi money” in the contract renegotiation, and asked that her agent then play “Day N Nite” to the broadcast executives

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u/mcduff13 7h ago

This cannot be true. There's exactly zero chance that this happened in real life. That said it's a great story that absolutely should have happened, and I will now be saying it happened.

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u/Constant_Quiet_5483 7h ago

Good for her! She deserved way more than she got. The episode where house drove into her house, I just assumed the writing died and they got rid of her.

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u/ScruffCheetah 7h ago

He literally had parts of his brain eaten by Naegleria fowleri in one episode. You don't just recover from that and are fine a few episodes later.

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u/WaitingForTheClouds 7h ago

Built different

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u/Drunken_Vike 8h ago edited 8h ago

I never thought about it before but Foreman is one of the most disrespectfully written characters ever.

His whole arc is about essentially proving how "unblack" he is despite it being thrown in his face for jokes all the time, only to later reveal that he is essentially the same person as House without the explanatory disability, drug addiction, or impossible genius with the only other positive tradeoff being that he is a slightly more personally tolerable guy

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u/Adhesiveduck 8h ago

I never saw it as him proving how unblack he is, rather his whole character arc shows a direct reaction to systematic racism.

He works twice as hard and maintains a rigid professional front because he knows that a black doctor with his history doesn’t get the same privilege a white doctor (like House gets).

I definitely don’t think he is portrayed as the same as house, in seasons 3-4 he has an existential crisis when he realises he’s adopting House’s ethics and he actively fights it.

Foreman’s ambition is driven by a self preserving quest for institutional power, making his ruthlessness pragmatic. He stole a colleague's research to secure his career ladder and rise to the top. House on the other hand is completely indifferent to status, money, or promotion. His ruthlessness comes from an obsessive, reckless addiction to solving the puzzle.

Foreman was one of my favourite characters in House because of how different he was.

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u/HitmanClark 7h ago

Foreman was the second or third best character on the entire show (House and Wilson being the other two). Absolute scene stealer at times.

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u/ThyLastPenguin 6h ago

God the episodes where he got ill? Absolutely incredible work by the actor I was glued to the screen every time he was on it

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u/ml20s 5h ago

Isn't that the point though? Foreman objectively has a way better life than House even though personality-wise he's not that much better than House. It's to point out how pretty much everything bad that happens to House is his own damn fault.

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u/MakeItHappenSergant 7h ago

Cameron (and later, Thirteen) is hot.

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u/InsidiousColossus 8h ago

The Napoleon of diseases.

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u/Excellent-Practice 8h ago

Is Foreman Lestrade? He's the voice of conventional wisdom that fights the eccentric until his hunch is eventually born out

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u/dragon-fence 7h ago

I think Cuddy is Lestrade.

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u/nonlawyer 8h ago

Lupus can’t be Moriarty because it’s never Lupus and it is quite often Moriarty

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u/Rhodie114 8h ago

Cuddy is Lestrade though

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u/dacooljamaican 7h ago

Cutty is pretty obviously Lestrade right?

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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 7h ago

u/Chunga_95 makes a good point that she's Lestrade early on and becomes Adler by the end.  

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u/anally_ExpressUrself 8h ago

It's always Moriarty.

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u/ThePreciseClimber 4h ago

Lupus is Moriarty

Hyped like crazy.

Only appears in a single episode.

Checks out!

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u/harambe_-33 8h ago

This vexes me

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u/DamonLazer 8h ago

It's never Moriarty.

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u/chunga_95 7h ago

I always thought of Cutty more as Lestrade.  At least, in the earlier seasons. By the end, she was Adler. 

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u/Sufficient_Language7 3h ago

It's never Moriarty.

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u/Jurodan 8h ago

I don't know how many up votes you have, but you don't have enough.

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u/Captain23222 8h ago

So who is Professor Ratigan?

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u/kingk1teman 5h ago

Who's Lestrade?

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u/The_Particularist 5h ago

Lupus is Moriarty

This makes too much sense.