It's Like Vindaloo: Stacy Warner/Sela Ward
Someone noted over in the episode threads that we don't have a thread to discuss Stacy, so I took it on myself to create one. If it's not necessary, feel free to delete. First off: It's Stacy. No "e."

Yea! She's a delightfully complex character. She is often vilified for not honoring House's wishes, but I think she was faced with a difficult choice. House couldn't convince her that he was right about his leg because he was dying before her eyes. And she did what she could to save him, knowing she would probably lose him.

I am confused. Wasn't House the vindalo? Doesn't Stacy say: "God, I really miss curry."? May be you can use "In the original Greek means relationship killer" (from FTC). Or some form of : "The woman you used to live with."/" That’s her Indian name. On her driver’s license it’s Stacy" Anyway, just an idea. :)

Stacy begins the curry discussion with: "It's like vindaloo curry ..." so I took it from there. I also considered "I always like to have an escape route," but that seemed way too, um ... negative. It can always be changed, though.

"It's like vindaloo" is good. And, because I love looking up quotes, there's also... Too long, but I had to include them: Can’t it be enough that I want to cause you pain? I thought you were capable of listening, I'd shut up. It's like watching Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward in the third grade. Mommy and Daddy are having a little fight, doesn’t mean we’ve stopped loving you. There is nothing approaching love in what I feel about him right now. When things are bad I always like to have an escape route planned. 60 characters or less I could swear I remember him being fun. I hate you. And I love you. I'd be on you like red on rice. If I never tell him, it'll never hurt. I'm just curious. Nothing wrong with that. Still fits. We fight over nothing! You can’t be within fifty feet of Stacy Warner. You were the worst two dollars I’ve ever spent. And my personal favorite: I’m a lawyer. You’re a jerk.

"Still fits" is really sweet. :)

Yeah, "still fits" is sweet. I love that line from House. It tells us how he feels in his heart. Bur for Stacy's thread, I agree with your pf, Poeia: "I’m a lawyer. You’re a jerk." That, rather sadly, tells us how she really feels.

Thanks for making the thread, Namaste. I'm fine with the title, though I was going to label it "You Were the One: Stacy Warner". :) Boffle, ouch! I don't think "I'm a lawyer. You're a jerk" sums up how she feels about House. Which brings me to my comments I was going to bring here from the "Failure to Communicate" thread: Boffle: It was very cool to see her so fascinated with him when he was solving the case over the phone: you could see that she found his intellectual passion for making the diagnosis compelling, like watching a virtuoso violinist play a sonata. Those two did have great chemistry and she did seem like someone he would genuinely enjoy spending time with, unlike any of the other females on the show (except maybe Cate). Too bad she really didn't know her own mind and lacked the strength of character House had thought she had... I, too, really got a sense of what Stacy and House felt for each other, particularly when Stacy went downstairs to join House, brought the cell phone charger, and opted to sleep on uncomfortable chairs to be near him rather than a real bed. Also, the way they looked at one another throughout the whole episode spoke volumes (in my humble opinion - I will accept that perhaps others didn't see it, as I have never seen ANYTHING between House and Cameron, but others insist they have "eyesex"...). I disagree, however, that Stacy didn't know her own mind or that she lacked any strength of character. I'm not sure where that's coming from, but I know a lot of viewers got the impression that Stacy was confused about her feelings for House in the rooftop scene in "Need to Know", after she and House slept together. I am one of the few who didn't see it that way at all. Honestly, my interpretation was that she absolutely knew that she loved House and wanted to be with him, but she didn't know if she deserved it, and she didn't think Mark deserved to be hurt so that she and House could be happy. peggy06: I thought they had chemistry until the plot got them together, and then, not so much. I thought the undercurrent of chemistry in Three Stories worked better than most episodes where they had more or less laid their cards on the table. That arc could have been developed a lot differently, and better use made of the Stacy character. As it is, she came off looking really bad, wanting to have her cake and eat it too. I'd have expected more for the supposed great love of his life - she just seemed selfish. I thought they had amazing chemistry throughout the Stacy arc, particularly in "Hunting" and "Failure to Communicate". I really don't think she came off looking bad at all - in my opinion, she came out looking human. That's what I really like about her, and that's why I really like the House/Stacy relationship. I thought their whole situation was painfully real, and I believed hook, line, and sinker, that they are the loves of each other's lives. (Now just in case you think I'm a hopeless romantic, I actually am far from it - in fact, I've been accused of being too rational and analytical on more than one occasion.) I would love to see them reunited at the very end of the series - I can't help it. ;) Also, I never got the feeling that she ever intended to have both men (which many have suggested), but, rather, that she was thinking through the situation out loud, trying to figure out how everyone could get what they wanted and no one could get hurt. I'm not sure how that made her selfish. Poeia: But one of my favorite Stacy moments was when, having automatically accepted that she was being abandoned for the case, she comes down to bring him the phone recharger. Yes. :-)

