Just as the little girl is about to give herself an injection, everything starts shaking and the walls start closing in on her. She’s in major hallucination mode, and as she comes out of it we see she has cut her hand on the mirror.

House gets off the elevator with a bad cold. Uh, I can’t really bring myself to feel bad for him, no matter how miserable Hugh Laurie manages to look. Nine-year-old with cancer or grouchy old dude with a sniffle? You make the call. Anyway, Wilson wants him to stick around and help treat this girl (remember, Wilson is the head cancer doctor. Chief oncologist, if you’re nasty). House isn’t interested in regular ol’ cancer until Wilson tells him about the girl’s hallucinations – even though she doesn’t have any cancer in the brain. When House was a kid, you know he loved to burn ants with magnifying glasses and mix condiments with household cleaners and make the littler kids drink it.

House’s assistants (anyone want to come up with a pithy name for them? I’ll buy you a beer if you let me use it) are in pontificate mode. House sends the boys off to do medical things but makes Cameron stay behind, in an excellent callback to last week’s episode. He doesn’t want her getting all attached to the pretty dying blonde chick. Good, I don’t want a lot of her this episode. She’s already managed to annoy me by quietly, subserviently, making House a cup of tea when she noticed he was sick. I guess since browbeating him into a date didn’t work, she’s going to try the maternal provider role. When that fails, she’ll move on to studied aloofness, and then oversexed vixen. I bet she considers the articles in Cosmo very edifying.

Chase is setting up the girl for a brain scan, and we see that she a) could practically be a doctor herself, with all she knows about the procedure, and b) is a far, far better flirt than Cameron.
Since this episode is getting pretty heavy, we get some penis jokes to lighten the mood. House sees a guy in the clinic who tried to circumsize his own penis. With box cutters. We don’t get to see the damage ourselves, of course, but House says he needs to get a plastic surgeon to “put the Twinkie back in the wrapper.” Actually, right now it’s not so bad being a girl recapper!

Well, since we’re only 10 minutes into the show, the girl’s brain scan was inconclusive. Chase is off to do more tests. She makes him explain the procedure because she likes to “hear his voice.” She also wants him to know that she’s never kissed a boy. Oh, honey. Come on. Let’s not do th - “will you kiss me?” OH GOD. Chase gives her some very valid reasons why he can’t but we already know he’s sort of morally questionable….”I won’t tell anybody” she promises. EW EW EW EW he’s kissing a nine-year-old! Blakggghhh! Chase doesn’t get to be the hot Aussie any more, he’s just the weird perv who’s going to ask Cuddy for a transfer to pediatrics tomorrow!

This is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on this show, and I’ve seen oozing feces. In Chase’s “defense,” he looks weirded out about the whole thing, but….that doesn’t really make it okay, does it? In the conference room the next day, Foreman suggests something radical: maybe the girl has syphilis. HA! Take that, Chase. Wow, he does not want to believe that his new lady friend is a slootbag. He goes on and on about how she’s definitely never had sex, or been molested. House wants to know why he’s so sure, so Chase says that she asked for a first kiss, so she probably hasn’t had sex. “Tell that to all the hookers who won’t kiss me on the mouth,” says House. To Cameron, mainly. House talks about how victims of sexual abuse can become manipulative. “You did it, didn’t you. You kissed her,” says House. Dang, Chase is a pushover. He totally admits to it. Foreman and Cameron freak out appropriately, while House tells Chase that this sort of thing is exactly why he’s not allowed to use the whiteboard markers.

Cameron is sent off to give the girl a pelvic exam. OK, every medical show out there occasionally has to do this rape kit scene, and every time, the patient, feet high and proud in the stirrups, wants to have a meaningful conversation with the doctor. This is bullshit. When someone’s poking a set of metal tongs that look shockingly like a medieval torture device around in your babymaker, you don’t even have the focus to chat about the weather, much less the social implications of being a bald female.

Posted by Kat on September 21, 2005 12:24 PM