This was the title of something I was going to write because I'd watched some of the first season of House M.D. but instead I wrote a different post earlier in the week. There wasn't enough meat on the bones of the idea to write something on that topic. Instead, because I was thinking about We by Yevgeny Zamyatin anyway (because of this post but also it's had an anniversary recently) which made me look for a near contemporary US science fiction story, which took me to The Color Out of Space which made me think of the real life Goiânia incident, which does resemble a medical drama but also a science fiction story.
In the comments Steve mentioned that the second season of House M.D. had an episode that resembles Goiânia and between then and now I watched that episode. Which brings me full circle.
So a quick overview of the House episode.
The cold open features a dad and his adult son. They just left somewhere fancy (I assume a restaurant) and the dad remarks that he's paid his last check to Princeton, letting us know that the son has finished an expensive degree at prestigious university. The dad warns the son not to over indulge celebrating and the son agrees. We then cut to a party of graduating students who are drinking copious amounts of alcohol.
We know, because this is the convention of this kind of cold open, that something bad is going to happen to somebody. At the start, it could have been the dad or the son but as the show is now following the son, it is probably going to be the son. House is a medical drama but it is also something of a Holmesian detective show, and it follows a convention of laying out some of the clues that will reveal the mystery of the illness but not in a way that the audience good actually work out in advance what the mystery illness was.
The son is drinking away with his friends when suddenly he gets an electric shock. He assumes it is some sort of prank but then he is zapped again. The House series regularly includes little sequences where it shows what is going on inside somebody's body and so we get to see like sparks running inside the young man's spinal cord. His friends realise that something bad is going on as he collapse to the ground and the theme music and titles start playing.
The portal fantasy bit is simple. The convention (and it applies to some crime dramas and legal dramas as well) is we are supposed to be invested in the lives of a person doing regular person stuff. Sometimes the person is rich, sometimes they are poor, sometimes they are exceptional but most times they are in some vague sense ordinary. In the cold open something happens and during the theme music they enter another world. The rules of this other world are very different. We the audience know things about this world. It does have rules and lore but we don't really know how it all works. By the end House (improbably at the time Hugh Laurie1) will have worked out what it is after a series of misdirections. The diseases are real (I guess - I'm not a doctor but sometimes I know what the thing is but I've know idea if the diagnosis makes any sense in reality) but it's effectively magic. An actual fantasy or science fictional version of the show would be much easier to make because you wouldn't need to fact check it all.
The portal fantasy aspect is simply that step across a threshold into a world where the normal rules that work and an ordinary person is at the mercy of strange powers. House is more consistently cranky than Gandalf and his beard is shorter but he is basically a wizard. At the end, the ordinary person returns to mundane world changed by the experience. I bet you could probably shoe-horn a hero's journey pattern into the patient-of-the-week's arc.
Despite Steve mentioning the title, it took me awhile to spot that this was the Goiânia inspired episode. Because the final diagnosis is typically delayed until near the end of the show, the pieces are obscured until the end. Indeed, the non-medical themes of the episode (the lies family members tell each other and the issue of a relatively poor Black student living with wealthy white students) the major twist is a simple one. The dad tells the doctors near the start that he runs a construction company. This is a lie and he actually runs a scrap yard. It was nice to get the "aha!" moment at the same time as the eponymous character.
Sure enough, the dad had found an interesting metal object and given it to his son as a key chain. The key chain had then irradiated the son and a fellow student leading to a bunch of unfathomable symptoms. Obviously, there are big differences between the plot and Goiânia but the specifics of a scrap yard and an interesting object and the initial victim being a family member are all close enough to suggest Goiânia as the inspiration.
The big difference between the accounts of Goiânia and this version is that it lacks that errie seductive quality, where people become fascinated by the glow of substance. In the House episode, it is just a curious looking metal weight. The son had attached it to his backpack, and so the object had been overlooked. Obviously, if the son had turned up to House's hospital glowing blue in the dark, we'd have to assume the diagnosis would have been a lot quicker and there episode would have been over far too quickly.
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