For me, "If I never tell him, it'll never hurt" was the saddest because of the look in House's eyes when he realized that she was willing to settle for an affair with him rather than leave Mark. She changed her mind later, but her commitment to "them" wasn't the same as his. I think that's when he knew that they were no longer really right for each other, even though he had been trying to convince himself that they were. Well said, Poeia. When House heard that, he realized he had, for once, made an assumption about how someone felt and was wrong: the one person he cared about that deeply was saying that their future together, which meant so much to him, wasn't as important to her and that she didn't share his assumption that their getting together was going to continue in the direction he expected. That's pretty much what I meant by my "sadly" comment above (though I also like your interpretation of that as the sparring, fun side of their relationship): that what at first looked like true love turned out to be, as often happens in real life, much more one-sided than it had seemed. And in the end, once he realized that she was wiling to keep cheating on Mark without leaving him, he wasn't willing to continue to do that to Mark, or himself, and it took some strength for him to be able to say no to Stacy. If he hadn't, he saw that there was an even worse trainwreck heading their way with likely the same result: he did the right thing. And, as much as I liked them together at first, there was always the feeling that she wanted an escape route: she even says that as she looks at House in Failure to Communicate. He was her escape route from her difficulties with Mark, not really her one true love as she was for House. I ended up so disappointed with her: she didn't deserve the vindaloo curry if she was happy with her pot roast. (sorry, the food analogy is poorly done, but you see what I mean, I hope.)

I agree with Poeia and Boffle on stacey. While I agree with Daisy that she was emotional and confused throughout Need to know she was willing to brush it off and pretend that nothing ever happened between her and House in Baltimore. They had different expectations, he thought about life commitment she wanted refuge from a difficult marriage with Mark, she didn't seem to want to adress the issue until both House and Wilson called her up on it. All throughout need to know she did not believe that House was the vunerable and emotional one in the relationship which was evident in her scenes with Wilson and with Cuddy. She decided to choose House but I think that by then it was too late and I think that she lost House on the roof because the scenes after that he was trethinking his position about it even before Mark confronted him. I think that stacey wanted to have it both ways she wanted to be in relationship with Mark because there is room for her in his life but when it got too difficult she would go to House and I really felt for House when he realised that on the rooftop. I liked them at first but once Failure to communicate came in I felt that she wanted an escape route. It was human like Daisy said but sometimes our human qualities leave a bad impression on people and throughout those last two episodes she rubbed me the wrong way. I think that HL and SW had amazing emotional chemistry together like in Honeymoon, Failure to communicate and and Hunting but when they actually hooked up it sort of fizzled out and by the ending of Need to know came about there was nothing left between them except for regret, fear, angst and pain for both. But I think that Stacey finally realised how much pain and suffering he went through after she left him when he said "I don't want to go there again". I interpreted that as that he didn't want to go back to the past and make those same mistakes all over again with her and didn't want to put himself there again.

I think Stacy is a very under appreciated character in the House fandom. People are too willing to dismiss her as a bitch or a 'flat character' (I don't know where people get that idea from) or any other number of stupid reasons because she, for some reason, threatens people's ships, even though she's not even on the show anymore. One of the things I love about Stacy is how human she is. She made mistakes, yes, but so does everyone. Her mistakes were not selfish mistakes like a lot of people like to claim. I think it's very unfair that people hate her because of the decision she made to want House to live. Maybe the result of her decision was unfair on House in the long run, in terms of the pain he suffered afterwards, but that seems to be the only point people latch onto, without thinking about WHY she made that decision. (Ignoring the actual real life legalities of what happened in Three Stories) What she did in terms of wanting to save House's life is a very real reaction, a very normal reaction towards someone that you love. Some people still call that selfish - all I can say to those people is, have they ever been in a situation where their loved one is facing death? It becomes a very desperate situation for the person watching their loved one die; there's nothing scarier than watching a loved one die and feeling helpless to do anything about it. Her feelings for House aside from the infarction are very real and human, too. She said to him, "You were the one, you always will be". I don't think she was confused about her feelings for both Mark and House; more, she was caught in a difficult situation that became confusing. House wasn't exactly angelic to her, in the way he pursued her. But I also find it very unfair towards Stacy's character that people claim House hates her. No, he doesn't. I never saw any indication of him hating her, more that he *wanted* to hate her but couldn't. That was very clear to me in the way he reacted to her in Three Stories and Honeymoon, and how he gradually grew more and more affectionate and open towards her as the show moved into season two. It was through Stacy that we saw a side to House that we hadn't seen before and haven't really seen since. There were a lot of layers to House and Stacy's relationship - a lot of pain, a lot of unresolved issues, a lot of love and a lot of affection. It was very clear to me that they were very much in love and the love of each other's lives. Even in House's passionate resentment towards her that we saw in Three Stories and Honeymoon, there was lot of love fueled behind that. You could see how emotionally affected he was by Stacy. It's a complex relationship and a very tragic one because they're the couple that are meant to be together but just can't be. I thought Stacy was a wonderful character. She brought a lot of dynamics to the show and was a very believable character, and that's partly owed to Sela Ward, whom I thought did a fantastic job at making Stacy human and believable. She had wonderful onscreen chemistry with Hugh Laurie, too.